Aldeota, Brazil Week 16

Hey everyone!

This week was great. I had quite a bit of work in the office to do, including two visits to the Federal Police with all the new missionaries. Elder Muniz and I also had some good experiences visiting and teaching people.

Thursday and Friday were the big days at the Federal Police. I had visited earlier and set up appointments for all the new American missionaries. It went very smoothly this time and we were able to finish before lunch both days. It´s always fun taking all the new American missionaries there because I am able to interact with them and see how they are all doing and how they have liked their first couple of weeks in Brazil. We have quite a bunch of missionaries that have visas that are going to expire this month so I will be visiting the Federal Police quite a bit more in the coming weeks. After a year in the country, every American missionary needs to visit the Federal Police and renew their visas.

Wednesday we had a great lesson with our investigator, Michele. She is super awesome and we love visiting her and teaching her with a member family. She loves coming to church and already loves the gospel. We are working with her to help her be prepared to be baptized. She has set a wedding date for her and her boyfriend in August. They have been living with each other for a long time now and have two kids together. We are hoping to be able to visit with her and her boyfriend together, but he hasn´t been very interested.

We also are looking forward to meeting with our investigator, Pedro, and his family. Pedro is a 10 year-old boy who has been coming to church with his grandma and aunt for a while but his parents have not given him permission to be baptized. He really wants to be baptized and we are going to try to meet with his parents this week to teach them and talk with them.

We are also teaching a girl of a part active family, named Ivana. We had a great lesson with her on Alma chapter 34 about the Atonement of Jesus Christ. We were excited but she didn´t come to church this week so that was disappointing but we are looking forward to visiting her again.

A less active member couple that we have been working with for a while came to church on Sunday. We were pretty excited and we are going to visit them tomorrow.

We also visited Bruno and had a great time with him and we love helping him gain a stronger testimony of the gospel.

This week is Carnaval here in Brazil. Carnaval is a holiday here and is really just one big party! It is going to make it a little more difficult for missionary work because a lot of people travel but it should be good.

I don´t have too much time to write today but thank you all for the love and support. I am continuing to work and feel so blessed by my Heavenly Father. I have had several, different, distinct, experiences that have testified to me of the importance of this work and I feel so blessed to be a part of it all here in Fortaleza, Brazil!

I hope you all have a great week! Until next week.

Love,

Elder Helvey

P.S. Remember those little handouts I made to give to members at our lunches a little while back for them to pass the names and address of their friends that they wanted the missionaries to visit?! Well we just had a baptism this week in our ward and it was from that invite! I was super excited to hear about that. He lived in the Sisters area so they taught him and everything, but it was great to hear that that little handout invitation led to a baptism!

Elder Muniz and I ate at Pizza Hut today for P-day lunch,
which surprisingly is like a really nice sit down restaurant here.

This is me sitting on our little sofa last P-day calling to confirm our appointment for that night.