Elder Aarone Cefalo

Oi Família,

This week was a great week. We were able to accomplish most of our goals for teaching and passed some of our goals. I do not have alot of time to write so it will be a quick e-mail. This week we taught alot of lessons to many people and found 7 new people who want to hear more about the gospel. Sadly the problems we keep running into in our area is people not being married and people smoking,drinking, etc. We also are having a hard time getting people to church. But we are going to work on all those problems and hopefully get them resolved. The problem is getting people married is hard in Brasil because of the process they have to go through to get a marriage certificate. We also had a couple of service project oppurtunties this last week, one was helping put an older lady into a chair so that the other lady could give her a bath and then having to put her back into the bed. The other was helping a couple people with pushing their car out of the road because it died. It is getting really hot here and i am wishing the Brasil had air conditioning in their houses because all the have are fans that barely help at all. Luckily on Saturday and Sunday it rained a bit so it cooled down. Akready today it is really hot. Today we had a churrasco with a family here in our ward it was alot of fun but we spent so much time there that we don´t have as much time to write e-mails. Vanda who has a baptismal date is slowly getting rid of cigarretes, she was smoking 8 or more per day but now she is only to 4 and sometimes 5. We just have to help her stop and get her to church and she will be baptized. Terezinha and Valdir are still not too certain about marriage but we offered to help and they said they would pray about it and tell us the answer this week. On friday we met a family that had just moved into a less actives house. They were there to help the less active old lady because she has problems with her ankles. Only the wife is a member but she also is less active. They have 3 girls who are older than 8. We had a family home evening with them on Sunday and it went really well and the husband was asking alot of questions and was really interested in learning more. It looks like things will go well we just have to find out if they are married or not and also get them to chuirch. We had some really good cake that night.Yesterday was a good start to the week because we were able to teach quite a bit of lessons and also mark times to visit other investigators. We are going to work on getting the ward more involved in missionary work so it starts to go even faster and better. Today we went to go and take showers but our apartment didn´t have any water so we weren´t able to take a shower and we have to wait until tonight to take a shower. We also went and got our hair cut by a lady in the ward. Church was really good on Sunday and the bishop had me stand up in sacrament meeting to be introduced to the whole ward. He is a great bishop. The day before he was really sick and we had lunch with his family but he didn´t even eat but just layed in bed. He came out and asked us to give him a blessing. I got the oppurtunity to give him a blessing. It was great for it being my first time giving the blessing in portuguese and not just annointing with oil like the other times. On sunday i got to try a juice that had beats, carrots, and oranges, it was weird but good at the same time. I love this area and all is going well and we have many people to teach that i don´t even have time to describe them all and what we are teaching. Well i love you all very much and hope all is well back at home.

Love Elder Cefalo