Monday, March 14, 2016

Pizza a la Skinner

Weekly letter!

With much anxiousness, we have finally received the results of the transfer. Like I´ve mentioned before, We don´t have any more transfer meetings in Salvador and now instead of getting the word Saturday night, we have to wait until monday morning, meaning I basically just now got word of the transfer. 
 
  • Elder Gomes will be leaving to Alagoinhas and will be companions with Elder Chastain.
  • I will be staying and I will be with Elder Castro, who´s a Brazilian who´s also from Elder Marim´s group (haha, it looks like I´m going to be with everybody from my son´s group )
  • In Irecê, Elder Rotela and Elder Arimuya (my old zone leader and a great friend) will be returning home and Elder Machado will finish Elder V. Oliveiras training. (I´ll send you a picture of them later. Great guys).
  • BUT, we will also be receiving.. another companionship! Woo!! I was super happy for that. Apparently one of our zone leaders, Elder Barbossa, will be living in our house but will be training another missionary. I feel like we´ve been really needing it. Jacobina is so big and Elder Gomes and I had to sprint from one end of Jacobina to another just to get to appointments and ended up losing time. So yeah, Super happy. It seems like every transfer I was stuck with one companion, I wasn´t as happy and not because of my companion but I always enjoyed coming home and chatting with other missionaries about the day, joke around and what not. It was a great way to blow off steam. 
I don´t know yet who will be district leader but it looks like I´ll find out about that later. I´m more or less indifferent as this transfer, it was hard to be a real district leader as our cell phones ran out of credits and so I couldn´t follow up and see how my district was doing and I wasn´t even able to do a companionship exchange this transfer but this transfer should be good. It´ll also be for 5 weeks so it´ll be short. 
 
Sueli unfortunately wasn´t baptized this week and we weren´t able to follow up with Erivelton as he´s only home on the weekends due to work. Elder Gomes and I fear that he may have ceded to temptations from his friends but Elder Castro and I are going to visit them this week. I´m not going to lie, though. A part of me was in conflict of having Sueli baptized. She doesn´t understand very many things and so a part of me was a little worried about having her get baptized for her to become less-active later but another part of me was excited to be able to baptize again. We even asked questions, like ´´why do you want to be baptized?´´ and she actually answered all the questions spot on and even understands commandments, like the word of wisdom, tithing and others so a part of me thought that perhaps she was ready. All in all, I´m glad to have her wait a week to see if she really wants to be baptized because she gave a bit of a weak excuse because her unruly and disruptive baby girl got a little sick but as we told her in the beginning: if the day came and she didn´t want to be baptized, we wouldn´t force anything. 

We had our last district meeting in Irecê and we talked a lot about testimonies. The meeting turned out to be spiritual and really good. I´ve had a lot of experiences like that on the mission though where the Spirit appears to touch the hearts of those around me and I sometimes don´t feel it as strong or not at all. It happened once with Elder Marim when I bore my testimony and once again with an investigator that Elder Gomes and I were visiting. Sometimes I get confused if it´s because it´s harder to feel the Spirit speaking another language or for some other reason. Either way, it made me feel happy to know that my testimony is felt by others and I have no reason to complain. 

We had a family home evening with Caio and his mom and I ended up making american pizza for us all. It wasn´t the best but Caio´s mom loved it and wouldn´t stop praising my pizza craftsmanship, telling me that I need to open up a pizzaria called ´´pizza a la skinner´´ and hire her two sons hahaha. I can tell she likes us a lot but sometimes it gets to be a bit much when we try to share a message with them because they all get distracted and talk about random things in the message or sometimes they just talk too much. 

Our english class was great! Caio´s sister brought two more friends and I was able to speak english almost at a normal pace and they were able to understand almost everything I said. I pretended to be a travel agent and I presented options for them to visit New York or Alaska and we talked about all kinds of things. It was really fun and they even accepted a visit from the missionaries so we´ll see how it goes :)

All in all, I´m super excited for this transfer. I feel like my next companion and the other missionaries and I will be able to speed up the work here in Jacobina and really contribute to the branch´s success. 

I don´t imagine there´s much else to say. When you guys can, check out the new easter video that the church came out with! I watched it and it was good. 

I miss you all and hope you all have a great week!


-Elder Skinner
 
 
Elder Arimuya along with many other people really liked the ring I got and he was joking with me begging for it but I didn´t want to give it away after just having got it.





Elder Rotela designing the baptism symbol and putting ´´só batiza!´´

I gave some ties to the Elders in our district :) (Elder Arimuya, Elder Machado, Elder Rotela, Elder V. Oliveira)





 

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