From one morning to the next

March 21, 2011

Today is Américo Brasiliense's anniversary, so the whole city is shut down. My comp and I took the bus to Araraquara, ate at Subway (there's one close by, can you believe it?!), and now we're doing the email thing. How are all you guys doing back home? I imagine that it's starting to warm up a little bit back in the real world, but here in the Matrix it's starting to cool off.

Big news this week: Transfers are today! Woo! But my companion and I are both staying in Américo, so it turned out pretty anticlimactic; actually, almost our entire zone stayed where they were, so there's that. Elder Harris, my companion from around Christmastime who is now a financial secretary, called me at 6:40 this morning and told me I was being emergency transferred. But then it turned out to be an unsavory joke. So, we're all still here.

Much bigger news: we baptized yesterday! Woo! Na verdade, for the first time in my mission, we baptized two people on the same day! We baptized Dadal, that woman that I mentioned last week, and a fifteen-year-old girl named Elen.

It was actually pretty insane because Dadal has a bunch of family members in the Church and has seen tons of missionaries come and go over the years. She has even been to General Conference (only two more weeks, by the way!) and to some branch activities here. I honestly don't know what we did differently than any other elders -- if we did anything differently in the first place -- I guess Dadal's time to get baptized had simply come. Dunno. It was really cool, though.

It's also pretty cool how we came into contact with Elen. We were just walking around the city and making contacts during our first or second week here, and I walked by a big morena lady (is it politically incorrect to call her "black"? I don't remember anymore) and said hi to her. She said hello back and was so nice that I just kind of did a 180 and contacted her. That lady's name is Maria (surprise), and Elen is her granddaughter. It turns out that Elen already knew quite a few of the branch members, so it all worked out really well. And now we're going to try to go after the rest of the family. It's just hard because their family, just like everyone else's, is not very united; at least, it's almost impossible to find everyone at home at the same time.

There was actually a third baptism yesterday, but it kind of fell apart. And I still kind of feel like it was my fault. There's a family in the branch whose son Lucas is eight years old and still hadn't been baptized. We had to go and teach him a few things so he could get baptized this week. I'm guessing he chose me to baptize him because there's no father in the family; I don't know why else he would have picked me. Anyway, we were the last ones in the "baptismal font" (it's a small, above-ground pool) yesterday. The water was pretty cold, and when I baptized Lucas, a tiny little part of his head didn't quite go under. And I think he got water up his nose. Anyway, we had to do it again, but as soon as he came out of the water, he said he didn't want to do it again and everyone tried to convince him to just do it really fast but he just wouldn't and I felt really embarrassed and I'm sorry! Anyway, I guess someone will have to baptize him this coming Sunday.

Elder Gillespie always said that there's no such thing as a perfect baptism, and it's really true. The little fiasco with Lucas kind of put a damper on the two baptisms we did have. But now I'm deciding to try and just shake it off. Sei lá.

Did you guys know that President Obama is in Brasil? He was, anyway. Don't know if he still is. People have been talking about it quite a bit.

Anyway, that was this week. Oh, I also made a year and six months this week. But I think I talked about that in my last email. It wasn't that big a deal. I have been on my mission for a long time.

That's all. I love you guys! Tchauzão!

booga