One earring at at time

So this past week the church put on a world-wide broadcast for all the missionaries, it was about "Teaching Repentance and Baptizing Converts". Sister Oscarson, Elder Bednar, and Elder Oaks were a few of the speakers present. It was really neat! Also kind of hard to understand with the Brazilian-Portuguese translation going on but anything out of the ordinary routine is always a welcome blessing. So yes, now the big mission push is to baptize converts (duh), but also focus more on teaching repentance.

This past week I was in the house for a few days because we had divisions on Friday, but Sister Dorgan, the sister I was on divisions with, had a sprained toe and so we just sat in her room at the Sister Training Leader's house and chatted all night (I also painted my toes) while Sister Rasmussen went out and worked in their area with our other Sister Leader, Sister Haycock. Divisions usually run for 24 hours, lunch to lunch, and so on Saturday morning Sister Dorgan decided she wanted to try and venture out on her toe. However, we got about halfway down the hill and she decided it wasn't worth the pain to walk to her area, so we just decided to do some contacting outside her apartment.

Now, I love contacting, but at noon it's a little..... hot, and not fun. So we made it fun! I challenged her to see if we could each get an earring from a contact before lunch. She accepted the challenge and we ventured out.... looking for men with earrings.

Our first contact actually contacted us. His name was Marcio and he's less active. After reviewing "Our body is a temple..." in a three minute street contact and asking for his earring, his response was, "Oh don't worry Sisters, I wear this earring because it's so small you can't even really tell!" Oh brother.

Our next contact really, truly thought about taking his earring out, we were so close! His name was Antonio and his response was, "Deixa me pensar (let me think about it), come by barber shop next week...". We'll for sure be stopping by.

Next, we contacted a young man named Disdefano, who was actually really cool! We have a follow up appointment with him tonight to teach the first lesson. When we explained our bodies house the spirit of God and so we can't have piercings, and then asked him to take out his earrings, his response was, "Well, my mom doesn't like them anyway." Score! However, the earrings were a gift from his girlfriend and so he wouldn't let us keep them. Darn. 

Loosing fire but never the faith, we stopped to talk to a taxi driver with an earring out washing his car. His name was Joao, and..... success! His earring went to Sister Dorgan. I ran into him again this morning actually, his earring is still out. #doingwork

One earring down and one to go with only seconds left on the clock, we contacted a teenage boy named Valdo, who gave up his earring, and that one went to my earring collection. 

Sister Dorgan and Sister Hanzel, cleaning up Praia one earring at a time. 

One of our earring victors

After the divisions we went home to clean up really quick for our investigator Viviano's baptism. Funny twist to the afternoon though, we didn't think Viviano was going to show up to his baptism and a different investigator of ours, Zinadine (our recent convert Landa's son) showed up to be baptized a week early. The good news is that Viviano had just walked to the church early without us which is why he wasn't at home when we went to pick him up, so all was good there. And then miraculously, our District Leader had stopped by to watch the baptisms and Sister Rasmussen happened to have a blank baptism form in her bag and so we were able to interview Zineadine and baptism him yesterday instead of this week. So we had a goal for one baptism last week but ended up with two. Palmarejo, land of miracles. Also, I would like you to look at the picture of Landa I sent home for her baptism and then look at her in the picture with her son.... doesn't she just glow now?

Well! That's all for now folks, have a great week!
Sister Hanzel

Local children love to get hand sanitizer from the missionaries