We received this email on June 12...
Last week was a very adventurous week.
We baptized Elza (the more elderly lady) and Cagila (the young lady). We have been teaching Cagila ever since I arrived here in this area. It took a while for her to get baptized because she works all day every single day and at night takes college classes, so we could only ever teach her on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. She works on sundays a lot too, but when she isn´t working she always goes to church with her uncle, who is a member. She is super receptive and accepted baptism super easily, but her main obstacle was her schedule. But we finally got her into the water.
Elza is the mother of a member from Itacoatiara (iiiitaaaaacooooaaaachyyyaaarrraa)named Joel. Itacoatiara is a city close to Manaus. Now Joel is living in our ward boundaries. One day we were knocking doors and no one was letting us in all day (ALL DAY) when we finally found someone really interested who..............lives in a different area. So we passed her address to the AP´s so they could pass it along to the other elders. So we were kind of discouraged that day because we only found one interested person but she lives in a different ward. I mean, that´s a good thing but....we want to baptize people in our ward too! But then, thirty minutes later Joel called us and asked if we were the elders from Colonia. Heck yes we are! He said that he is a member from Itacoatiara and he wanted us to visit his mom that same day. So we got the address and we went to it. It turns out that Elza´s husband had passed away that same week, and it looks like they had already been taking the missionary discussions before, except they weren´t actually married yet. They had also gone to church a ton of times already. But we got there and Joel had already explained a bunch of stuff to her, telling her that she could be baptized and in one year she could do the temple work for her husband so he could be baptized too. We taught her a little about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and she actually asked if she could be baptized that saturday. Elder Marcolino and I looked at each other and then looked at her again like, heck yes you can! After we made some phone calls to the bishopric to plan the baptismal meeting, and we planned to teach her the rest of the lessons (Joel had already taught her a lot, about coffee and stuff). So that was the story of how the worst day ever became the best day ever. Lots of prayers answered.
The bottom part of my shoe was coming off, so I panicked and went to the "Casa da Butina" aka Brazilian Boot Barn to buy something to wear on my feet. Luckily they had dress shoes/boot things. I bought the most conservative ones I could find for cheap-ish. I asked the guy if they would last 3 months, and he looked kind of offended and said that they would last six years! .......we´ll see about that. You´re talking to a guy that burned through two pairs of eccoes in 20 months!
Our new apartment is way better than the old one! The move was interesting because it was difficult to find people to help us. Most people here don´t have cars, and even less have trucks. So finding someone with a truck was a challenge. We managed to move all the big stuff (fridge, beds, dressers, stove, table, washing machine) and we still have to get some of the small stuff (books, chairs, microwave). It was a challenge to get the stuff into our new house because we live on the second story and our spiral staircase is super narrow. So there is a random door on the side of our house that is there for the purpose of getting furniture in and out. We had to lift all of the stuff to the door and I had to grab the stuff and pull it into the house. It was super lucky that I didn´t fall and die while doing this. It all worked out in the end.
Love, Elder Olivier
Our new house
The most obese baptism clothing I have ever seen!
