Elder Rhodes Missionary Experiences while serving the Brazilian people

This week has been up and down. Our numbers this past week have been down.  I have learned that more than half of your set appointments will fall through. It has been a bit of a rough week for the Piracicaba central gang.  We are still working with Seila and Socrates for a baptism.  Bianca, their daughter, drew me some pics. Another special child drew this of me...I was impressed.  The hair is nice. We had our first interviews with our mission president this week. He basically just told me how awesome I was. ;) It was funny though because, from what I've been told; usually the first interview with him while in the mission field is like 30 minutes and the others are like 15.  Mine was like 7.  He said he was glad, but also surprised because most of the new missionaries are super overwhelmed and just cry all through the first interview. I was like nope, I'm good. He told me that he can tell that I have helped my companion as ...

Well, it was another good week. Church this past Sunday was awesome. We had 8 investigators there! Sheila and Socrates which are our best family were there at church with us.  They need to get married before being baptized.  They had their 6-year-old daughter perform in the primary program and it was so awesome. While on the stand, she kept waiving at me and Elder Costa the whole time.  During the program she went up and bore her testimony. It was so awesome. Afterwards, we were talking with Sheila and she told us how Bianca had a friend at school that didn't believe in God.  She took the pamphlets that we had given them for our lessons and gave them to her friend. She is 6!  She said that her friend believes in God now.  :) Before coming to church, Sheila and Socrates were in a fight and were debating not getting married or baptized. They had decided to come to church in support of Bianca while she performed in the primary program.  During gospe...

Well, I am now 2 months through my mission. It has flown by. I saw a Komodo dragon this week. Maddux was the first person I told about that of course. To Maddux, "I will send pictures of a capybara I saw up close in person. Also a ton of birds and lizards. I saw A KOMODO DRAGON! It ran into the woods and I didn't get a picture though. It was absolutely huge and super scary looking. I ran after it and my companion grabbed me and was like, no man, that thing can kill you!" This week our baptism did not go through. Apparently, there was a miscommunication with some of the members and the mother of Augsto about the details and dates of the baptism. He is still getting baptized, now it will be on the 27th. All good, a little frustrating, but all good. We had division this week and I went with our district leader Elder Barros. It was awesome. we set both of our records for teaching lessons in a day! We taught 12 lessons in one day. How crazy is that? Also, we met this...

Portuguese is super hard and I had to give a talk my first Sunday here in Piracicaba. Was actually pretty good. Nobody believed me when i said that i didn't know any Portuguese before my mission and that I've only been in the field for a week. 2nd thing. The apartment I'm staying in has 2 sets of elders and this area hasn't had baptisms in over a year. Between us and the other elders we have 8 people on date! Elder Costa and I have 3. There is a father and mother with a daughter; Sheila, Socrates and the daughter is Bianca. She speaks so fast and so loud that I don't understand a single word. When we were teaching them the other night i kind of just sat back relaxed and thought"now this is what its all about right here."  Kind of a peaceful moment for me since i have been somewhat stressed to learn a language that I have had 0 contact with in my 18 years of existence. The other person on date is Augusto. He is 14 and will be baptized on the 13th...

This past week was not the best. We went through our area book and the missionaries before us must have made up fake teaching records, and fake addresses. We had to spend almost 2 full days walking to all these written down places and attempt to find people that possibly don't exist. Because in the small chance that they do exist and are interested in learning about the gospel we need to find them. Also, we had a day when we had about 6 lessons lined up. All fell through but one. Little disheartening. Interesting story, we went to an investigator home Elder Costa had almost taught all the lessons to with his previous companion. Clapped at the front of the house a few times...waited. The neighbor came out and was like, Yo, that guy died like 2 days ago. What?! Then like the whole street came out and was giving us all the info of the family and stuff. I don't really know what to do with his teaching record and neither does Elder Costa. We called the assistants and asked, they...