Dallin's Michigan Mission Blog: Week 47

Well this week was finally a bearable normal week. It's been a while. We have several investigators who are actually progressing, we are working with members* and it's not miserable every day. We also had 2 investigators** in church yesterday. Not to mention the area is just straight up better.

*The ward here has apparently been dealing with lame missionaries for the last 6-8 months and a lot of the members had lost lots of confidence in the Elders. The last transfer or two the Elders here had been working on winning the trust of the members again, but It looks like in the last 4-5 weeks the Elders finally started getting help from the members.

**Little story to show the importance of members. We went around Thursday, Friday and Saturday making sure to commit all of our investigators to come to church on Sunday. We had in total about 10 - 12 people who had said they would be there, and about 6 were pretty solid. When we got to church, we only had 2 investigators there. One of which we didn't invite, but has a friend in the ward that brought her. The other also has a friend in the ward who made sure to call and confirm that she'd also come to church. None of the investigators that only we invited came to church. Only the ones who have friends helping out. I think that may have been part of the problem in my last area. The ward wasn't so helpful with investigators.

There's an inactive family we found that moved here about 3 years ago and no one in the ward knows them. We've been working with them for a little while, and they've been progressing very well. The parents are both members, and they have 4 kids that aren't members. The goal is to help Ruben, the dad, get back into church so he can receive the priesthood and baptize his 3 oldest kids. I'm really excited for this family, they're a bunch of really good people.

So one day I decided to count all of the Volkswagon Gols I saw. I spotted about 46 without recounting any. And we had a good day too. We were in lots of homes that day. Yesterday I saw just over 50. It's a popular car here in Brasil. I'm pretty sure they don't sell them in the US either. I'm going to have to make friends with a forwarding agent to help me out after the mission.

Oh ya, Elder Dial has 10 months on the mission right now, so he's a little newer. He also didn't get his visa until a few weeks after leaving the MTC, so he's been in Brasil for about 7 months.

Oh ya, I ran into Elder Paxman at the last transfer. He was like "Dude, your new bishop!" And I said "I know right?"

That ends my week too. I have a few photos I'll send now. Talk to you guys next week.

Falou (that's a way of saying "peace out" or "keep it real" kind of, but the translation is "you spoke" I don't really get it, but the rapazes think I'm cool when I say it)

I deemed these chairs yetti chairs.