This week has flown by! It was a great week! Most importantly.....we had our first baptism yesterday!!! Sister Fortes and her last companion have been teaching her for a while but she came to church for the first time last Sunday and felt the spirit so strongly and wanted to be baptized. She was baptized after church yesterday! Her name is Maria and she is such a sweetheart. She was crying the whole time yesterday and kept saying over and over how happy she was and how pure she felt. She told us over and over how her life has been so much better since she met the missionaries. It was such a great day! Me, Sister Fortes, and the other two sisters in the area sang How Great Thou Art at her baptism. I love singing and music in Portuguese because it’s the one thing that is the same as in the United States!
Some of the days this week have been really hard. It’s been hard for me to keep a good attitude sometimes when I always feel so out of the loop and never know what the heck is going on. And sometimes I don’t think that is just because I don’t know the language. But all that being said I have felt it over and over again this week that Brazil is exactly where I need to be right now. I have grown more in these past 2 weeks I think than I did in my whole transfer in WA. It’s because things haven’t come very easy and I have to rely on the Lord. And now I know I need to do that ALL the time not just when things are hard. I also know that there is a reason why I have to learn a language. I’m learning better how to study and focus and just how to work hard for something that I want to be good at. I was getting impatient with myself (for some reason I keep thinking I need to be fluent with the language by now, don’t ask me why) but then I just realized that I wasn’t working as hard as I could. So I’ve started to try to talk just Portuguese whenever possible no matter how long it takes me to say it and I spend extra time going through these notecards learning new words. That’s helped a lot. And the most motivating thing ever is going to lessons and not being able to say everything I want to say. That always makes me want to work that much harder.
This week we got 10 new investigators! One of them is 20 years old and she just had a baby. Her babies name is Camilla and she is the most beautiful baby ever!! She is only 2 weeks old. Natalia is the mom’s name, and she seems really interested in the church. I still can’t believe how interested everyone is in learned about Jesus. They see the name on our name tags and want to talk about our religion. It’s so crazy! We are teaching all women. In church it’s mostly moms and their children and then like 5 men there.
I put my pictures of snow in my bag this week and showed some of the people we teach. They loved it!!!! No one has ever seen snow here before and they all thought it was the most beautiful thing they have ever seen. Yesterday in church I sat by a 12 year old girl name Cecilia. She asked about my whole life! She thought all of our family’s names were so funny. She especially laughed at Brice and Carter and she loved the name Jessica. I told her that her and carter should get married and she thought that was funny too :) She thinks Carter looks a lot older than 11.
I can’t believe I forgot this in my last letter! My area is Boa Vista!!! I’m not sure exactly how far away it is from Recife because we took the bus here. But it was like a 3 hour bus ride and we had to switch buses twice. It’s one of the coldest areas in the mission. and it’s still freaking hot as heck!!!! I have tan lines already! If you want to send any package or and mail you send it all to the mission office.
Sister Malyssa Bedke
Brazil Recife Mission
Rua Das Ninfas 30
Boa Vista-Recife-PE
50070-050
Brazil
If you ever do send anything I’d like those granola bars that I like and then gum. They don’t have any of that here.
I think that’s it for the week! I don’t have a picture of the church here but I’ll get one and send it next week. The churches are BEAUTIFUL here. I wish I had a picture of the one in downtown Recife. It is like 3 stories and so pretty!!! I took some kinda good pictures from this week. One of me drinking a coconut. It’s not as good as I thought it would be. It’s so cute so I thought it would be like this sweet juice stuff on the inside so I was disappointed. And then I have some of all the chocolate people have given us for Easter. I’m gonna gain 10 this week I already have accepted it. Everyone just kept giving us more chocolate! And then some from Maria’s baptism too!
Good job to Rae in track! Tell me everything that happens. Times and everything! And congrats to Christine!!! They are adorable and I love the names! I can’t wait to meet them!! :)
Love and miss you all!!!
Sister Bedke
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