09-27-2010 Letter Home

"Strawberry Fields"

 Pictures of Vera's family!

Hey guys! First week! Man, I am so tired and my time is running out, so I'll make it quick. This week was GREAT. We worked really hard but not to the extent that we lost the Spirit. I've recognized that, here in Ceara at least, you have to conserve your energy. If you aren't careful, you'll walk so much and sweat so much that by the time Saturday and Sunday rolls around, you're beat, and you'll trudge along to your appointments thinking only about P-Day and you won't have the Spirit. You've gotta work hard but work smart too, you can't run from one appointment on one side of your area to another or your legs will literally, literally give out by the end of the week. This week I'm proud to say that we worked hard, found more elect people, taught with the Spirit, and we didn't lose our gas until the last hour of Sunday. When Tuesday rolls around we'll be right back on track.

We baptized Joyce, the 10-year-old daughter of Vera this week! She's really quiet and when we were teaching Vera she was always watching the kids or at school or doing something else, but this week we taught her everything she needed to know and she decided to be baptized! Awesome!

In other news, being District Leader is pretty cool. I did a training last District Meeting that everyone liked a bunch, about Finding the Elect, we did practices too, I got a lot of compliments. Pretty sweet, only going to get better. I interviewed a couple more people yesterday and it went very well, I'm getting the hang of it.

Just this and that, you know, nothing too out of the box this week. I love all of you guys and I hope all is well at home, in the States, in the Rio Grande. I'm thinking about everyone a bunch and praying as well for you! Thanks for all of the prayers and kind thoughts, they are helping me out a lot!!

Much love!
- Elder Brendon Carpenter

09-20-2010 Letter Home

Meteor Shower!

 Hey everybody!!! So, news about transfers... like I thought, Elder Da Hora and I will be staying here in Sao Cristovao/Tamandare. 

It was funny, last Tuesday during our meeting with the bishopric the Bishop of Ala Fortaleza called President Batt and told him up front that he wanted us to stay here, haha. We have a really good relationship with the leadership and the ward and everything is going great. But, can you believe it, I'm the new district leader! Wow!!! Responsibilities! Haha. We got back home after lunch Sunday afternoon and I thought, "Ah, let's take it easy, this week was pretty tough, let's just go to the chapel and clean up the baptismal font and take our time..." Then, it turns out that the Zone Leaders call me up and say that I have four interviews to handle! Oh man, I was panicking, reading Preach My Gospel on the bus to learn how to interview people to be baptized. It went pretty well though, we got to the chapel of the other Elders and they brought the baptismal candidates to the church and the interviews turned out to be very easy. Though, one teenage girl got really stressed out about the idea of talking to some Strange Handsome American and started crying she was so nervous. I had to joke around with her a bit to get her to relax and feel comfortable.

Yeah, so, say goodbye to my cash reserve because I'll have to take so many buses and say goodbye to my Saturdays and Sundays to find and teach new investigators. We're going to have to work even harder during the week to make up for it. But, I'm generally excited by the new opportunity to be a leader and inspire others, it'll be a new experience, even if it lasts just one transfer.

This week we were able to teach and baptize Maria Vera Lucia Oliveira Pereira (yes, I had to memorize the name to perform the ordinance, harder than you think, I messed up twice). She is a miracle. If she was the only person we baptized this transfer, I would be proud of our work. 
One day two weeks ago I had the impression that we needed to look in the Area Book. We made a list of old investigators that hadn't been visited but might still have potential. We then started to contact all of them. We knocked on one door, near the Bishop's house, and we met Vera, who said that the person we were looking for had moved away. I explained why we were looking for her and we asked if we could share a message with her, she accepted and bam! we started talking about the Restoration and testifying that Joseph Smith was called as a prophet. She liked what she heard and she went to Church that Sunday (we didn't even accompany her to the Church, she just got up and went). She loved it, the sisters in the ward did a great job befriending her and making her feel welcome. The Tuesday after, we went to her house, invited her to be baptized, and she accepted. We passed by her house every day to teach a little bit more about the Gospel. Vera was really touched by the Plan of Salvation. She's a widow... her husband died eight months ago and left her with four children, which is difficult but she is receiving help from her family and she's studying in order to get a job and start providing for her kids independently. She wants to help her husband in some way and when we taught about vicarious baptisms she got really excited. We marked chapters of the Book of Mormon for her to read and she read every time we asked her to. One night she was really busy and went to sleep without reading the Book of Mormon, but she had a dream and heard a voice tell her, "Get up and read the book." And she did just that, woke up at midnight, went to her sofa, turned on a nightlight and read the chapter we left her with. Wow! What a privilege to teach and baptize her, she was super excited to be baptized, you could really just see a light in her eyes. We got to the baptismal meeting right on the dot, 7:00, everyone was waiting for us (buses... you know, we were returning from the interviews in the other ward and the bus took forever to arrive). "I thought you'd given up on me!" She said, joking around. "Nunca!" I said, smiling. "Never!"

