Keila's Baptism!

Keila's Baptism on Sunday, November 4, 2018

Things are going great. Keila and her family are amazing. Only Keila was baptized this Sunday, but the whole family minus grandpa came to Sacrament, but only Keila and Wellington (14 yr old brother) stayed all three hours because they had a visitor come into town. We baptized Keila after church and her dad pulled up as we were taking pictures beforehand and he really liked her baptism. Really, the whole family wants to be baptized, everyone likes us a lot.  We usually read a bit in the Book of Mormon with them and explain, then everyone reads a verse and explains it. 

The other people we teach are doing fine, a decent bunch of them need to marry and that takes quite a while once that process actually starts. Irasema´s baptism is marked for this Saturday and she´s progressing well.  We had my first ward council here, started at 4 in the afternoon.  It happens on the first Sunday of every month, but not when there is General Conference, and thus this was my first one. We were just a part of it for the first thirty minutes, talking about recent converts, people progressing, and whatnot and then Bispo Warken dismissed us.

A funny encounter happened yesterday we visited Sergio after ward council. Sergio at some point while we were visiting together said, “Thank you very much” in English. Certainly startled me! Apparently some years ago he took like a basics of English course or something. People do want an English class but I’m not sure about teaching one. Elder Favoretti said he´ll make up excuses for the rest of the transfer, but after that (because he´ll leave and I won´t) "Boa sorte, meu amigo!" Elder Favoretti and I have some fun together.

Our district grew in size, now we have a set of sisters, one of them was one of the Sister Trainers for our mission while I arrived. Our new zone leader is Elder Romero, don´t know where he´s from. We also received another Elder, Elder Rush from Nashville. This Sunday was also weird because it was "Horário do Verão", day light savings, so we jumped forward an hour which made getting up rough. So we are now 4 hours difference in time from each other. 

Roseli also said this past week she was going to come to church, but she didn´t, but we visited her and she told us how she had to housesit for her son William who went out of town. I figured it was because of time change, because the time change happened automatically on people´s phones last week but this year it was changed to the first week in November or something. This week we’re going to start teaching the boyfriend of a returned missionary sister, we´ll see how that goes. I think he might be atheist or something, but she´s brought him to Institute, gave him a Book of Mormon, and talked about her mission with him and she said he wants/is willing to meet with the missionaries. 

This past week did have a good amount of rain, but it kept things cool, so I can´t complain too much. Apparently the only thing that is done for Halloween here is you can have a Halloween party at school where you dress up and stuff. Also school here is very different, there are three different sessions, morning, afternoon, and evening, and you pick one and go to that. Also, their summer break is in like December/January to February/March or so. Milkshakes here are amazing, there is this ice cream/milkshake stand not too far from us that we hit up sometimes, I love me some chocolate ice cream, but it is definitely no blue bell. 

Tell Brother Skanchy thanks for the advice, about finishing the chimarrão before passing it (which I´ve done every time and talked with my companion and he said yeah you have to otherwise it is really rude) and finishing my plate every time (although one time a few weeks back I left some sauce, was like a cheese whatever on my plate because it was seconds that I was forced to get and the mom apparently tried to make me feel guilty with a I don´t care, but ,,, and her kids got embarrassed and said mom stop he doesn´t understand. This was near my beginning so Elder Favoretti did explain what happened/how she was trying to make me feel guilty afterwards to me. Now I make sure and look at the plates of the people who’s house we are in to see if my plate must be literally spotless or if I can leave some grains of rice). I do like looking at all the advice of everyone in my journal, it really helps!

Love y’all, 

Elder Trevor Mangum

Pizza with the tradition of writing how long you’ve been on your mission