Letter dated 7-22-2013--A Baptism, the flood and a flirt!

 Oi minha Familia e meu Amigos!

Can you believe that I have been in this country for a whole month?! I can hardly believe it. It feels like forever since I was in the MTC and  don't even get me started on how long it feels like since I was at BYU. 

 

Thank you everyone for your emails this week! It was a great surprise to have so letters for me to read. I love reading them so much and are definitely a highlight of P-days. To answer some questions that I was asked, on P-day we email home and President Oliveira. We usually clean, grocery shop, get haircuts (doing that today and I just know that my hair will be really, really short... like more than normal), and relax a little bit by studying the scriptures and such. To be honest, there isn't very much to do in the area that I am in right now but something that we do have is a concrete soccer stadium where me, Elder McKissick, Elder Taulbee (the friend of Elder Kichan Dorff), and Elder Pires (Native Cabo Verdeano) play Ultimate Frisbee. It is a lot of fun  and a good way to start off P-days. The 4 of us are the missionaries here in Mosteiros. At the moment we don't live in the same house but the rumor is that we will be living together next transfer. We shall see. 

 

Closeness with any members? The youth of the Church are so strong here. All the people who are willing to listen are the youth and so they are the ones who are accepting  baptism and man, they are just plain amazing. There is Patrick (convert of 9 months) and Edy (convert of 3 months) and Mara (convert of 3 weeks. She was our first baptism) which I think that are just so strong. They are all steadfastly reading the Book of Mormon and are such great missionaries. They come with us on lessons a lot and some of the people that they have helped teach should be getting baptized this week.'

 

About the weather. It has rained twice. Like actually rained. We switch between blistering sun and nice cool overcast like every hour which is nice. I like it a lot. 

 

This week has a been a great week! Let me share a couple of stories. So we have found many golden people who are just so ready to hear our message. One of these people is a 21 year old girl. She is very interested in Joseph Smith and she loves to read so the Book of Mormon has been for here. In our last lesson though, she said she had a couple of questions for us. She then proceeded in asking us questions like, "Can people in your Church marry? Can you go on dates in your Church?" Of course we were like yes. Then she asked, "Can you marry people outside of your Church? Have you had a girlfriend before your mission? Can you date while you are on the mission?" At this point, Elder McKissick and I felt a little uncomfortable and we answered her questions and left. As we left, Elder McKissick said to me, "I think that she was flirting with us." And so now we have the joke that whenever we go back to see her she is going to ask Elder McKissick to marry her. :)

 

Something else that happened this week was that our investigator Eugenio was  baptized! He is an awesome 55 year old man but he has the absolute worst memory. We could ask him, "What is a prophet?" He wouldn't remember and so we would remind him and then literally turn around and ask him again and he would forget everything that we told him. For that reason our lessons with him went very long but thankfully he was baptized on Friday and when we passed by him on Saturday he had the biggest smile ever. He said that he felt so good since he was baptized. We are really happy that he feels that way. 

 

Eugenio's Baptism

Oh, and I have another experience to share that goes with Eugenio's baptism. So he has a damaged finger and in order to make him feel better about it, we told him that we could baptism him in the font in the Church building instead of the ocean. Worst idea ever. So we are filling up the font and about 3 hours passed and the thing is half way full. We were wondering why it was taking so long and then we realized that the font was leaking somewhere. The water had leaked from the back of the Church all the way to the front and coming out the front door. Thank goodness our floor is tile or else we would have a huge carpet problem. So we are mopping it all up and sweeping out tons of water and then we realized that the reason why all the water had come out is that the cork couldn't be sealed completely and that the tube the water flows out of wasn't connected to the drainage system so it was just flowing out onto the ground! It took forever to clean up and by some miracle I was able to use 2 broomsticks and a rag to jam the tube into the ground. It took me an hour to figure out how to make that work but it did. It was a big mess but thankfully the baptism was a success so it was all worth it.

 

Flood Cleanup

 

 Oh, and some sad news. We decided that we were going to stop going up to Feijoal because the work up there isn't progressing and the work in Quimada Guinchu is just exploding. Its sad that we won't be going up there anymore but hopefully one day we will reopen our efforts up there. 

 

Well, it was great to hear from everyone like I said. Love you all and I will talk to you later!

Tchao Tchao!

Elder Dorff