As promised, the pictures of Joyciani are included. She is doing great, as well as Ramon and Renan (they came to church in sunday clothes for the first time, and no body told them anything about it!) Jessica is always at Church on Sunday but Mateus has been a little rebellious lately, problems in the family... their parents have been really difficult lately. But who knows what will happen this transfer, we're always working miracles. I am getting e-mails every week from Clarissa, the girl we baptized in Veneza, she is doing well, firme e forte (firm and strong) and always going to church, but misses us a lot because the missionaries don't pass by her house as much. From what I've heard, all of the people we baptized in Mondubim are still doing well, Elder Reis is staying there for this transfer and is keeping them strong. I love these people! Keep them in your prayers, I want them to have huge happy families in the future with lots of returned missionaries, hah.

Well, I've got a date with a DVD player and a bunch of G-rated movies in the chapel... with air-conditioning (halleluah!) I love all of you! Thank you so much for all of your support and love!!

Your son, your brother, friend and relative,
Elder Brendon Carpenter

09-13-2010 Letter Home

Still Walking the Line in Latin America

 We had a baptism this week again! Joyciani, 15 years old, and she chose me to baptize her! We've been teaching and waiting for her the whole transfer to really feel sure about this decision and we feel like she was truly ready for the ordinance of baptism, she has plenty of friends in the ward and has been going to seminary almost every night.

Had a lot of other mini-miracles during the week, like every week. I felt the whispers of the Spirit one evening and knocked a door. We waited patiently in the hot sun, Elder Da Hora with kind of a grim look on his face. But, after a couple minutes we met Vera, 28 years old, she has four children, the oldest 10, the youngest with less than a year. Her husband died in the last two months (we didn't ask how) and has left her with some difficult conditions. She loved the message and the next day, showed a bunch of faith and walked to Church with her two kids and loved it! She said the members treated her very well and she felt very welcome and at home there. We also got two investigator families we've been visiting since the beginning of the transfer to go to church and they loved the experience as well. We had several members give us a silent "rock-on!" in the hallways with a thumbs-up, they were very pleased. Good week!!!

Been a little trunky recently, but feeling the Spirit and doing our thing every day, we're doing well. Getting curious about transfers but its very likely we'll stay here together for one more.

 I am so glad that I have you guys as family, it really means a lot to me. I've seen a lot of families since I got here in Ceara and man, there are so many dysfunctional unhappy families. We were doing some tracting yesterday night and we ran into a teenager, 19-years old, just sitting on the curb. We introduced ourselves and asked if we could enter the house to share the message of the Restoration but he said that his mother was sick so we just talked with him outside on the curb. Shortly thereafter his mother came out and we asked her if we could go inside and share the message more formally. It turns out it was a bad idea. The teenager didn't want us to enter the house because he was really embarrassed by his family. His father was there, drunk out of his gourd and it looked like he hadn't taken a shower for days, always interrupting us rudely, and the mother smokes a lot, so the entire house smelled so strongly of cigarettes. Everything was disorganized, dirty, they had only bananas and water and beer in the fridge, almost all the lights were broken... just pitiful, true misery. I guess every Sunday the son has to watch his two parents get drunk and do nothing but sit around... he seems like a good kid, doesn't drink or smoke and he seemed really interested... I hope we'll be able to help his family, there's three other sons there as well... it was just really sad and the thing is that we could see that it was because of the choices these people made in their lives that they were so sad and had so little going for them.

We've been super blessed to live in the country we live in, with all of our opportunity and our quality of life and freedoms. Our family could seem like heaven on earth to many people here in Ceara. I'm so glad that you have all made the choices you have and have continued to hold onto the iron rod, we've seen so many blessings in our lives because of that. We just need to trust more and more in the Lord and refine our lives and we'll never lack anything, we'll continue being happy for eternity, even if there may be momentary challenges here and there. I'm super grateful for that.

