7-19-10

Ma! Tudo bem! Como vai voces?

Well this week was quite interesting. We had a pretty good week as far as new investigators -- one from Ecuador named Julio. Solid as a rock! He's a really nice guy, lives here with his sister and his kids are still down south in Ecuador. He came to church yesterday with his hair all did and a nice ironed shirt! He loved it! He especially loved priesthood meeting. Our priesthood meeting is very inviting and loving for everyone, the members are great at fellowshipping them. It's a nice change of pace after all the sriousness and kind of intensity of Sacrament Meeting haha.

Veronica is slowly quitting drinking coffee! I don't know if I told you guys or not but Veronica is the wife of German, or as known in the wrestling world, Apolo. They have been married for a while now and he was baptized in '95. He has a daughter from his previous marriage who was born into the church and just showed up at church one day. Now Veronica is taking the lessons and has a baptismal date for August 1st! She is super awesome and doing her best to stop drinking cafe. (it's easier to spell in spanish). She has been getting really bad headaches so she has just een taking it with more and more milk each day and less coffee. It's a start!! She has really changed, we can all see it. She is much more calm and collected. The whole family is actually, it's great. Veronica was actually a wrestler as well, you can seach for them on Google Apolo and Havana and you'll find them! haha, they're so sweet!

Right now we have 4 baptismal dates so we're pretty excited to have some work to do.

Yesterday was definitely interesting... Yesterday was the baptism of Mariela Cobarrubias. We had the font filled and Elder Rogers was dressed in white, ready to go. 6:00 and nobody is there! Slowly the people started to pack the place though. We had a better part of the branch there, allt he leaders showed up, and we were standing around at 6:30 saying.... Hmm.... Where's Mariela? Mabel had been at her house since 5:15 waiting for her. Elder Rogers played phone tag with Mariela and Mabel for over an hour. We still are not sure what happened, but the baptism was eventually called off. It was a really rough time for us. We were really hoping for it, Mariela hasn't talked to us since last night -- so we're not sure what's going on.

In stead of this happening, I took the chance to take some family pictures of everybody that was there! Well, most everybody. So I have a little work I need you to do for me. Just touch them up a little. There's one picture of Ruths family and there's a man next to them in blue and white. If you could get him out of the picture or crop it somehow, that'd be great. But it made for a little fun while we were there. Then just shoot them back to me. There's a few pictures of Ricardo Carvalho and his daughter, you can e-mail those to me and to him (rickgol11@hotmail.com). Gracias.

Anyway. I love you!

-Elder Conner Allred