Week Fifty

São João was this week. Its a big holiday here in the North East. Bigger than Carnaval. On Thursday the road was filled with fires, and children lighting off bombs and fireworks. There are these little bomb fire works that the kids use here. Its a little roll that you light and throw and it just explodes and makes a huge noise. Pretty entertaining. I saw 2 kids throwing them at each other in a park, and for a while too. It was crazy. They were having a bomb fight. You could easily lose a hand with one of those things. It was pretty sick though. But Thursday was basically impossible to work after like 4/5 hours so we went to a members house and visited a recent convert. But São João was pretty cool. I probably will only see it once because of the timing I came on the mission.

Other than that this week was pretty rough. Our two investigators that were making the most progress and had a baptismal date for this week fell through Saturday night. They weren't able to go to church because of a family event. So that was hard. And no one really progressed this week and it looks like we are going to have to cut Maria and Edson. It's getting hard to continue working here. Without help from the members it's entirely coming from our own effort. And this week there were only 26 people at church including us and someone from the district. It's getting pretty tense I'm not going to lie. I'm feeling pretty lost honestly right now. I don't know what else to do anymore here. I have been turning to Preach my Gospel for a lot of help but it's difficult to apply the principles perfectly in the area. 

We got expelled from a house in the middle of a lesson by a JW this week. We were in the garage talking with the mom and daughter, when from nowhere the oldest son came out from the house and just started to say a mountain of hipocritical things. He accused us of trying to convert his family (partially true), but also that he hates missionary work and thinks it's wrong (Jehovas Witness does the same thing we do...) but yeah I wanted to call him out but I let it go.

Also after I said the opening prayer of the lesson, The mom told me the prayer was good, but I erred on one thing... She asked me what is the true name of God. I said Elohim. She said no, Jehova. She said I was supposed to pray to Jehova in the name of Jesus Christ. I just thought to myself... let it go... just let it go. And I was just like yeah cool.... this lesson will be rough.. then we were expelled 5 minutes after. 

Also we are going to be changing our house here soon. The secretary was able to fix the contract,

So yeah that was this week...

Elder Batten

(The moto taxi was an emergency, we missed the bus and had to get back to the station quickly to return to the area. haha.)