I do not have my camera cables here right now, you guys'll have to wait one more week to see Joyciani and her family and other cool pics.

Love you family, relatives, everyone else!!! Thinking and praying for all of ya, and thanks for doing the same for me!

- Brendon 

09-06-2010 Letter Home

Cuckoo's Nest...

I've got some pictures of my house and the area where we shower. We have three chairs nearby to place shampoo, soap and everything. Hah. We also have an empty pool where, years ago, they baptized new converts.

This week was kind of tough. We went to District Meeting on Tuesday and passed by the bank to pick up our allowance and Elder Da Hora realized that his account had nothing. A few phone calls later we figured out that his account had been drained a few days before. It looks like my comp gave his credit card to a member to withdraw his money and the said member returned the card a day later and said that the machine wasn't working... but, what really happened is that the said member stole 100 reals. I don't want to go to much into detail about the whole situation and what happened afterward but it kind of sapped the Spirit from us for two days. So I've been paying for everything this week, hah, and we are going broke pretty soon.

So, the spiritual experience of this week is Roger. Last week we were looking for some teenagers, non-members, that had gone to seminary and played soccer in the Church and appeared ready for the Gospel. We found them hanging out with Roger, who is 23 years old, who at first seemed really hostile to us. I don't know, he just started talking about the Plan of Salvation and Spiritual Paradise and Prison as if it were really weird, and the teenagers seemed to gawk at us and laugh as we started to explain the Plan of Salvation more seriously. I kind of reacted a little aggressively, testifying and inviting Roger to know more about the Church personally. He said he had already talked with missionaries and had a Book of Mormon, so at first I thought, ah, the guy probably got in with another Church that talked bad about our Church and he wants a fight. But, in the end we scheduled an appointment with him. We went over to his house one afternoon expecting a Bible Bash and, yes, he did start opening up the scriptures and showing us how it says that the Dead sleep until the Ressurection and don't do anything until then, I guess someone from another church showed him these scriptures and at the moment, I really didn't know what to say. But we got to talking about other things and it turns out that Roger was baptized 8 years ago, but after a few months he left the Church, principally because he started going to Seminary and the youth at that time were very rowdy and he decided that the True Church wouldn't have such an unorganized program... which is very sad, I know. He loves reading the scriptures and studying the Gospel, and he was really turned off when he would go to Seminary and everyone would monkey around. He then started going to other churches and got generally confused by religion.

So, we started sharing everything with him once more, about how prophets are important and how there can only be one true church, and he really started digging it. We went back another day and I had studied all about the Spirit World and I showed him the right scriptures and we even talked about the Millennium and the War in Heaven and other deeper doctrines. I lent him a book called Day of Defense that I had inherited from another missionary, and yesterday, we saw him in Church! He said he read the book in two days and couldn't put it down and that he wants to return to the Church!!! In Elder's Quorum he totally started a big conversation about how obeying the commandments brings happiness and everyone really enjoyed his presence. What's better is he wants to become worthy again to baptize his wife, who hasn't heard anything about the church yet. We're going to teach her and maybe some others in Roger's family this week and I'm really looking forward to it. It was an awesome experience because when I met Roger for the first time, he acted very aggressively against us but after only one week we're good friends and he wants to accept the Gospel again. Yeah!

Otherwise, we've got some other good things in the works. We have a 15-year old girl that wants to be baptized next week, she's going to seminary every day and she wants to invite a bunch of family and friends to the baptism. We have another guy, Diego, who is my age and he wants to be baptized as well next week. His friend Jamerson is a recent convert of three months and Diego told us that he saw a huge change in Jamerson and that he wants the same change in his life as well. We are teaching two young couples in their mid-twenties that want to get married and baptized as well, so awesome!! But, it'll take a while longer with them because marriages take a while to plan and everything. I love this transfer and these wards, its great great great!!!

 More pictures of my house...

Hey, do me a favor, guys! One of these nights, when Dad has some time, get the whole family together and what the short movie "Good Things to Come", on the Mormon Messages channel on YouTube. I watched it on LDS.org. By Elder Holland. Really good and emotional.

Veesh, I've been on for a little too long. Gotta go, family, friends, I love you all a bunch! Until next time!!

- Elder Brendon