To: Allred, Kevin
Subject: Wow! It´s almost Christmas!
Hello everyone!
I think one of the best Christmas presents I´m going to get is a real P-day - the Wednesday after Christmas. Our P-days have been occupied with rehersals for our Christmas conference. Elder Cruz is in the theatrical performance. I´m going to be singing in the choir, singing and playing violin in a quartet, and playing violin in another song. Hopefully in works out all right. I´m using the violin of some member that lives somewhere in the mission. One of the other missionaries brings it to the practice every week. I haven´t really got to practice the violin parts well because the first two weeks I didn´t have a shoulder rest and today the A string broke. Hopefully I can find another one before next week.
Anyway, that´s been eating up all our time on P-days. Today we left the house at 6:30am, took a bus, a train, and then another bus. Then we walked through the rain to the stake center where the performance will be. We just got back to St. Andre and really don´t have any P-day left. It´s a problem because tomorrow we have interviews with President Teixeira and this transfer he´s coming to our houses to do the interviews and inspect our house. We haven´t had a single P-day to clean since my second week in the mission field.
The work here is great. We don´t have any firm investigators right now, but we´re working hard. Some days we walk all day long, covering pretty much our entire area, and aren´t able to teach a single person - all our appointments fall through and no one will let us into their home. Then other days we are able to teach 5 lessons and get 3-4 new investigators (for some funny reason, these days are a little less common). Last Sunday morning before church, Elder Cruz and I were literally running as fast as we could from house to house to pick up our investigators to bring to church because I have to be there on time to play the opening hymn. We were only able to get one person to sacrament meeting - Wennington. He´s going to get baptized, but first he needs to stop smoking and drinking coffee. He´s about 25. He started tallying the prayers he says on a paper he put on the wall because he can never remember whether or not he said his prayers that day.
The assistants to the president in our mission are amazing. I heard in a period of 4 months they baptized over 80 people. They teach about 50-80 lessons a week. My companion asked them how they teach so many lessons. (Preach My Gospel says that a lesson is when you start with a prayer, teach a principle of the gospel, and end with a prayer). They said that they teach lessons right there on the streets. They do a street contact and tell the person they have a quick message. Then they ask permission to say a quick prayer. So they pray with the person and teach him right there on the street. Then they set up an appointment to teach that person in his house. Therefore, they´ve already taught a lesson in about 5 minutes, and they have a new investigator.
Elder Cruz and I decided to try this. Last week we taught one lady in a store and another man on the sidewalk. The man was painting a gate and it turns out he doesn´t live in St. André, but we have a return appoint to teach the lady, who is actually the owner of the shop where we taught her.
Sometimes I forget which language I´m speaking, especially because I teach English class twice a week with people that can converse in English fairly well. Then afterwards it´s hard to switch back to Portuguese. One morning last week, I woke up and started talking with Elder Cruz in English, just out of habit. I could see that he didn´t understand me, but I didn´t realize until about a minute later that it was because I was speaking English. Then other times, my sentences will be half English and half Portuguese.
Love, Elder Allred
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