WEEK 33: February 10, 2020

Lunch at Zone Conference/Mission Tour with Sister Lucelia Gonçalves, the mission mom

Well another week here in Vacaria!  This week it rained and rained and rained!! 

This week we had a “Mission tour”  where a general authority comes to tour our mission and talks to all the missionaries and gives us a little bit of encouragement!  Elder Costa (from Argentina) of the 70 visited this week, he gave an awesome talk about how we can value the scriptures by putting our name in place of the scripture characters. It was super cool, even though the entire thing was in Spanish, and I didn't understand everything haha. 

This week we had a little miracle.  We've been working really hard knocking doors, asking for references, and searching for new investigators every where we can, and it's been frustrating because it seems like nothing we do leads to baptisms or even to people coming to church.  After weeks and weeks of doing the same things, last week we started working specifically with the youth of our ward, and encouraged them to invite their less-active friends, and non-member friends to go to church.  And this Sunday, one young girl in our ward brought a less active friend to church, who brought a friend also, and after the reunion, the non-member friend came up to us and told us she wants to be baptized!  WE responded “of course!” and set the date for next Saturday!  The only thing is, she lives in another city that doesn't have the church, so she drives an hour to our ward every week.  So we've had to teach here through video calling, which is pretty cool haha.  Every time we have a lesson scheduled with her we go to the internet cafe and call her, it's getting the job done! 

Didn't take any pictures this week, but next week I'll make sure to take some!  (Luckily Mom found some pictures that Andrew’s mission mom posted on Facebook!)

Thanks for reading!

-Elder Andrew Hammond

All the missionaries in our Zone with Elder Costa

Singing Happy Birthday to President Gonçalves

They're are so sweet to each other!

"Happy birthday Congratulations 61 years..." I can't read the rest of the signs.

From our conversation:

• After the zone conference/Mission tour, Elder Costa asked to interview just Andrew and his companion.  We don’t know what that means and neither did Andrew.
• The girl that they are teaching with video calling is the daughter of a less-active couple.  She is 12 years old.  Her cousin is the young woman who brought her to church.  I pray that she will have the support to continue coming to church after these Elders leave the area.  Maybe her parents will come to the baptism and start coming too!