January 27, 2014 - Brazil Goiania Mission - Uberlandia - Week 52

Dear Family,


Hey guys!!! So this week was totally whack! Haha I´ll tell you why later.

This week is transfers! But they already told me that me and Elder Neeley are staying in Parque do Sabiá. Legal, ne? (saying legal in Portuguese is like saying cool in English haha) I´m happy because I feel like I can do a whole lot more in this area. I keep finding out more and more stuff about this ward that happened in the past and it´s crazy! I guess a lot of people in the ward fell away because they didn´t support the past leaders. The bishop now is always wanting to help out the ward and he´s the nicest guy ever haha. I'm still way awkward... By the way, the word "awkward" doesn´t exist in Portuguese, so that´s not a part of their culture. :/ But they are starting to understand what it means now because I´m living in Brazil now.

So this week, the leaders of our zone and district told us to teach a lot of less active lessons to find people through that. It was so much more difficult than I thought it would be haha. We literally passed by like 40 different less actives and they all either didn´t live there anymore, or they didn´t want anything to do with the church anymore (one person told us that they didn´t get baptized haha and another said that they got baptized, but they didn´t get confirmed :/) so we didn´t have a ton of success doing that. The leaders want us to do it still, so I guess we´ll have to do it. The elders that have been in this area in the past have not done ANYTHING to update the member list, and so we´re going to have to do that. The list is going to be a whole lot smaller after.

This week, we found a lady on Saturday who came to church yesterday.  She has had a ROUGH life. She´s about 50 years old and has just had it rough. She has two sons. One son is married and is doing fine, but the other son is like 26 years old and is a drug addict. She divorced with her first husband and her second husband was killed by her son (In defense) because her second husband attacked the mom, and the son got angry at him and then the husband tried to hurt the son and the son killed him in defense. Crazy! Her first husband is always trying to get back together with her, but she just won´t let him back into her life because he is always drinking. But she is really nice and she loved church yesterday. We didn´t get a chance to teach her after, but we´ll see what happens.

We´re struggling with Flora because she didn´t come to church, and she is not reading the Book of Mormon. It´s frustrating because everytime we go over, she tells us she didn´t read or pray, and then she goes off about her problems in her life. We´re going to give her one more chance this week, but if she doesnt progress, we´re going to have to drop her. What do you think that I should do with her?

So this week, this guy lost control of his car and drove his car into the wall of our house hahahahahahahha. Luckily, nobody was home and so nobody got hurt, but he drove away after he did it! We still have no idea who did it. These other guys came over and said that they were his friends, but they wouldn´t give us the guy's name. it made me so mad haha. They ended up fixing the wall pretty fast and so everything is good now. But still, i´m mad that we still have no idea who did it. they told us though that the guy didn´t have a license and he didn´t have any registration on his car. (We also believe that he was drunk). So we´re just a little bit peeved. But whatevs. I´ll send some sic pics of the wall.

Love you guys! I´m loving this area so much and I´m feeling so much better about everything! Only one more year to go! Tchau!

Elder Hanson

Butthurt, because some drug addict lost control of his car and hit our yard wall :-/