Hi Everyone! This week was pretty full!
This week in Ituverava we went and followed up with our investigators there. There's and older man named Geraldo that we baptized on Sunday, that was awesome! We've been working with him since I got here so it was super cool to see him finally take the step of being baptized! So about Caio, the 13 year old boy that wants to be baptized. We went and talked to his grandma, who actually has more of the say if he gets baptized or not. Elder Almeida, Lehi, and I talked to her for about 45 mins. But, in the end she still wouldn't allow it which was pretty rough.
On Thursday we had interviews with President Scholz. This time interviews were a bit different, we did interviews with our companions. It was good, we talked a lot about our area and what to do with the members. We also talked about the possibility of putting another companionship in Ituverava permanently and keeping one companionship here in Sao Joaquim. But, president said no way because Elder Costa, the area president of Brazil, said that he doesn't want any more areas being opened because the wards are too weak. Then President brought up the fact that here in Sao Joaquim we have an attendance of 30 or 40 people per week, but over 400 people have been baptized. I didn't know it was that bad until he told me. It's much different than the 71% attendance we have in Sandy!
From Thursday to Saturday morning we did splits with the zone leaders. I stayed there in Franca while Elder Almeida went back to Sao Joaquim. The zone leader i was with is Elder Mehmetof. He trained one of my best friends out here on the mission, Elder Jones. Elder Mehmetof is super funny and a super good missionary. I had a good time with him and learned a lot! He only has 8 weeks until he goes home, so I tried to learn all I could from him. Also, he made it seem like it's really probable that I'll be senior this next transfer, maybe even train like I said earlier, so we'll see how that goes!
Sunday was good because of the baptism, but bad because everything else seemed to fall apart. The family that we're teaching promised, again, that they'd go to church and we wouldn't need to go and get them in their house to make then go. So a little after 8 we called and the Eduardo, the younger brother, told us that the whole family was asleep. We were pretty disappointed, so we went over there again. We got there and the family was now getting ready. We stayed there until everyone was ready, all they were waiting for was the mom Lucilene to iron a shirt for one of the boys. We had to leave to get ready for the baptism so we just told them see you in a few mins. We went on with the baptism which went great, but after we realized the family hadn't showed up yet. We called and found out they weren't going to come because the mom and dad had "headaches" and it was "raining" so they couldn't come. They were all ready to go! All they had to do was walk out the door! But everyone gets to choose for themselves.
Marcos, our investigator in Ituverava who's also 13 had his baptismal interview with our zone leader while we were doing splits. He passed! But when they got there we was a little on the edge, he didn't know if he wanted to be baptized or not. But during the interview Elder Guzman, the ZL from Washington DC, said that marcos received an answer in the middle of the interview and out of nowhere got super excited and wanted to be baptized, which was awesome! But on sunday he was a bit on the edge again. I think he still wanted to, but his mom didn't even let him go to church so he didn't have a choice. That was another bummer. We could've had 3 baptisms on sunday but because of parents of other religions we only had 1. Times like that are hard. So close!! But, there's still hope for our investigators, we just need to be patient and keep working, and if it's what Heavenly Father wants, it'll work out.
This week I was really paying attention to my accent, even more than I normally am. Elder Guzman has a year and a half on the mission and speaks better than every other American in the mission. People think he's Brazilian when he talks. It really made me want to get to that point! It's so cool how people can't tell. I want to have an accent like that so bad, but I'm just not there yet. I think accent is one of those things that I'm just going to have to keep trying and let the Lord help me out.
Well, there's my week! The talks that I'm going to tell you guys to read this week are Elects of the Lord, the doctrine of calling and election by Dean Roy Doxey and Beware of Pride by Ezra Taft Benson. Both are so cool!! For sure check them out. I love you all! Until next week!
Elder Odom
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