Aldeota, Brazil Week 9

Well another busy but good week has come and gone. This week was a little but hectic with visiting the Federal Police with 6 new missionaries. We arrived at 8:30AM and didn´t leave until about 2:30PM so that was a long day. It was frustrating to have to wait that long but it was good to talk with the new missionaries and see how they are all doing and to hear their stories and what they think about everything here. We all ate lunch together at Subway and I think they all enjoyed eating something somewhat American for a change. It was my first time at Subway too so that was nice.

In the office this week I have been working on a couple of projects for President Souza. One is changing all the cards for our transfer board and making them smaller so we have more room for the missionaries that will be coming. Also I had to figure some things out for President regarding the voter registration for some of the Brazilian missionaries. Overall, a busy week in the office and a little bit stressful because a lot of our materials are going to arrive late because of Christmas and New Years but it will be alright, I hope.

Elder Muniz and I had a good week visiting and teaching people. We had a great Family Home Evening with a family in our ward and two of our investigators, Michele and Fabino. We shared the talk by President Uchtdorf entitled "Come, Join with Us". We had a great discussion about why so many people want to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was great and our investigator, Michele, made her famous chocolate cake and it was SO good!

We also visited the grandma and aunt of one of our investigators, Pedro. Pedro is 10 years-old and comes to church every week with his grandma and aunt but his mom and dad do not want him to be baptized. We visited his aunt and grandma and we all decided to fast on Saturday for Pedro´s parents' hearts to be softened. We are looking forward to meeting with them this week!

We also visited both Angelica and Bruno. Both of them are going through a rough time and it was great to be able to be there for them and continue to help them center their lives around Jesus Christ. They are trying hard to live the gospel and Angelica told us this week that she wants to serve a mission. We are excited for her and we are hopefully going to start teaching some of her family and friends with her.

One thing we have been trying to do is to visit all the less active members in our ward. There are a lot of them but one night after one of our appointments fell through, Elder Muniz and I decided to visit a few of them. After we walked awhile and tried to visit 4 or 5 addresses and either the address didn´t exist or the people had moved, we decided to try one last name that we had for the night. We came to the apartment building and told the doorman we were there to visit Daniel and told him the apartment he lived in. A few minutes later Daniel came down. Daniel is 19 years-old and was baptized about 2 years ago but stopped going to church soon after he was baptized. We had a great time getting to know him and we had a great discussion about why he was baptized. We gave a little lesson on the importance of church attendance and invited him to return to church with us the next day. The next day, we arrived at his apartment building at 8:30AM and after a few minutes he came down in a nice white shirt and tie with his Book of Mormon in hand. He really enjoyed coming back to church and we are excited for him to return to being an active member of the church and to start receiving the blessings that come with that.

One last thing for this week I forgot to write about last week was that Daniel and his family were baptized in Sevilha 2 weeks ago. I don´t know if you remember but Daniel and his family were people we met and started teaching my last week there and now they are all members! It´s a cool story how we met them but anyways just thought I would let you all know about that.

Overall it was a great week and I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to serve here and help people come closer to our Heavenly Father and to center their lives around his son, and our Savior, Jesus Christ.

I hope all is going well with everyone back home and you all are having a great start to your new year. 2014 is going to be the best year yet!

Until next week.

Com Amor,

Elder Helvey

This is me with the 6 new American missionaries all in front of the Polícia Federal. 

They all have in their hand their official document that makes them legal in Brazil!

 This is the new Stake Center of the Fortaleza Stake - it is my stake. I got to go and visit it, it is still under construction but almost finished and will be dedicated in the next couple of weeks. It´s huge!!!

One of the member´s we had lunch with had this crazy rambunctious cat. 

I had fun playing with the cat, although I don´t think he enjoyed this too much.

It poured like crazy one morning and flooded like all the roads. This is a picture of me on our balcony where we can usually look out and see really far but could barely see anything on this morning.

The road between the office and our apartment was flooded.