Monday, March 26th 2012

Oi Família!

Everything is going swell here in São Paulo. After an extremely eventful week last week, this one was rather slow and... well, boring. Let´s be honest, not every week is great lol. We are having a lot of difficulty right now in finding new people to teach and take to Church. The place that we always work in is extremely big. Imagine the little town of Spring Lake with a population of over 500,000! Just picture this... You are walking on a busy avenue with a bunch of little outlet shops, kind of like Spanish Fork´s main street. Then you take a right turn onto one road and start going down... and down... and down. This place is like a valley of curvy roads and houses built on top of other houses up to three or four stories high and alley-ways that lead to other curvy roads. The place is so big and the roads and alley-ways are so unorganized that they don´t even appear on the map! When you look at the map, you only see a big white spot that says, "Heliópolis Community". It´s crazy in there! Everyone has a motorcycle and everyone sits out side their houses playing loud music and drinking! It´s great because there are always new people to find and teach, but it´s also pretty difficult because a lot of people don´t like to give up the ways of the world. We are getting pretty famous in this place and everyone gives us high-fives and tells us to come to their parties... ugh... ;) We don´t ever go, but we tell them that we´ll try just to not hurt their feelings. I love this place and it really feels like home to me now. I know just about ever secret passage-way in the alleys now because I have lived here for seven months now. It´s going to be rough leaving this place. I remember back at the start of my mission I was dying to see green and forest and pretty scenery, but I realized that the more green there is the less people as well. So now I prefer the cement and loud music and crowd of people because it´s a lot easier to teach and BAPTIZE!

I really find it hard to believe still that my time on the mission is so close to ending. We are praying really hard here so that we can find more families to teach and baptize before the end of April. In my house, we have two dying missionaries (me and Elder Mielke) and we need to occupy ourselves to the max so we don´t think about home. We are doing a great job so far, I think, but Satan is being really annoying. We found a family this week and the dad´s name is John the Baptist! He went to Church this week and loved it! We are going to help them all get baptized either this week or the next. We have an investigator who is helping us out a lot with these fathers whom we are teaching. This investigator and his wife are waiting for their legal marriage to come through so they can get baptized. They have a rough past of drinking, depression, unemployment, and whatnot, so they are the perfect couple to help us out with new investigators. This John the Baptist went to Church and made friends with this husband and he said, "This Church is so good! It isn´t like all the others! I am totally going to bring my whole family next week!" The greatest thing in this ward really is the quantity of recent-converts. They are able to help the new people come into the Church and feel welcome.

Well, I am going back to work. Thanks for the updates in the family! I can´t wait to see everyone again!

Love,
Elder Clark