Parker - April 24

Hey everyone!

So yeah this week was kinda eventful. We had companion exchanges on Tuesday, and I finally left this area for exchanges, because the past couple transfers, the Zone Leaders took advantage of the opportunity to get exchanges out of the way when my companion, district leader, had to go and do baptismal interviews for them, so I always stayed here, but this time we did exhanges normally, so I got to visit and spend the night in the Zone leaders apartment, which is super tiny. 

Then, we went to the stake center on Wednesday I think for a devotional, Elder Nelson was in Buenos Aires, and the devotional was being broadcast. There were four speakers, the area president and his wife, Teixeira, (pronounced Teysheyra), from Portugal, the wife spoke in slow english while someone translated, and spoke about how man and women are like blue and yellow, both distinct colors, yet, when combined, they make something entirely new, green. President Teixeira spoke in broken spanish, mixing it up with english and portuguese a lot, but he spoke about how as members of the church we need to be happy, and show it. Sister Nelson also spoke, with a translator, about how we should not lay aside the ´´weighter matters´´ of the gospel. (And I recognized the scripture she was talking about before she named the reference, Matthew 23:23). And Elder Nelson gave his entire talk in perfect spanish, (though heavily accented). And he talked about how we need to keep the commandments, as well as pray daily. It was a pretty good devotional. 

Also, wednesday morning we had to walk for more than an hour to get to a Western union so that Elder A could take out money his parents had sent, so we were dead after lunch. 

And Saturday, we went to another Ward to help with a Capilla Abierta, (is it Open Chapel in English? I honestly have no idea what we would call it) We were explaining brifely the various points of the first lesson, the Restoration. After a little bit in though, they skipped the groups over us because it was taking too long. But only like 18 investigators came anyway, so...

And our bus ride back to our area was like an hour, because we accidentally took the bus that goes alllllll throughhhhhh the cityyyyyyy. And then Elder Arts bought ice cream when we finally got back, they have banana ice cream here guys, its great. 

And Sunday, was ok, we managed to bring E to church again, and his younger brother M came too, they both liked it, and more and more less active youth are coming back, which is great. No one is getting baptized this transfer though, all of our hopefuls either couldn´t make itto church or had other problems that are keeping them from getting baptized. 

As for transfers, I still am not sure if I am going to stay here another month and a half or if I´m gonna get transferred next week. Either way, transfers are gonna be weird next week because that Monday is Labor day here, so like NOBODY works, there won´t be much taxis even. So I don´t know how transfers are gonna work, or if I am gonna be able to write that day, but we´ll see. 

Anyway, I love you all and I hope that everything is going great for you guys! 

Love

Elder Blaylock 

"Elder A, a little lost Dutchman in Argentina" ;)

Brock - April 24

More hard work, but finally some progess. This week, after changing our focus area and knocking at doors, to use a Brazillian saying, "até o pó (until the dust, i.e. until we die of figurative exhaustion)", we managed to bring about a dozen people to church. We were fairly pleased with that, not to mention that many of our investigators enjoyed church a lot.

But then judgement came.

My companion and I have been somewhat persecuted by a woman from the Christian Congregation of Brazil the past week, because unfortunately some of our new investigators live close (some exceedingly close) to this woman. Exasperated, my companion finally made a deal with this woman--if she came to our church, he (meaning us, implicitly) would visit her´s. 

And she fulfilled her end of the deal. 

Now, we´re not talking about simply a "nice church", one that, while not possessed of the restored fulness of the gospel, still has many truths; we are talking about the screaming, kneeling, "hallelujah amen glory", women wearing veils, Bible-thumping churches.

It was an hour and a half meeting that was personally hard to witness. One I am not likely to repeat. But, thankfully, it has ended, and now lives on simply as an amusing anecdote. 

But yeah, other than fairly uneventful week. I´ve been getting sick more. Not sick sick, but more headaches and stomachaches. It´s probably stress or anxiety, for obvious reasons.

Hope everyone´s doing fine. Love you all.

Elder Blaylock

Our area:

Homemade tortillas and tacos:

Parker - April 17

Hey Everybody!

This week was fairly interesting, some of the highlights include giving away all of our Easter Cards about Prince of Peace, finally bringing a certain investigator to Church, Interesting revelation about the Sacrament.

So yeah, we finally brought this one investigator, E to church, he lives about one block away, so we´ve been passing by like every sunday to see if we can catch him awake, and this week, we did! and another miracle: this week, we actually had a fair number of youth at church too! so he started to make friends. 

