WEEK 18: October 28, 2019 (4 months)

Come Follow ME/HIM

Another week in the books!
This week was very interesting!  Started off very sad on Monday night when my favorite investigators called and said they decided to make a life change and buy a yacht and move to the sea, super cool but a sad loss to our already tiny teaching pool! :(  We said goodbye to them on Monday, and helped them organize things, and on Wednesday they left for Floripa to buy a yacht! 

On Tuesday was another sad day, it was a holiday here, so we had all 5 of our teaching appointments fall through, and we were left with nothing to do, so we did a service project and helped a ward member trim the leaves of his palm tree! (pictured below)!

The next day was extremely interesting!  We were walking to an appointment when one of our investigators called us! (this is really really rare occurrence here)  but he called urgently and said he needed our help with something.  We arrived and he said that he had a demon inside of him because he was having really negative thoughts and actions apparently, so we gave him a blessing and “cast out” the evil spirit that was within him!  4th time doing this on my mission and it's starting to feel a little too normal haha.

Most expensive jeans in Vacaria!

The rest of the week continued normal, knocking on tons of doors and talking to tons of people, and very few people accepting us!  Ended the week on Saturday with buying a pair of jeans... I was paying for them when the worker said I needed to swipe my card again because it wasn’t accepting my card, and repeated this process 4 times, we then left without the jeans and with a negative attitude towards that store!  We went to another store and bought jeans.  I then talked to my parents and found out that my card was charged every single time I used my card, my companion likes to joke and say I now have the most expensive pair of jeans in the city haha.  Still trying to work that out with the store owner... I don’t know what’s worse, the store owner that asked me to swipe my card 4 times or the dumb American who swiped his card 4 times haha.  Overall, I think the fastest week of my mission until now!  Hoping things will speed up now that I’m done with my 12 week training!

Tchaó until next week!
Elder Hammond

Elder Merino relaxing

With the branch executive secretary

Chimarao  (Mate') anyone?  They drink it without any sweetener there.  Andrew likes it!

From our conversation:

• He sprayed the fleas and found several dead ones under his bed.  He also bought a plastic mattress cover that he’ll bring with him in all his apartments.  He seems to have finally gotten rid of his buggy bed mates.
• His stomach has been upset and a ward mom (Irma Claudi?) counseled him to stop drinking the milk and maybe try soy milk.  She also said that most Brazilians take a couple of pills two weeks in a row once a year to kill any parasites they might have picked up.  She gave some to him and he took one last week and will take another this week.  Gross, but THANK YOU, Sister Claudi!!
• They had a super fun FHE (family home evening) with a member family.  They served this really yummy cake that was a completely new flavor for him.  He maybe didn’t understand enough to learn what it was exactly made from, but it was good enough to mention.
• Today he made sweet potato fries and got some oil burns to prove it.  He claims the Brazilian sweet potatoes are better than American sweet potatoes.  I think he has forgotten.