I’ve got a lot of really good stories this week, so get ready. First of all, Elder Payne, the records guy, and I have really got into playing amazing basketball games with all different sorts of rules in the house with this little basket and rubber ball that one of the missionaries going home left in our house a while ago. Mostly we play pig with only slam dunks, bouncing it off walls and things, and occasionally we play some one on one. Well, I got a pretty jammed finger out of it, and it really hurts to hit the backspace key, because it is the finger I use to hit it; so if the letter doesn’t sound very well thought out or well formatted, it’s because I’m just being lazy with the backspace key.
With that said, first story I’ve got is from Sunday afternoon, so we left after church and went to some members houses to eat lunch like usual, which was really good food by the way. We have a family in our ward from Utah, the dad works at the embassy here, and we ate tacos. I swear it felt like I was back home and we had the missionaries over, except I was the missionary. Anyway, that isn’t the story, so we get picked up from the lunch appointment so all of us are in the car together driving home to get out stuff from the house to go out and work, well we get to the house and the front gate and the front door are both wide open. Someone had taken a crowbar and pried our front gate open to be able to go under the electric fence we have and then pried open our front door. There were marks all over the door and all the wood from the frame was broken right off. We have this dead bolt and they broke it right through the wood, so in our door way there was just wood chips everywhere and the door was still locked. The dead bolt was still alright and we didn’t have to get it replaced, just the frame, which now has a metal plate in it, and the actual doorknob, it was completely destroyed. So anyway, this is all we see and the first thing we think is that they are still in the house, because it is 3 in the afternoon. So all 6 of us go in together and look through the rooms and everything has been gone through, all the suitcases were opened all, our clothes were all over the rooms, our drawers were all pulled completely out, our desks scattered, but the interesting part about the whole thing, they took almost nothing. It was amazing some of the things they left. We had some money sitting on a top shelf they didn’t even touch, they scattered all the books on our desks, but Elder Payne had his Ipod under a book in his room and they didn’t find it. All of us have speakers and radios out on our desks and they didn’t touch a single one. Elder Vance had his camera in his backpack, which was completely emptied, he later found his camera on the floor in his room. They opened up a pocket in a bag where Elder Morrill keeps his money and his credit cards, stole all the money but left the credit cards. The only things they took were all the money they could find, 250 mil from Elder Payne, 500 mil from Elder Morrill and about 250 mil from Elder Dailey, which all together is equal to about $200, and a few watches. The only thing that was stolen from me was that $5 watch I bought in that store where I bought my soccer shoes. Elder Dailey’s camera, Elder Ruiz’s camera charger, and Elder Vance’s Ipod were all stolen. So we got pretty lucky, but it was still pretty scary. They broke into the house between 2pm and about 3:30 pm. We asked all of our neighbors and no one saw a single thing. We live in the nicest, and I thought safest, house in the entire mission.
The next cool story is about this investigator. All this whole week President has had interviews, so he wasn’t in the office to really give us much to do. It is in the middle of the change, so I didn’t really have too much to do from just normal jobs. I decided to pass a bunch of references I had been getting over the last week. This one I got had a very confusing address and was a reference from a mission in Brazil. They had passed it to the south mission and then the south mission passed it to us because they couldn’t find it and thought it might be in our mission. So knowing all this before doing anything, I decided to just call the number and ask the lady herself. I mean the worst she could tell me is that she didn’t want missionaries to come over. So anyway, I call up the number and a woman answers, I talked to her for a little bit about her family in Brazil who were members and how they had contacted us to get in contact with her, to share with her a message about Jesus Christ. I found out her husband had recently died and she is only in her 30's. She has one son who is 2 ½ now without a father. I asked her if we could come over to her house and share a message with her and she said she would love to share with us but she isn’t really ever in her house. So, first thing I think is that she doesn’t really want to share with us, that is what they usually say when they don’t really want to share, so she asked if she could meet us somewhere, and I just kind of asked again where she lived to get a better idea of if she was even in our mission. I mean all I was trying to do was pass the reference to the appropriate missionaries, so I asked her if she knew of any chapels of ours close to her house, and she tells me the only one she knows is the one in front of Super Seis in Mburucuya, our chapel. So then I got super excited. The reference just happens to know our church, so I set everything up with her to meet in a members house to teach her. We get there and have the lesson at the members house and it was probably one of the best lessons in my entire mission, one I don’t think I will ever forget, because of how much I could literally see how the gospel would and was blessing her life. We taught about eternal families and about repentance and baptism and committed her to be baptized on the 5th of November. She is coming to church tomorrow. The only bad news, she doesn’t live in our area, she actually lives closer to a different chapel, a lot closer, but she knew this chapel because her uncle is a member and when she was really young she remembers our chapel from where he would go to church. So, at church this Sunday we are going to try to pass her off to the other Elders, but it was such a blessing to just teach her that first lesson. It was like I was immediately seeing the effects of our efforts, the change that can happen to the people we teach. Anyway, I’m really excited to see her in church tomorrow, and hopefully we can get a few more people tonight that will go tomorrow for sure. I love you all so much, can’t wait to have more good experiences to tell you next week, Elder Adamson V
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