5/21/12 Email from São Mateus

I am doing great, things are going well here.  Our investigators are doing well, they have some worries but we are working with them about these.

We didn't have any baptisms this week, we didn't have any marked for this week.  We will probably be baptizing three people this week.  They are having their interviews tomorrow.

This week we had a motorcycle show in our area and we went there for a few minutes, that was pretty fun. We saw some stunt riders, but they weren't nearly as good as the stunt riders that Dad and I saw before.  We also saw a bunch of beautiful motorcycles.  I took some pictures and I wanted to send you the pictures this week, but my adaptor is broken, I have to get a new one.

I have no idea what my best experience this week was, because well we had some really good experiences while we were teaching this week.  I guess that just teaching this week was my best experience.
I will be staying here for the next transfer and I will also be staying with my companion.  That is the first time that I have stayed with a companion since my trainer Elder Turley.
Miss you and love you.

Elder McBarron

5/14/12 Email from São Mateus

It was good to talk with you all yesterday.  I am sending you a picture of the monkeys and of an owl. I am trying to get a picture of the parrots still for Megan.  Sounds like she is having a lot of fun with the Daffodil Princess stuff.  I wish that I could be there to see it, but i am here doing the Lord´s work.  We have to be willing to endure to the end, and if we do not endure to the end with patience and with a good attitude we will not receive the same blessings that the Lord is saving for us.

Sounds like you are busy getting the yard ready for summer.  I kind of miss working in the yard, even though I hated it, I miss the manual labor.

[Which lessons did you get to teach this week?]  We are teaching a lot of the first lesson, we are finding a lot of new people and it is good to teach that lesson a lot so that well you can remember all of the parts of it.  Really what we are usually doing is teaching what the people need, which means sometimes we teach part of one lesson and then part of another.  We don't really teach a full lesson all of the time.

[What was the best part of your week.] The best part of my week would have had to be yesterday being able to talk with you all. The other parts of the week we ran into some things that weren't so great, because 8 out of our 14 baptism dates that we had marked fell through. We have planned really high goals for this week and we will be working our hardest to complete our goals this week.

Miss you all and love ya.

 

Elder McBarron

 

 

5/8/12 Email fromn São Mateus

[What kind of week did you have? Don't you have a baptism this week? You have pictures of the new area?] 

This week was a good week, we marked 8 more baptisms, all of our baptisms are marked for the 19th and the 26th, we don't have any before then. This week I could see the adversary tries to stop the work of the Lord, he was working hard this week with our investigators.  He is not liking what we are doing here in our area, we are working like mad men.  We are teaching a lot of people and we are receiving references like crazy from the members.

I have no idea how many miles we walk each day but it is a lot.  I am really liking the area, me and my companion are trying to get bikes from our mission president for our area because it is so huge and our investigators do not live near each other.  We will see how that goes. miss ya dad

[We are so excited to talk to you next Sunday! Do you get to Skype again? About what time do you think you will be able to call or do we call you this time.]

This Sunday I will be able to Skype, I don't know exactly what time, it will probably be anywhere from 10:00 your time to 1:00 your time that I could be able to start talking depending on if we can get a hold of more than one computer.  We already have one computer, but my companion is marked to start talking first with his family because their time zone is closer to here.  I will sent an email during the week with a more concrete time frame if we can get that second computer.

 

I am having a better time with everything here in my new area with my new companion and everything.  We have 12 dates for baptism marked and we are planning on marking more.  We are working our butts off, every day we get home and are ready for bed which a nice feeling.

 

I have photos of my new area and I was going to send them today but I forgot my camera in the apartment. Miss ya and love ya!

Elder McBarron

4/30/12 Email from São Mateus

My week was pretty good, it went by really fast. we are having fun here.  Me and my companion are trying to have high goals so that we are always working hard and we almost reached our goals this week. We now have 4 people set up to be baptized on May 19th, they are the mom and the kids in a family, it is hard for us to find the dad at home.  We are trying to work with all of the other references that we received, but it is kind of hard because our area is really big and we are trying to visit everyone that we can.  We are receiving a lot of references and everyone that we have received so far are progressing pretty well.  We have not gotten a reference that we have not added to our teaching pool, there has not been one that we have felt like the members need to accompany them a little more.

Oh, I have 2 other roomies, Elder Stewart from Spokane, WA and Elder G. Rocha who is from Rio De Janiero.

We met a lot of people that rejected us yesterday. I was trying to talk with a lady and she said that she didn't like us and our religion and told us to leave. Oh, I also talked with an American yesterday and I had a hard time talking in English. But it was pretty cool as he said that he has talked with the missionaries before and said that he will ask them about their message when he gets back to the States.

Last p-day we played a lot of card games and wrote letters and just rested.  Today we are probably going to play volley ball with some members.

We had a special visitor in our mission this week, we got to hear from Elder Quintin L Cook, that was pretty cool and really a special experience.

In 2 weeks I will be talking with you all. We got to have a service project, the first one in a long time and we were cleaning up someone's yard. It was good and it felt really good to do some hard work with my hands and forearms.  Well, I don't really have much else to say.  Miss ya

Elder McBarron