Day 357

Technically I'll have exactly a year next week, but officially I've already done 50% of a mission! Some people burn a shirt at the halfway point but I think I'll just buy a pizza or something.

Our hopes of teaching more at the indian village are basically on hold (permanently)? Paula (who was baptized with her 3 daughters) talked to the chief but he doesn't want to meet with us. Like she said from the beginning, he really doesn't like anybody outside of the tribe.

We have a baptismal date marked here for this Saturday/Friday. Stake conference (one stake for all of Santa Maria; lots of people) is this week two so she'll have to be confirmed a member next week.

We checked the post office today and nothing has arrived yet, we'll check next week.

There's someone visiting here in T. Neves who lives in the United States in South Carolina. She married an American missionary who served here a few years ago. They've lived in the US for two years. When we first talked to her it was us and another American missionary. She speaks fluent English and we were both excited to speak English with someone. But in practice the impulse is just to keep speaking Portuguese, and you're also trying to formulate something reasonable in English while thinking in Portuguese! It's really weird to try to switch between languages in the same conversation. In the end the other American elder just said "have a nice day" as we were leaving, and she said "you too". And we've visited that family (her mother and brother, also members, live here in T. Neves) other times after, but we've only spoken Portuguese. Dunno, Portuguese works fine.

Her husband stayed in the States to keep working.

Way back in Itaqui on my first weeks on the mission I had the chance to talk to a recently returned missionary who was visiting the area with his parents. Since then I always thought it'd be neat one day to visit Santa Maria and find the elders on the street. But I'll plan more closely on that stuff exactly a year from now...

Until next week,

Spencer