New Companion Elder Duarte

Well this week was transfers, and Elder Cordiero left to go to Ubá i am still here.  My new comp. Elder Duarte is really good, he is constantly encouraging me to speak more Portuguese, and is always helping me when I say something wrong. He is also one of the larger missionaries in the mission, and I feel rather safe around him(I'm no longer the tallest in our house and Elder Dennis is no longer the largest in our house).

This week I introduced Elder Duarte to our area (Elder Duarte meet area, area meet Elder Duarte) and to all of our investigators.Literally all of them (so we had a lot of lessons this week) 

This week it rained. If you didn't know rain makes things hard for missionaries because not many people are on the street, so it's hard to do contacts, and no one wants to come out to open the door (the majority of houses here have a wall around them so they have to go outside to open the door to the street) so its also hard to find new people. Also even water  proof shoes get wet in a Brazilian rainstorm. This week we (our house) bought four umbrellas Elder Dennis had to buy two and the other elders one, due to the excessive rains and winds (mine has yet to break). 

In case you have never been in 25 degree weather (about 70) and had thick fog covering everything its really really weird, but such is Petropolis. 

Anyway we got 3 new investigators this week, one was a reference from an investigator, one was from knocking doors, and the third just showed up to church. we have been having problems with all of our current investigators (only one of them is always at church and she needs to be married before she can get baptized) 

We have a young man with whom we have been working with for a while whose parents again refused to let us baptize him, and told us that their son would not be baptized until he is an adult.

So we can only work with his parents and pray that their hearts will soften or that our investigator will continue to go to church until he is old enough to decide for himself that he wants to be baptized.

well I don't have much more to say except that we learned that our ward is pretty close to a split (we only need 2 more Melchizedek Priesthood holders and this month we have a recent convert who should be receiving the priesthood) and we have been working with two of the central people from the Old Quitandinha branch who when they fell inactive many others also fell inactive, and I hope that as we help them they will help us and others in strengthening the church here. so before I go home we should have a Quitandinha Ward.