While I was there today I spent some time with Elder Barbosa and got some deets on the next transfer coming up this next week. I don´t know for sure if what he said is true but maybe and probably I will be leaving this area! It should be interesting to see how it all goes down. More details next week for sure.
For this week, we saw many many miracles for sure. We were able to teach 10 lessons with a member present and that is pretty exciting here in Porto Nacional because members never go out with us to visit. But this week we also started doing family nights in our area with the other elders of the house and we were able to find some amazing people to teach! We found 10 new investigators (and many more to come) because we were able to teach full families this week. Pretty exciting stuff. We also marked 4 more baptismal dates in November so that was good. We are also working on helping some couples get married! Thats something that I haven´t done yet on the mission so we are exciting to take on the challenge. The main difficulty here is how expensive it is. It costs about r$430. So we are trying to find some laws that help people with less money get marraiges for cheaper.
So I don´t know if I have mentioned the difficulties that exist here in this area. Porto Nacional has been a branch for almost 20 years... It has real struggles growing. Retaining members is super hard because no one likes to visit them. The leadership in the branch is also really weak. So it has been hard to work with them to get things going. Elder Burock and I visited the Young mens president and he is less active (more or less, he is super funny and says ´´Satan thinks I am less active, I am tricking him...) and without saying anything he starting talking about how he is needing support in the youngmens because he has no one. So we offered all the help we could and said we will be his first and second counselors! ha. We had a great conversation with him and made some goals to help reactivate some of the young men we have here in the branch. Usually they have young mens on Saturday and he hasn´t been going because of work. So we told him we´d do it and got some of the young men together Saturday morning to play soccer at the church. We didn´t have many people, but that is expected as it was the first activity we did. We are planning on doing more things and more activities for the youth here.
This week we also had our night of integration with the members and us missionaries did a Pie in the Face and it was a blast! We bought real whipped cream (super expensive) and all the kids wanted to lose to be able to eat the whipped cream :) ha. But we are really trying to get the ward excited because everyone and there dogs are just ´´dead´´ doing nothing to help this branch grow. BUT thats why we are here to help them serve one another and bring there fellow irmaos unto Christ.
Something else cool is that I taught the Elder quorom lesson this week about Leadership and I loved it. I couldn´t believe it when I taught for an hour in portugues alone... God has really helped me lately as I have had to help these wonderful people learn how to lead, share the gospel, and be true followers of Christ here. I am loving it. If I could only ask one thing of everyone that reads this email, its that you pray it isn´t so hot here and that we get some rain. Working in the streets under 112 degree heat in brasil just doesn´t work... haha! My shoes are melting! So just pray we get some clouds, rain, whatever to help this weather cool off! ha :) But I love you all and hope that you all know I am doing good and love the gospel of Jesus Christ. I hope you all have a great week! Stay golden!
com amor, Elder Patterson
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