Elder Anthony James Holt: Week 8

Bom Dia Tudo,

This has definitely been a great week, but like my subject line, it has definitely not been without trials. The week began with transfers, which I talked about las week. I was very excited to have a native companion, but also very nervous. It has definitely been difficult. I love speaking portugues, but having to speak it all day every day is very frustrating beacuse naturally my tongue wants to switch back to english. So it ended up that we had a lot of quiet times on the road, which I feel bad for, but my head heard really bad and I was learning a new area which just made it more difficult. We have 3 families right now that we are working with to prepare for marriage and baptism. One has the process open, to be married at the end of this month. Unfortunately, the mom of him has severe mental problems, and the fiance left the house. Elder Mataveis and I were really nervous about them going through with the marriage, but we think they will now after they sat down with the Bishop for counsel. The other recieved their certidoes (basically a birth certificate, and when they get two more documents will be able to open the process as well, they are an amazing family, and we are trying to move their wedding date inside of this transfer. The other family has not started douments yet because we have not taught the Law of Chastity yet. They are very wealthy and should have no problems. The wife is the sister of a member family in my old area that I loved. They have a ton of support and 5 children over 8 who are all very interested and also very smart. I have very high hopes for them. We had a huge problem this week with lessons dropping unfortunately. We would mark the lesson, confirm it, and about 15-30 minutes before the lesson they would call and say they weren't in house or we would get there and no one would be home, I think this happened with 10-15 lessons which meant we would spent the time between 19 and 21 door contacting. I hate door contacting because I don't find it effective at all, and it is very time consuming and monotonous. Basically it produces very little results for they amount of work you put it. My companion is determined to door contact as many houses in our area as possible before the transfer ends, and so because I am still in training we ended up door contacting. For 5 nights we spent around 2 hours a night contacting and didn't have a single lesson from it and maybe 5-6 contacts. I was really annoyed and on saturday I just said a pray while we were contacting that if there was a reason all our lessons were dropping that I might see some success with our contact. Almost immediately of course, God reproved me and the next door contact was a whole family that sat with us in a lesson. I like the family a lot, I think they have good potencial. I really hope something comes out of it, and I am still not a fan of door contacting. I am going to try and stack lesson this week though, now that I know the area a little better, so that we can not door contact. Yesterday, I got to skype my family, it was really good to see them again. Granted it was early morning for them so I am not sure that they were themselves 100%. I was honestly scared before hand because I don't want to get trunky in my 2nd transfer, but it wasn't bad and I think I missed the trunkiness a little bit. This morning we played gator ball with the rest of the zone which was a blast, and then we went shopping. It was really funny becuase these two girls came up to us, and asked if I spoke portuguese, they were mocas so I should have said no, but I felt guilty about lying. There was a really dark one and a really clear one, and the really dark one explained to me all the reasons I should give my number to the clear one. I love all the attention I get here from the mocas(young women) it is really helping my self esteem, granted it might just be that I am the only white person here. Hopefully when I come home black I get all the same attention from the white girls. I'm not gonna worry about that now though, I still have to work on my skin tone.

Com Todo Amor em Minha Coracao, Obrigado por todas as oracoes e apoia,

Elder Anthony Holt