Aldeota, Brazil Week 14

Hey everyone! It was yet another great week here in Aldeota filled with a lot of work. This week I worked a lot on figuring out some things with renewing visas for all the foreign missionaries. After one year every foreign missionary needs to visit the Federal Police to renew their visa. We didn't have a great system setup to keep track of all the visas and when each missionary would have to visit the Federal Police to renew their visa so I was working on that and it turns out that we have quite a few that have to visit the Federal Police this transfer so I am going to have to do all the documents for that and get them all scheduled at the Federal Police. This next week is going to be pretty busy because we have Zone Conferences. Half the Mission will all meet together on Wednesday and the other half on Thursday. I am looking forward to that because it is always fun to all get together and see everyone and have a day of training, but it will also be a lot of work. I have had a lot of work this week to get ready for the conferences too but it has been good. One of the things I have been doing to prepare is making a video. President asked me to make a video tribute for all the new missionaries that arrived in our mission since last conference and all the missionaries that are ending their mission before next conference. It has been a fun project to work on and I am excited about it!

I don't know if I've said this before but I am in charge of ordering all travel planes for the mission. I order all the flights for missionaries that are going home. Usually it is pretty simple and I order the travel plans with certain timing depending if it will be international travel or within Brazil. Well this past week I received an email from Church Headquarters in Salt Lake saying that because of the World Cup in June and July here in Brazil, I need to order ALL flights until August for all our missionaries. So that was a pretty big project that I finished up this week and now have all the needed travel itineraries until August, including the return travel for President and Sister Souza. They are ending their 3 year mission on June 28th and we will be getting a new Mission President, which is exciting but also sad because I love President and Sister Souza so much and for sure am gonna miss them!

This past week Elder Muniz and I also had a great visit with Bruno and we have a new investigator named Mary. We received her name as a reference from two Elders in our mission that helped her when her car broke down. We have been trying to contact her for awhile but it has been difficult. I finally was able to talk to her on the phone and mark a time when we could come visit. We visited her and had a great lesson and she had lots of questions. She is about 50 and her daughter and granddaughter live with her too and she explained about how she has visited many churches. She seemed excited and intrigued about what we talked about and we invited her to attend church. She was super excited but it turns out she works all day Sunday. She was disappointed but said she is going to try to switch shifts with one of her friends so she can come next week. We have an appointment to visit her tonight so that will be good.

We also had a great visit with Bruno this week. He loves having us over and we love visiting with him. He gave us some German food (his dad is German) and we had a great time with him. He loves telling us about everything that is going on in his life and loves telling stories and jokes. Something cool that happened is that he invited one of his friends to meet the missionaries in another ward and the missionaries there visited her and she got baptized this past week. It was so great to see how excited he is about sharing the gospel. We talked with him about serving a mission but he is not sure about it. He is 22 and not sure how his family would feel about it. We invited him to keep on thinking about it and prayerfully consider it. We had a great discussion about a lot of things and he explained to us how happy he is to be a member of this church and how it has blessed his life. Every time we visit Bruno I continue to be amazed at how much this Gospel changes peoples lives. I remember visiting Bruno for the first time with Elder Allen way back in November and to see how much he has changed and how much he has been blessed from then until now. It is truly a miracle and I am excited to continue to help him progress in the gospel and gain a stronger testimony.

Lastly, on Sunday our ward had 13 visitors at church! Which was awesome. During Priesthood 7 of the 18 people there were visitors. The work is really moving forward here in Aldeota especially with 8 missionaries in the ward.

Well that´s about it for me this week. I hope all continues to go well back home with everyone. I miss you all and love you but am doing great here and truly loving the work! Have a great week.

Until next week.

Love,
Elder Helvey

This is us 4 Elders in front of 50 Sabores, which is a really good ice cream place here. Ice cream is SUPER expensive but we decided it was worth it, and it was.

This a picture of us 5 Elders in the Mission Office. One of the Elders was transferred this week so now it´s just 4 but it´s a fun picture.

Elder Muniz made Garlic Bread! It was suuuper good!!

This is me in front of Palácio da Abolição that is a place where the Governor has parties and big cultural events. It is in our area, about 5 minutes away from the Mission Office.