23 March 2015

That sounds like a cool week!  Congrats to Zach with their performance at ISSMA! Gold is awesome! That sounds like it was a fun trip out to the farm though.  I remember going out there once and that it was freezing cold. We were all walking around outside without coats or anything and it was windy.  It is kinda of near the airport right? That doesn´t surprise me that they wanted to get into the water though! It was probably freezing! Ice cream sounds really good though.  Here the ice cream is water based and not milk based b/c milk is super expensive here. I would probably be 5-6 dollars a gallon at the minium.  Really expensive! The chest freezer died? Thats sad, but that is cool that we have a new one though! And now we have a grill! Thats cool.  I need to learn how to do Brasilian barbeque b/c it is super good!  I remember the Brother Lopez made it at my open house and its really good here as well! We don´t eat it that much b/c it is expensive. But its really good.  How is Stirling doing?  I hope that everything is awesome with him! That would be super cool if he could be there when I got home!  An Open House would be cool, but would it be the same day that I get home?  I´m going to be so tired after 24 hours of flying.  Whatever you want to do is cool!  That is a cool little blessing with the jobs!

  This week here in Manacapuru wasn´t too crazy.  Monday was the normal pday.  We traveled to Manaus that day after lunch and got there and emailed from there.  That was cool to be able to use fast internet!  Tuesday was a Zone Training that was pretty cool.  We learned how the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you know, Faith (fé), Repentance (Arrpendimento), Baptism (Batismo), Receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost ( Receber o dom do Espirito Santo), and Enduring to the End ( Perseverar até o fim) applied to us as missioaries.  It was a super cool training! I liked it.  Talked a lot about the importance of obedience and how we need to be exactly obedient to the mission rules.  Pretty cool training! We left back for Manacapuru directly after the training and got back about 2:30pm, kinda of tired but still functioning.  Did some visits for the rest of the day that were fairly normal.  Talked with Diane a little bit.  She is progressing well.  She was traveling this weekend so wasn´t able to go to church.  Wednesday was normal.  Taught a bunch of people.  We had a good lesson with Paulo Henique and Luana.  We got to learn part of the Brazilian National Anthem as well which was cool.  I can kind of sing it now!  Thursday we handed out invites for the open house quite a bit.  Friday as well.  Just getting everything ready! Saturday morning we taught English class and I taught piano class for two people. It went pretty well.  Nothing too amazing.  We also got the chapel cleaned up for that night.  That day we didn´t have any time to really do visits, lots of running around and getting things ready.  The open house started at 5:00pm and nobody showed up!  I think over 800 invites had been handed out and nobody showed up! So at 5:30, we got all the members together and we formed an action plan.  We all paired up and left for the streets to invite the people passing by to come on in and see the chapel! I got paired up with Alex, one of the youth and we hit the streets just inviting everybody and it worked! We got quite a few people to come in and do a tour of the chapel which was really cool! It went until 7:00pm and we got some references from the open house now to work with! It was really cool to see the youth all team up and hit the streets to invite people to come on in and see the chapel! Testimony Building moment!  Sunday was busy as well.  After church we made a few  visits and then had a meeting and made some more visits. This week was busy but was really good!

  I hope that you all have a great week this week! Miss you all! Have an awesome week!

love

Elder Battraw