Elder Connor Jacklin: Feliz Ano Novo!!!

Opa Família! Como esta! Estou bem aqui! É muito bom aqui e eu amo é aqui! Eu penso eu devo escrivar este mensagem em Português hoje. Não, I´m just kidding. Hello everyone. It was nice to hear how good your New Years has been. It´s way different down here. It feels kind of weird, but holidays aren´t really an excitement for us down here, (except Natal e Dia de Mais). Everyday down here feels like a holiday to us. We had a lot of Ups and Downs this week. Allow me to narrate the week for you!

On Monday it was nice to see you guys again. It felt weird being on the other side of the screen this time. Did you paint the walls again? I swear I helped you paint those like 4 times before I left? Just kidding.

The rest of the week was pretty interesting. We had a meeting with our bishop on Tuesday. He likes what we are doing and he wants us to keep up the good work. He also told us that we need to stay out of the North-Eastern part our area because apparently it´s a bad place for Missionaries from the US to go. The other areas here are really nice though. We have a lot of people here that treat us really nice, even when they aren´t members.

We had another baptism this week. Her name is B. In the picture I send she doesn´t look very happy but she was. We baptized her on Saturday and were going to confirm her a member on Sunday. But Brazillians have a weird habit of not getting ready on time for things. We came by her house an hour and a half before church telling her that we need her to be prepared to leave the next time we come around. When we came around to her after picking up another investigator, his name is R I´ll talk about him in a second, she was barely starting to make Breakfast. So we had to wait for her to eat and to get ready. We were 45 minutes late for when we were supposed to get there. So we have to wait until next week to Confirm her. She is willing to wait and we are still excited for her.

R is an investigator we started teaching on our first day here. He has been taught all the lessons and wants to be baptized. So this coming Saturday we are going to Baptize him. We were supposed to do it last Saturday but then something came up in his family so we had to reschedule for this week. We are very excited for him.

P is making great progress. We are meeting with the Bishop tomorrow with him to talk about him receiving the Aaronic Priesthood this coming Sunday. Elder Goodwin and I are excited for him. Last night I was talking with him about the Priesthood (in Portuguese) I was telling him about all the Blessings it will bring him and his family with it in his home. He wants to serve a mission when he´s older. I asked him where he wanted to serve. He told me he wants to serve in Washington D.C. and convert Donald Trump. As soon as I heard Trump we both just burst out laughing. Then Elder Goodwin came rushing out the door telling me we had to leave because it was 22:30 and we needed to be getting home. By the way we were at a members house for this. His name is F and he´s the other person in the Picture that I will send of B´s Baptism.

Oh yeah a quick side note. My camera broke. I don´t really know how. Also just a personal thing to my mom. I got the charger, but the chord that goes with it wasn´t in my bag or in my Suit Cases.

Well that´s about all for the week. This morning we got up around 7 because it´s just like Monday, it´s another holiday here and we don´t have anything planned. Everything is closed to so we can´t buy any food or any other things that we need. Sometimes I wish that if a Holiday was on P-Day, then we could move P-Day to another day and just have a normal work day. Because we can´t seem to find anything that´s open today. I´ll send the pictures in a few minutes so if you freak out about why they aren´t here yet just give me a few minutes. I have a lot and will probably be sending them in a couple of emails.

Elder Jacklin