Luke and some recent converts
Luke and his companion
Wow. I didn´t even realize that Levi´s departure date was so close. Yeesh. One more week and there will be Elder Heperi 1 and 2 wandering around, huh?
This week was full of lots of rain, and even more cold. I dunno if almost two years of Brazilian heat has made me a wuss to the cold, but I was freezing this past week. Actually, I´ve heard that Apucarana is one of, if not the, coldest cities in our mission. The city sits on top of a big mountainous region, and is really high up. There are a lot of hills here, so we spend a lot of our time going up and down. Just to get to our chapel from our house we have to walk up two hills, cross some railroad tracks, and walk thru a small Gypsy community. (They´re nice, though I´d like to know why they have a nicer washing machine than us when they don´t even have a house.)This next week we get to visit another part of town that is known as the Anthill. Should be fun to walk up that street.
Because of the rain, I had to put my clothes out to dry in our house, and under a little patio that we have out back. The clothes in the house dried ok as we turned on every fan that we had, but my shirts out back didn´t fare as well. We´ve basically got a jungle out back with 20-foot tall plants that have become trees whose weird-looking seeds attached themselves to my shirts. Also, I found out that the local birds like to hang out in that portion of the backyard, and ended up pooping all over two of my shirts. Man, how I miss a good dryer…
On the work side of things, we´re having a lot of success finding some good families. One guy that we taught on Saturday night named Ni... ended up going to church with us yesterday, which was good because I usually find that people take a week or two to get going. He was pretty tired during the meetings and ended up sleeping thru most of sacrament meeting, but he said that he enjoyed it all the same.
Another family that we´re teaching really have been prepared to receive the message. They´re a young family named Ju... and R..., with two daughters ages 6 and 3. They just happen to live on the other side of the street of the Young Men's president, and, Hallelujah, are legally married! Ju... said that a couple of years ago they decided to officially get married, as he said that it seemed like the right thing to do. They went to church for the first time yesterday, and Ju... said that he´d definitely be coming back next week. It´s really been good to see a whole family interested and progressing, and normally we just find more individuals.
Anyway, on a closing note I saw a guy in a restaurant wearing a New Zealand All-Blacks shirt. I went over to go talk to him but unfortunately he got up and left in a hurry. Maybe he was afraid of me as a missionary or something. Who knows?
That´s sáll from me. Till next time.
-Elder =w= Heperi
