Wed's and Med's

So Lauren´s a licensed driver now, eh? I´m sure she´ll do fine, but, just be careful. As they say here in Brazil, “Woman at the steering-wheel, constant danger!” It´s funnier in Portuguese because it rhymes.

Today I´m writing from Londrina. My new visa finally came thru after months of waiting, so now I´m officially legal up until Nov. 7th. Whoo-hoo!

Well, this week I was in bed for a bit with a sinus infection. I stayed in bed all of P-day last week, but found that I still wasn´t better, so I had to stay in the house all of Tuesday and some of Wednesday, which was a pain. I actually wasn´t sure exactly what I had, and since going to the doctor´s office here can sometimes do more harm than good, Sis. Leal had me talk to a medical doctor serving as a church missionary. I was grateful that he was American, as I was looking up words in the dictionary like crazy trying to find medical terms that I didn´t know. Anyway, he gave me a check-up over the phone in English, and I got myself loaded up on a bunch of Brazilian meds. A plus is that over here you don´t need a prescription from the doctor to buy all the medicine from the pharmacy, even when the package has, “To be sold only under doctor´s prescription” written all over it. Good times! Anyway, lots of rest, a blessing and 800 mg of something called “Azitromicina” per day had me up and ready by Thursday.

This week had some interesting highlights. One of the Elders from the Zone, Elder Pi… (who goes home with me funny enough)broke a mission record and had 53 investigators come to sacrament meeting on Sunday! Ha, so the rule on the mission is that anybody who´s not a member can be counted as an investigator, even if you haven´t taught them yet. I guess one of the members is a soccer coach, and the team was traveling or something that day, so he decided to bring the team to church. Their branch there only has an attendance rate of about 50 or so, so you can imagine the look on the members faces when the attendance more than doubled. Definitely one of the funnier things that I´ve seen with the work here.

The only downer of the day was that two of the Relief Society sisters (some of the younger ones, 20´s or so) had a bit of an argument afterwards about something. It ended up in a purse fight and a couple of bloody noses. I´d say about par for the course with the 53 investigators when weighed against the purse fight.

Our Branch is doing well. Currently, there are a lot of youth who are interested and getting baptized, so the branch is pretty excited about missionary work. We had a baptism this last week, and there has been so many recent converts in the past 6 months or so that they´ve had to call 8 ward missionaries just to meet all the demands, which is pretty cool. We´re gonna train the ward missionaries this week on the discussions, and it should be a pretty good process.

The Branch is good still. All the members are nice, and which makes us feel pretty welcome. The only member who´s a little…different is some lady named ???... She´s in her late 20´s, unfortunately, just had her marriage end. Anyway, every time that we have lunch at her family´s house, she always gives us an earful about how ... how marriage is terrible. She´s... told me and my comp. that we should never get married because “There´s not a man on the face of this planet who´s worth anything!” Yeah, it´s a bit intense.

On Sunday there was a special lesson about Eternal Marriage that I´m extremely grateful that no investigator participated in, and she made about 200 comments about how marriage is terrible, and how nobody should get married. Anyway, that would be no good for an investigator to hear, so the branch president had to talk to her a bit...

Welp´, I believe that´s it from me.

Thanks, as always, family and friends.

Here´s a “good luck” shout out to Phil and Stephanie... I believe that they´re getting ´hitched this week (if not just save it for next week). Also, thanks to everyone for this round of mail, (Talisa, Andrea and Kamalei) and as always I´ll try to send a prompt response.

´till next time!

-Elder =w= Heperi