Fever

5 September 2016 

 

It's been so hot this week. I have this problem where every day where it's stupid hot, I wear my lighter colored pants, and when I'm in a lesson, my sweaty forearms make giant sweat marks on my thighs, and also the sweat on my pants makes it looked like I peed my pants. Really pleasant, really nice.

The thing about the heat here isn't that it's just the sun beating down every day way hotter than anywhere else; the temperature is honestly hotter back home. It's just that, when it rains during the night, the next day gets so darn humid, that the second you stop moving, your body starts raining. Also, we have to teach people inside their houses, because there's so much going on in the streets, and the houses are like literal ovens with no ventilation except for a fan from a Chinese store. For a long time I've been using my tie to wipe my sweat, but this week, I started to carry a sock I haven't really used, and so now that's my sweat rag. Just thought I'd include that nice piece of information.

Now that you're all likely thoroughly entertained by hearing about the #struggle here, maybe I can talk a little bit more about my week itself.

One thing we wanted to work on more this week was our member help, and we had a big success! Just about every day we had members who left to teach with us, and it was awesome. One day, we had a recent convert, Tyson, who is 18, come out and teach with us, and we visited two of our younger investigators, Danielson, who is 18, and also Tommy and Deborá, who are 17 and 15. We taught Danielson about keeping the Sabbath day holy, and Tyson was able to testify saying, "yeah, it was different for me to go to church at the beginning too, but it makes such a big difference in my life" and talked to him on a level that two white guys couldn't. With Tommy and Deborá, at the end, Deborá said, "hey, you gunna be with them when they come back?" and without us even asking, Tyson told them, "totally, I'd love to be here". It was rad.

The next day, Thursday, my comp woke up with a headache, and wasn't feeling the best. We went out to teach in the morning, but ended up just talking to people in the street a bunch, and went to a restaurant close by for lunch. By the end of lunch, most of which he had his head down for, we got up to go and he could hardly walk straight. We promptly got in a taxi and went to the comfort of our nice air conditioned home, where he knocked out in about 0.8 seconds, and slept for 4 hours. We didn't go out to teach the rest of that day, figured I'd give him a breather from pushing him hard on 

Wednesday :P

We finished off the week super strong with some solid lessons. We're continually helping Lu prepare for the end of the month for baptism, same with Tommy. Just got to get them coming to church consistently. At church on Sunday, we only had one investigator come, named Zezinho. He lives right on the border of my last area and my current one, and since we were already tight, we started teaching him again. On Sunday morning we passed by a little early just to invite him to come, and he was like, "alright, I'll get ready to go", and sure enough, he came! One really cool thing that also happened at church, my investigator from Tira Chapeu, Mundinho, who is getting married and baptized this week, flagged me over, since my last ward meets at the same building, just earlier, and he told me, "so, this week I'm getting baptized, right, and the Elders said I could chose who I want to baptize me, could you do it?", to which I was like, "uh, YEAH!". It was actually really cool :) I'm so excited for them.

Been a fun week, lots of work, and a lot more still to do :) life is good.

Love y'all!

Elder Massey