As the title suggests, I will be training again! I love training, and am very excited to find out who will be my new companion tomorrow! As for Elder Capistrano, I laughed very hard when I learned his fate. He will be transferred to Urlandia B as a Junior Companion to Elder Sena. Not only is he a little disappointed to be Junior to a guy who showed up at the same time as him, both he and Elder Sena were somewhat terrified about getting transferred to Urlandia, due to the marvelous stories that they had heard from, uh, me. For those who don’t remember, I too, served in this very area... and those were a few interesting weeks. But, to calm their fears, this morning, I’m sending a "Elder Wassom's guide to surviving Urlandia B."
Sister Chaves is also getting transferred to Parque Pinheiro, Santa Maria. Oddly enough, she too had been fed some horror stories by her companion, Sister da Silva, who had served in Parque Pinheiro the transfer prior to Santiago. I promise you that the mission is a whole lot bigger that it seems through my emails, but there’s just a whole lot of "coincidences." Sister Chaves will be replaced by Sister Porter.
Elder Bicudo went home after 2 years of dedicated service, and Elder Alvarenga will train. With all this info, Elder Alvarenga, Sister Chaves, Elder Capistrano and I will all take the same bus headed to Santa Maria at 7am tomorrow.
This week started off pretty tough, but then blessings just seemed to fall from the sky. On Friday, we were walking in the street when a young girl who I didn’t recognize ran after us and said to Elder Capistrano: "Hey Elders! My mom told me to tell you we're getting baptized on Sunday!" "Really? Where?" "At the church!" "Which church?" "YOUR church!" After that conversation, I had to ask Elder Capistrano what that was all about. He too, was slightly dazed. He said "That was Juliandra, daughter of Alexandra. They are former investigators that told us 2 months ago that they weren’t interested at the moment, but told is that they would 'call' us if anything changed." "Well, Elder," I said, "It looks like something may have changed." Surely enough, Alexandra and Juliandra showed up at the activity on Saturday, went to church on Sunday, and, later that afternoon, accepted the challenge to be baptized on the 21st.
Then, at church, a rapaz and his aunt, Patrique and Maria, whom Elders Capistrano and Moore had cut from their teaching pool, showed up at church, also with the desire to be baptized. We learned that afternoon that this was because of the services rendered to that family by the members after the hailstorm.
These miracles served as a good lesson to teach Elder Capistrano. I told him what Elder Soares da Silva told me in Urlandia. "You can always count the number of seeds in an apple, but you can never count the number of apples in a seed." Elder Capistrano worked hard here in Santiago, and is very loved by the people, judging by the great emotion arisen at his farewell.
I love you all. I am happy. I know the Church is true.
Com Amor,
Elder Wassom
Haha my Bombachas came in ;)
An activity that we did with the Branch, involving ice cream that had quite a few leftovers:
Saying goodbye to Elder Bicudo:
Elder Capistrano saying goodbye to Jefferson and his family:
My District before the transfers and the city of Santiago:
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