Hello folks!

We survived the first week of Interviews!!!! I never imagined how draining it would be to be giving 3-hour trainings twice a day! We´d been working hard on making it turn out well, even staying up a little to practice. How it´s been working is this: each zone is individually trained on the stuff President wants us to pass on. While we´re training, President takes each one and interviews for about 15-20 minutes, and there´s about 14 missionaries per zone. The hard part is timing everything so that when President gets done with a zone, we finish the training. This week I get to go to the farthest area in the mission - a small branch - where´s there´s pretty much nothing but jungle. SUH-WEET!

With balancing between training the mission and taking care of our area, this week was a little stressful. One of the two baptisms we had planned fell through, but we´re hoping she´ll be ready by the end of the month. Most days because of on-the-spot errands or meetings that we have, our study time is shot. It´s incredible how a little time in the scriptures a day can affect a lot. 

But it was all worth it after we had a BAPTISM!!! It was a complete fall-from-the-sky kind of investigator. She made contact with the Sisters in front of the Temple, already knew a little about the church, and easily accepted baptism and the Restoration! I think she even marked her own baptismal date hahaha. We had some good support from the ward, and yesterday she got confirmed. We´re gonna try to take her to the temple this week to get her started on her family history work. 

My first Brazilian Easter Egg

We also have another family that´s got great potential. Fabricia is a single-mom with three children, all of them with different fathers. So she´s been looking for something that is really there to help her family. She lives a little far from the church, especially with having an infant, so the members were great to help give her a ride. She felt a little hesitant in bringing her children, thinking that they´d be really roudy. But the best part was that she told us that on the way home, her ^roudy^ kids were talking about the Savior and all that they learned in Primary. She even asked us if they had this everyday! Her and her oldest (8 years old) are marked for the 25th to be baptized. 

Our burgers we made this week! 

Ever since General Conference, we´ve been feeling the work getting more challenging, even in the office. Remember that part in Andy Griffith when Barney Fife is Sheriff for the day and everything ends up going wrong - car accident, broken water pipes, etc - remember? It seems like everyday has its own set of broken water pipes between the whole mission. It´s a mental game for sure to keep things cool in the area, the office, the mission, and in your own head. 

But I´m so grateful that this church is true! And it is!

Have a great week!

Love Elder Nissinen