Waiting for Winter

 The weather there [in New York] sounds amazing to me.  It continues to be in the 30s every day here (in Celsius that is).  I hope you are enjoying the long winter.  I can't wait for winter to arrive here.  I hear it might reach the lows teens (in Celsius) during the winter here.

This week has been a crazy one.  The mission president wants all the companionships in the mission to do 140 contacts during the week; or in other words, talk to 140 new people every week about the gospel.  Usually we haven't quite been reaching that number so the zone leaders (the leaders for a group of missionaries, sort of a type of middle management) came down hard that we all need to do our contacts.  So we knocked doors.  We probably knocked 200 doors this week.  It was really rather successful.  We have probably 50 addresses to return to, and we managed the 140 contacts.  It was actually the first time in Elder De Oliveira's entire mission that he had done it (obviously my first time also).  Other than that we have been doing the usual stuff: teaching lessons, trying to do it better and better, and finding new people to teach (emphasis on the last one).  

We will probably have a baptism this week for a son of a member in the branch.  He is 11 so we still had to teach him and interview him because he is older than 8.  His Mom was inactive when he turned 8 and his dad isn't a member so he hasn't been baptized until now.  He and his family live on a farm just outside the city.  We arrived in the house and waited for a bit until Juliano (the kid we are going to baptize) came riding in on a horse. Brazil: where you can drive five minutes outside of a city with 100,000 people and your investigator arrives by horse.  It was pretty awesome.

I hope you are all having great lives with whatever you are doing.  I know I am having a good one right now.

I love you all!

Elder Russell