This week was a bit hectic. We did in fact have General Conference this week. The Saturday Morning session was SUPER hard to understand though, the afternoon got a bit less difficult but Sundays were all good. They have a different translator for each speaker and some have much much "thicker" Brazilian accents than others. I look forward to reading it in English in a month or so. Its a bit difficult to untranslate back to English from Portuguese you lose stuff.

This week we found that bolieas are 100% dependant on obedience to shaving. I have become very careful on my shaving now and the boleias are just flowing in from the police giving us rides to the massive dump trucks (they are the coolest and always give us rides). One boleia we hop in, get going, do our normal small talk and the guy goes "Do you believe in the Bible, if so open to Joao". With that we start a 15 minute Bible "Discussion" over the end of the world... It was an interesting ride and something that happens pretty often actually.

Elder Evangelista has been talking to our investigators with some "fire" recently to really get people paying attention. The idea is that "There is fire that burns and fire that purifies. Its the same flame for both, the burn or purification depends on the material". We went through several people to burn away what was needed and purify the rest. That has helped us a lot.

On the topic of fire, we did a service project this week. We cleaned up a crime scene.

No real stories of investigators. Bia is still doing well but we had some things to handle this week and didn't get to do too many visits. Hopefully this week will be productive with a new companion.

Thanks for the emails and support!


Elder Howell

PS: Happy Birthday (2 days late, I know) to my favorite DC missionaria.