Monday, November 29, 2010


Alô!

This week was swell. Thursday morning I got a call from our beloved zone leaders, Elder Carvalho and Elder Ingram, mainly with the intention of mooching off my cell phone minutes to call some Irmã (sister) in their ward about lunch because they used up all their minutes. But, they also called to inform me that I am now the leader of the largest district in the mission. There is a city in the state of São Paulo called Osvaldo Cruz, which has a little branch, and I guess the missionaries there had some sort of security problems and they were “emergency transferred" to Apucarana for a while. I have yet to hear what actually happened -- stay tuned. Elder Shaddick is now buddied up with Elder Campelo, and Elder Woodward is with Elder Fonseca, so we now have 8 in the district. I don’t know either of them, although I have heard a little about Elder Shaddick, and I think he´s got around a year on the mish and Elder Woodward has about 6 months. Well, I guess we´ll find out more tomorrow at District Meeting. Poor Elder Schirmer will be missing out on the fun because he will be going to Londrina to get fingerprinted and to have his visa renewed.

We found another part-member family. Sandra, who has been inactive for 3 years, lives in a house with her kids, and her brother Paulo, and his kids, Mikon, and Juliana. Paulo´s gonna be difficult because he likes the bar, if you know what I mean. But his son Mikon is cool. He’s 14 years old. So Sunday morning at 8:40 we go to pick them up to go to church. Their grandma goes to wake them up and out walks Juliana, half way clothed, stumbling out the door, drunk. She´s 13. She had come home at 5:00 AM from a party. She told us that Mikon didn’t want to wake up, so I asked if we could come in. When we got inside, we went into Mikon's room and pulled off his sheets and woke him up to go to church. Turns out that he had stayed up until 4:00 in the morning, waiting for Juliana to come home. We asked him why he didn’t go to the party, and he said that he doesn’t like loud noise. Well, that’s good. So after some delay we got him to go to church, and he enjoyed it. Good kid. Sucks about his family though. We´ll see what we can do to help.

Last week on the way to a lunch appointment that was quite far away, we met Jesus. Brazil is pretty cool. I don't know anywhere else where you can find so many random statues of Christ.

Speaking of Rio de Janeiro, my mother and I are SO glad that I didn’t get called to go there. Boy, it’s a mess. It’s literally a war between drug traffickers and the police/army. I believe they are trying to clean it up for the Olympics and the World Cup here in a few years. In the mean time, many people are dying, with tons of buses being burnt, and there is constant gun fire, not only in the ghettos, but in the city as well. Crazy.

Yea for peaceful Londrina!

Later,
Toots
(that’s my nickname . . .)

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