Laranjeiras

Hey guys,

Well, we had a pretty good week. Life is just going on. I'm still here in Laranjeiras. By the end of this transfer, I'll have been here for 6 months. But, I'm excited to stay with Elder Lewis. He's a good guy and I'm glad that I can stay with him for another transfer. I think by the end of this one, I'll be ready to go to another area.

The work is going well, though. We have some pretty good people that we're teaching and a family of 6 that we're hoping to baptize soon. We are getting some good references and trying to teach the most that we can with the members. So, life is going pretty well and we are trying to have some good success.

New Years was pretty chill, except I didn't really sleep too much. It sounded like a war was going on outside. I think I finally fell asleep at like 3 in the morning. We celebrated by eating some burgers and churrasco....pretty exciting. But, it's now 2011! The year I go home! The time is flying by...

We had a few ward changes this week. Our stake is not really the strongest in Manaus. On a good week, our ward has an attendance of 120. But, the neighboring ward only has about 70-80. So this week, we found out that a fairly large portion of our area was taken out and given to the other ward. We lost about 25 active people....So, while it's nice because our area is now smaller, we lost some good members, and (unfortunately...) some of the better lunches. It's nice because now we don't have to walk as much, but it's definitely going to shake some things up in the ward.

We had a good lesson this week. I tried to have the investigators talk 50% of the time by asking good "inspired" questions. We hadn't really planned what we would teach before, and tried to learn what we needed to say by just asking questions and listening to the Spirit. It actually turned out to be a great lesson and I could tell the investigators really paid attention and learned what we were trying to teach them.

But yeah. Life goes on. I'm just lovin life and the mish. Hope you guys had a good new year!

Love,
-Elder Eric Stapley