So this was a good week. We have some good investigators so we taught a lot this week. There is an 8 year old boy that we have been teaching because he has been coming to church with a friend and a lot of his cousins are members. But he is very difficult to teach. I don't think he is in school yet so he doesn't read and he doesn't understand a lot of things we say. So we taught him and his mom and one lesson we taught them was the Word of Wisdom. He doesn't have any problems with that since he's only 8 but he said when he turns 18 he will smoke cigarettes like his dad... His mom told him that smoking is really bad and that his dad is crazy and shouldn't be a role model.. So that was interesting but effective and our 8 year old investigator gave up future smoking...
Anyway I thought a lot about that this week. Here you have an 8 year old boy, parents are separated, his mom is a little crazy and apparently his dad is too. No one put him in school so he is a little behind, and he is counting down the days until he turns 18 so he can smoke like his dad. I started thinking about how important a parent's example really is. Because he is too young to realize that his parents aren't setting the best examples - he just wants to do what they do. And he definitely isn't the only kid like that. It really makes me work harder and want to be a better future father. And it makes me really thank the Lord for the family I have and the situation I grew up in. But anyway the lessons all went well and we baptized him on Saturday!
We finally got a ward mission leader and he was a member less active so this calling will hopefully help him as well as us. So the batismal font gets really dirty during the week - lots of bugs and stuff. And it is a little inconvenient to try and clean the font real fast on Saturday morning before the baptism. So we planned with the new ward mission leader to go on Wednesday morning and clean it. And it was DIRTY. Lots of bugs and lots of stuff on the wall. Pretty sick, but we cleaned it real good and it was perfect when we left. But there are these little black bugs that apparently only come out during this part of the year. They are literally EVERYWHERE. And when we came on Saturday the baptismal font was full of them! So that was great. But we got them cleaned out again!!
We had a New Years party here at the church on Thursday night. In the U.S. fireworks are a big thing on New Years, but here they are a big thing everyday. Apparently the people here think fireworks are really awesome because they are going off constantly. So that wasn't really a big thing on New Years. But most of the people in Óbidos celebrate by getting as drunk as possible, men wearing womens clothes, and doing all kinds of crazy things. Pretty much a day for Satan, so we stayed safe in the church. And guess how many lessons we taught on Thursday and Friday... 1! But we talked with a few drunk men who wanted to hear a word about God. One of them said he has an angel in his house right now, and the other straight up bore his testimony of how he knows that the Mormon church is true! But he for sure has never been... We were laughing the whole time but we invited them both to church on Sunday.
The New Years activity at church was cool - lots of people and lots of food. The members here decorated the church all cool and everything. We got permission to stay until midnight so that was nice. It was kind of slow for a few hours until it hit midnight. Then everyone went crazy - playing music and dancing and hugging and saying Happy New Year and what not. So that was fun. But we had to leave at midnight so we missed out on a lot of the fun. But apparently the members stayed there until 5 am!!!
On Friday most of Obidos was hungover so we weren't able to make contact with hardly anybody. We got invited to lunch at the same members house who did a big lunch for Christmas and that was super fun. They had this chalk stuff that they were throwing on everybody to celebrate and that was getting a little out of hand, but they had lots of good food and stuff to do there. We were some of the last people to eat and when we went to get food, there were no clean plates left. I already told yall that the people here treat everyone like family and part of that is that they share the same dishes and cups and what not. So when I saw there were no clean dishes I just used the bishops plate once he finished eating. Nope, I didn't wash it or anything, I just put some food on it and ate. I never would have done that before my mission!
They had another activity Friday night. Everyone was at the church playing volleyball. And since we weren't able to teach anyone the zone leaders said we could play too. But as soon as we got permission they took down the net and started playing soccer! And Mission Rule number 1 is that we can't play soccer. So we were bummed out about that. Brazilians love to play soccer!
We had 3 baptisms on Saturday but only two were for us, One was a baptism for the ward, but we baptised him because his mom wanted us to. So it was really good. The church was an absolute mess because no one cleaned it after the New Years activities but they came right before the baptism and cleaned it and the baptisms were good. Everyone was happy!
Well that is about it. I had a good week and i hope all of yall did too! I have about 100 pictures to send but the internet here isn't good enough to send them. So next week we'll go to a cyber and I'll send them from there. Love yall.
Elder Green
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