I don´t believe I can express in words the anxiety that a missionary feels as he awaits on the day of the transfer faxes to discover what will happen. Unfortunately, we aren´t allowed to know from our Zone leaders until late at night, so that entire day, the only thing that stays on your mind is wondering who will leave and who will stay (and if you go..where you will go and who will be your companion.
Me: Stay
Elder Laurindo: Leave
Elder Barroso: Leave; Return home
Elder Bacca: Stay
At first, I was rather saddened to hear that Elder Laurindo will be leaving and it kind of stuck in my mind for the rest of that day. Late at night as we were in the middle of a lesson, however, Elder Grabner, our district leader, (and then later our zone leaders) had tried calling us but I couldn´t answer it in the middle of the lesson. As we were leaving, they called again and I was able to answer the phone. We started talking and then they said like, ´´Oh, Elder Skinner, we have some news for you. Next transfer, you´re going to train.´´ they said it in other words, along the lines of me expecting a child, so it was pretty funny. After I hung up the phone, I was super stoked! Now everyone in my district is calling me ´´papai´´ and such hahaha! But anyway, I´m super excited to go to Salvador tonight, go to the meeting for trainers, see my friends, have lunch, see where they´re all going, and to meet the Elder I´m going to train. I´ve heard mixed things, like several americans will be coming but I´ve also heard that that´s not true and that there´d be a considerable amount of Brazilians as well, so as far as who I´m going to train, I don´t have any idea. Stay tuned! :)
Other than that, it´s been a normal week. The heat of Barreiras has been really killing here and I suppose that´s the only reason why I wouldn´t be happy to stay. I do have a bit of a funny story to say though. In our house, we all did a ´´house council´´ of sorts where we decided that all 4 of us would sit down and discuss the matters of our house (things like our relationship between us 4, matters like cleaning the house and such). Anyway, we all signed an accord of sorts with a list of things to help us better maintain the Spirit in our house, to show love and respect for one another, that sort of thing. One of the agreements we had made was that if you dirty a dish and you don´t clean it between a certain time frame, you would have to pay a small box of chocolates to be shared between the others. Everybody agreed, but as expected, it caused more ´´fights´´ than it helped us to keep our house clean. Basically what happened is that all of us at one point owed 1 box of chocolates but Elder Bacca owed 2. So what we ended up all agreeing is that Elder Bacca would just have to pay 1 box and the rest of us were off the hook. Elder Bacca kept trying to dodge the accusations and give excuses for not having to but in the end, he finally fulfilled his part. This transfer, though, I think we´ll have to discuss a better means of cleaning the house without causing contentions.
As far as the progress of our investigators and such, we found a mother and daughter named Janaína and Vitória that appeared to have quite some potential. Saturday night, as a matter of fact, we went to visit them after leaving a copy of the Book of Mormon after having explained what it us and discovered that they had not only just read the part we had left for them but had also gone beyond that and read other parts. We did have to explain what the Book of Mormon is again because they had a few doubts here and there but I´m excited to see what happens further on. We also ended up teaching our Branch President´s mother-in-law named ´´aparecida´´ who had already been taught and everything but wasn´t able to get baptized due to certain circumstances (mostly with having to quit drinking coffee) but now has a baptismal date. She´s still trying to conquer the coffee but we hope all goes well with her.
That´s all for now! Love you guys! Until next week.
-Elder ´´papaizão´´ Skinner
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