Laranjeiras

Hey guys,

Well, we had a good week! The work is going well. We're still set up for a wedding at the end of the month and I actually had a lot of fun teaching this week. We have 3or 4 young men in our ward that are working on their mission papers. They were all inactive about 3 or 4 months ago, but are now preparing to head out on missions. We've made good friendships with them and are being blessed because of it. They are all pretty cool guys and have a bunch of friends that they're inviting to church. We've been teaching some of their friends, way cool and sincere guys, and 2 have already said they've received answers about the Book of Mormon and want to be baptized. It's been fun to teach with them. We're teaching good people who've already gone to church and are honestly open to receive the gospel. So, it's been a fun week. One of my favorite parts of the mission is to teach and I love it when more of my time is spent teaching than finding (which isn't so fun for me....) So, the work is going great. We had over 12 investigators at church this week! So, we've got some good potential, and I'm enjoying the work.


It was an interesting week at church. With the ward division, I thought we'd have less than 100 people at church. A usual week had a frequency of 120 people and we lost about 25 active ward members. This week, we had 118 people at church! I was surprised and it was a great blessing to see. But, we did lose the ward pianist and the Principles of the Gospel teacher. So, who gets the responsibilities..? Me! We showed up to church at 9:05 (we were trying to get some ppl to come to church...) and right when I showed up and sat down, the ward secretary came down and told me that I'd be playing the piano. So, I run up to the stand just as the first hymn was supposed to start and look at the hymn. It had 5 flats! I had to resort to just playing one note, as I don't know how to play piano very well, but it went pretty well. I also had fun teaching the Principles of the Gospel class....We had a pretty good showing and the lesson went well. So, I'm staying pretty busy...

Today, my last comp, Elder Woolf made a year on the mission. So, we celebrated by having a "brunch". We made chocolate chip pancakes that his family sent, juice, eggs with bread, french bread, an avocado smoothie, and a scone-ish kinda thing. It's like a fried pancake you eat with cinnamon sugar. It was so good! I took a pic, but I forgot my camera. I'll have to get it to you guys next week. Sorry.

Elder Lewis and I still get along great. He's a good kid. We've figured out that between February 4th and 5th, I'll have as much time left on the mission as he will have had out here. Pretty nuts!

So yeah. That's pretty much whats been going on. Hope you guys have a great week!

Love you!

-Elder Eric Stapley