Dear Everyone,

 

Thank you so, so, so much for the prayers you´ve said in my behalf. This week was better than last week. We´ve been giving more of those magic thank-you notes and we did a Family Home Evening. I´m hoping that little by little things will smooth out. We are also helping the Relief Society by helping recently converted sisters in the ward do their visiting teaching.

 

Yesterday we had 2 investigators in Church! Yes! One of them is Helena, who has huge potential. She is African and is friends with some a recently converted family. She is showing a lot of interest towards us and our message and we really hope that she gets baptized. We are going to present a baptismal date this week. This morning we had a zone conference call saying that we need to ALWAYS invite people to be baptized at a certain date in our second lesson with our investigators, and that the date needs to be as soon as possible. So, we´re going to invite a lot of people to be baptized this weekend and this upcoming weekend!

 

As of right now we have one person marked for baptism, Amadú. Amadú is really cool. He is from Guinea, is a non-practicing Muslim and speaks Portuguese worse than we do. Sister Thornley and I actually found and started teaching him, but not until now he´s started progressing. He has been reading the Book of Mormon in Arabic and is excited for baptism! It is so fun to teach him, because we have to teach him like a primary child. Our lesson on the Gospel of Christ went something like this:

 

Us: `God wants us to be content (he doesn´t know the word for happy), so Jesus was our example.´

Amadú: `okay.´

Us: `Faith is trust in God.´

Amadú: `uh huh.´

Us: `Repentance is saying sorry to God when we do something wrong.´

Amadú: `I´ll say sorry next time.´

Us: `Good! Baptism is important because it makes us clean. Only good in our church.´

Amadú: `Yeah, only good in your church.´

Us: `Wanna be baptized?´ pointing to picture of baptism

Amadú: `Of course!´

Us: `Why?´

Amadú: `Because it is good. I like to be clean.´

 

What is funny is that he actually understands most of it! We get a kick out of him.

 

Now for the fun stuff! We had the priviledge of helping the Sisters out in Lapa. I was with Sister Austin and Sister Gidney was with my MTC companion Sister Call. It was great. I love doing divisions because you get to help so many people! They are great Sisters in a great area. It is kind of interesting to see how the work is so different from one area to the next. Lapa was the first church unit to be created and it is gorgeous and FULL of great people. This week we get to go to the Azore Islands for 3 days to help two areas there!

 

Well, thank you so much for all of your support. I love you all!

 

Sister Derrick