Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Zone conference, birthday packages, and growing the ward! 02.20.2017

     So this week I had a zone conference with President Lacerda. There we talked a lot about how to be a better teacher. The focus was on using your personality to help teach a lesson and to not use memorized lessons.  Every one has a different personality and they should use this to teach.  He also talked a little bit about how we need to get rid of some bad traditions that the mission had developed and ask if every tradition is a tradition that edifies ourselves. President Lacerda is definitely trying to raise this mission up. My interview with President Lacerda was good. I love my mission president!! He pretty much told me to be more confident in myself. I am always critiquing myself on what I can do better, so that helped.  Thanks dad for the little advice UAC thing. I just need to practice this to really be a good teacher. Many times we start forming questions while an investigator is speaking and we lose a lot of what they say.

     I also got all my birthday packages!  Yeah I felt really special. The ties were great. I liked most of them and will trade the others. The flower tie that you sent is sweet. Elder Palomo taught me how to diminish ties and I have turned two of them into skinnier ties. It takes like 30 min for each one, and I think I don't like ties super skinny, but a little bit slimmer is good. The cheesecake was good. It wasn't the best quality like you said, but it was good just the same. The Brazilians liked it a lot. I even put some of the Reses pieces on the cheesecake for a little bit more flavor and it was delicious. The candle things was cool.  The song went on for a long time though and i didn't know how to stop it so I am sorry to report I had to curb stomp it to stop the music in the end. But it was good while it lasted :) 


    This week there was a lot of working and a few splits with the elders of the house. We had two service projects.  The first one was where we went to a school and made text book kits and delivered them to the students. A member here works at the school and needed our help.  It felt weird entering a school and being a missionary. The school looked like a prison with metal bars everywhere as well. I though Summit (my high school) appeared prisonesque, but now I know it was nice. The other service project was shoveling some dirt and debris into bags and then lifting the bags out of the house. There was a huge series of tunnels at the back of this mound and we thought it was a rat. We didn't get to all of it so the rat might still be there.

   So this week I saw the Lord's work in my life with people at church. We had 4 baptism dates that were marked for this coming Saturday, but when we tried to visit them during the week they weren't home at all. But this Sunday 6 new investigators showed up that we had never seen before, so we got their addresses and will visit them this week.
     This past Sunday we had a special sacrament meeting for all of the less-actives and it went well. The we had 125 people there. The first time that I arrived here there were only 55 people at church. The number is increasing really fast. I even played my violin with the choir during sacrament meeting. However, on the night before I broke my A string and didn't have any way to get a new one, so I had to mix up what I was playing the day of. It all worked out in the end though. 



      This is the last week before transfers. I am excited to see what happens and I think that this transfer was the fastest one that I have had yet. I hope that President Lacerda doesn't mess with me and my companion. I want to be the last companion of Elder Palomo and send him home. 

The weather is still hotter than hot and I still have to climb hills, but I am enjoying this mission. You learn a lot from everything. 

Until next week!
-Elder Smith

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