SO! How is it in sunny Oregon? (adapt this sentence in your head if you're not there, thanks!)
Here it's raining like crazy! Some of the roads here actually turn into rivers! Today was a lot better so we went to the center and wandered around for a while.
This week we did a division with our LZ (Zone Leaders for those of you non-Brazilian missionaries) and my ZL is, guess...YEP! Elder Wells! [Elder Wells was David's 1st companion when he arrived in Recife from the MTC] We had a fairly typical day here (not much more than walking from one fallen appointment to the next) and we stopped to have a long discussion about the area. We prayed and we just started talking. We came up with this:
1. The leadership of the ward doesn't know how to work with missionaries (the area was closed for over a year!), so we need to guide them by the hand.
2. I let my fear of failure control me. I need to focus on the spirit and strive to follow his council and not MY ideas.
3. My comp lets his love of people control him. He needs to let investigators that don't want anything alone.
4. We need to organize and plan better and more rapidly.
To meet all of these we have created a notebook of the area and are filling it with information of all of the leadership and the area (map, contacts, etc). It's going to be awesome!
Funny aside: Here in Pernambuco when people would say "whoops" or "oh-no" in English, they say "Eita bixiga" which translates to (more or less) "Wuh-oh bladder". My comp and I were in an area really far from home and we both needed to use the bathroom so we tried to find a member, but they weren't at home. Another member lives close by so we started walking there and my comp started half-dancing. He said, "I can't stop dancing!" At the same time I stumbled and, without thinking, I said "Eita bixiga!" We both burst out laughing (which just made it worse) because it sounded like I was saying that I didn't need to dance, because - "Wuh-oh bladder!" Trust me, it was really funny.
Elder Page