Also, to answer questions about the photo I sent to mom, we´ve been digging a hole for a septic tank for the Bishop´s house for the past couple of weeks, and last thursday, I managed to toughen up and make the climb down there. It was interesting. 

And yeah, returning to missionary stuff, I made an interesting connection about the Sacrament this week. As we all know, the bread represents tthe Body of Christ, or in other words, his Resurrection, and the water represents the Blood of Christ, or in other words, his Atonement. The Resurrection saves us all from our fallen condition, our pains, aches, and temporal worries, the Atonement saves faithful members from our sins. Both are very important, but which one do we take first? The bread, meaning that the fact that not only did Christ suffer for all of our pains in addition to our sins, but really that is a principal and crucial part of it, it is just as important, and to me it shows that before we receive the remission of our sins, God want us all to be ok first.

I don´t knowif what I said made sense to you guys, but I do know that it´s really important, I hope all of you had a great Easter, and I cannot wait to talk to you guys on Mother´s day

love,

Elder Blaylock

Brock - April 17

Well this was a week that flew by. It seems like yesterday that I was writing emails to you guys. This week, we worked for a little bit in our old focus area, but it wasn´t working all that well. We ended up choosing a new focus area on Saturday. On Thursday we had our Multi-Zone conference. It was fairly uneventful, but we did have some changes made to the mission. The zone and district structure will change (apparently we´ve been doing it wrong this whole time), as will the roles of zone and district leaders. The "mini-missionary" curto prazo missionaries are no longer allowed, which will probably mean that a few areas will close temporarily, due to a decrease in missionaries here. After the multi-zone, we had the zone leaders in our area to do baptismal interviews, which is about when I started to get violently sick. I was throwing up and shaking and with a bad headache, so my companion and the zone leaders managed to get a hold of a member and they took me to the hospital. This was probably an overreaction, but they gave me some sort of thing into my vein and made me do that test where you close your eyes and keep still and you go into the machine? You know? Because of that we left the hospital at like midnight. It was probably just food poisoning (the hospital told us that the test results were "normal"). We also had stake conference this Sunday. There was a Seventy here that gave a good talk, though. He talked about a lot of things, but one of the things he touched on was that we shouldn´t get too mad when young children aren´t that reverent because they don´t really know that much. He made his point by saying "Let´s all stop and listen for a minute; do you hear the little voices? That´s them." It was pretty funny. He also talked about good, better, and best choices. Overall, somewhat exhausting week. But, I´m ready for another. And another. And a few after that. But after that probably need a break. ;)

Love you guys

Elder Blaylock

Parker - April 10

Hey everybody! 

Wow, time really is flying, we´re already halfway through this transfer. 

This week was pretty ok, we had President´s Conference on Thursday, went pretty well. After the conference, we went to the restaurant that we always go to after conferences, and unfortunatley, me and the Zone leader, Elder A, (who´s pretty cool, we´re good friends, we´re always together when we do exhanges with the zone leaders) sat at the end of the big table where we were, and we were the last people to be served, it took a while, to the point where I started to quote that scripture from Nephi ´´And the first shall be last and the last shall be first´´ saying that someday we´d get our recompense. And then our food arrived. The food here is pretty good, I´ve been able to eat pretty much everything that I´ve been served, so that´s cool. 

We´ve been working pretty hard, we found two new investigators on Friday and also had a family home evening with investigators as well. It went pretty good, we´re making progress. The only problem is that we had a big fat zero in Church again. Sigh. But that´s ok, we´re still making good progress, we´re pretty sure that one of our investigators, Isabel, is finally going to be baptized this month. She´s wanted to for a long time, but she hasn´t been able to because she´s married to another man that she´s not divorced to, and living with a different man, and has been living with him for the past like 40 years, so getting separated wasn´t really an option for them, as they have a life together. But now it looks like her divorce is finally gonna go through, and her ´´boyfriend´´ (I hesitate to use the term boyfriend because they´re like 60 years old or so) says that he´ll marry her so that she can get divorced. 

Other than that, we´re doing pretty good. Now that transfers are coming up again, I don´t know what to think, it´s pretty 50/50 that I´ll stay or go. If I stay, then I´m definitely leaving the next transfer, and then the transfer after that, I´ll probably train, if I  leave, I think I´ll go to the province of Santiago del Estero, and the transfer after train. But I don´t know anything yet. I´m just shooting in the dark. 

Hope all of you are doing great, congratulations Jameson and Arianne on graduating! Hope you guys enjoy Minnesota.

Love,

Elder Blaylock

Brock - April 10

This week we worked a lot. We were all over the place trying to find new investigators. We managed to find a fair amount, and we brought four people to church. We weren´t able to baptize anyone this week, though. Man, we have also had to rely on the tender mercies of other people several times this week. One day we had to eat at a member´s restaurant for free because I needed the money we had gotten for lunch to get to our district meeting. On Sunday, our lunch fell through, and we were so close (so close) to buying something to eat when of the counsellors passed by asking where we were headed. But yeah. 

Don´t have so much to talk about this week. I´m doing well. Still managing to climb those hills, somehow. I think we missionaries get some sort of extra strength/endurance so that we can continue our work. I´m glad to have a companion that knows how to work, as well. I´ve been doing a lot of the work alone for the past few transfers because I´ve had "younger" companions that were still learning the ropes. But Elder C has already been a zone leader, so he knows what he´s doing. That way we are able to balance the work load a little better.

How´s it going with everyone? Congratulations to Jameson & Arianne for graduating! Or, to finally use the phrase I´ve been saving for the right moment, the long-awaited situation to say "con-graduations" has arrived! That is all. 

Anyway. Love you guys. Hope Grandpa´s been healing up quickly. 

Elder Blaylock

Parker - April 3

Hey everybody!

My week went great, mostly due to General Conference, it was so awsome. And, since like 95% of our zone are gringos, we got to watch it in english! I was so excited when I found that out, hearing the voice of the prophets in their natural language is truly a blessing. I would also like to remind you guys that now you guys oew me 32 more pieces of candy for all of the great notes I took during this conference ;D

Other than the conference, we had a pretty good family home evening with some investigators of ours, now we´ve really gained their trust. And we see that they want to get baptized...just not in our church, or rather, our ward. Because they don´t see the people as united, as disciples of Christ. I would like to urge all of you to try and be more dilligent disciples of Christ, because people notice when you are, and also when you aren´t. 

Also, are you guys participating in the Easter Initiative? The Prince of Peace I believe its called in English. The video that starts it off is super de diez (which means really, really good in spanish). I can´t help but feel a huge spiritual bonfire strike me as I watch it and it gets to the point where it says ´´Él es Jesucristo, Rey de Reyes, Señor de Señores, Príncipe de Paz.´´ 

Espero que todos de ustedes puedan desarrollar Sus atributos, para que haya más paz en el mundo, yo sé que como vivimos las enseñanzas que hemos recibido estos últimos días nos van a traer las cosas que necesitamos en esta vida. Yo sé que vive mi Señor. Y sé que ël ama a todos sus hijos.

Con mucho amor,

Elder Blaylock

PS Sorry about the spanish, I couldn´t help it. :)

Brock - April 3

What a privilege it is to watch and participate in General Conference every six months. Even arriving late to the first session and not being permitted to watch the very late Priesthood session, I feel so edified. To me, one of the biggest common themes was our "daily worship habits". The lines upon lines that build our faith, our foundation. We need to pray continually, read the scriptures (particularly the Book of Mormon) every day, and attend church meetings. These simple acts of faith, like regular physical exercise or three square meals a day, will help us and give us strength for when the inevitable hard times come in. When we are doing these things, we can truly say, "I can do everything now!"

We´ve had a great week in Jandira. It´s nice to be back here in the capital. My companion´s name is Elder C, and he is from Colombia. It´s cool to have a Hispanic companion again. Hispanics are cool. We also were able to baptize someone after the last session, a lady named C that Elder C was teaching last transfer. 

Yep. That´s about all I got. Oh yeah, so I left for the transfer with my new wheels---four of them. However, I arrived from Tatuí in Jandira (a trip that took the whole day) with only one wheel. That´s right, my "good idea" to switch the wheels made the problem worse and subsequently three out of four wheels are now wandering about the São Paulo north region. I also attempted to throw out some dead weight, and then was obliged to throw out some white shirts and garments that had gotten mold due to a bad washing machine. And, I ate the very last spoonful of my peanut butter this week. Fun thought I remembered from a couple weeks ago---I saw a Harley Davidson-type motorcycle, the kind with the sidebags. Inside these sidebags were two dogs, one on each side, and they were both having the time of their lives. So funny. 

Anyway, love you guys. Can´t wait for next week.

Elder Blaylock