Week 5

I had a lot of one and only type experiences this week. First of all today I was a witness at a sealing. It was a friend of Elder Ramos' from His home in Manous. In Brazil you half to be married civily first and sealed later. So his friend had been married in manous but was getting sealed in the temple in São Paulo. Manous doesn't have a temple yet, I think that it has one announced though. Elder Ramos got permission from the president to go to the sealing. We were the only other people other than the sealer there. We did a session in the temple first where the bride got her endowment and then we went to the sealing room and they got married. We then took pictures out side the temple and the groom took us out to lunch. His name was Gabreil and hers was Andre or something that sounds like it. It was interesting to see a sealing and more interesting for it to be with so few people. The sealer was great. He gave Gabreil a talk on chivalry and made him promise to be chivalrous and had him lead his bride by hand to her side of the alter then go back around kneel himself. I understood the sealer very well, he was old and talked slow.

Another once and only thing that happened to us was that when we were at a members apartment trying to get him to go with us to a lesson we were having with a young woman and needed another male present, he said he could he just needed to do something and he would be back in 5 minutes. His roommate 10 minutes later had to leave to go to work so we were alone in there apartment for a little, after another 10 minutes we decided that we couldn't wait and it wasn't good for us to be in there apartment alone so we went to leave, but the gate to the stairs was locked and all of there neighbors on that floor were gone. So we were stranded on the 7th floor of this apartment building for 30 minutes more. We ended up not making it to that lesson.

Also I for the first time had rootbeer in brazil. It was great terribly flat but great. The member had an old companion of his from the us come visit and had given him a bunch of rootbeer extract. I loved the rootbeer. He even gave me one of the bottles of rootbeer extract. So yesterday we went to buy some carbonated water and some sugar to make the rootbeer. But they didn't have any carbonated water. So I thought I would improvise and instead i found the weakest tasting mineral water they had there and planed to just overwhelm the flavor with sugar and rootbeer. I soon found out that putting straight sugar into mineral water is like putting a mentos in diet coke. I poured the sugar in and the 1.5 liter bottle went up like old faithful. So i came to find out that mineral water will lose all of its fizz if you concentrate it with sugar. So I ended up having almost completely flat rootbeer again. However i am still happy that i have rootbeer at all. Also it was funny that when we read the ingredients we found that there is alcohol ( I for the life of me can not remember how to spell that) in it. I explained to elder Ramos that it was used to dissolve the oils in the water but he had wanted to make sure it was ok so he called up the zone leader to make sure, now every american in the zone knows that I have rootbeer and wants my rootbeer. With my second bottle of mineral water i tried only putting in half as much sugar so i might have some fizz left in it when i drank it, but it tasted terrible, so i put in the rest of the sugar and it is just as flat as he first. I got a drop of extract on my finger so i licked it off. It was the most powerful bitter flavor I have ever tasted before.

But as to the work it didn't go too well this last week. We had one day with only one lesson and all week we were coming to empty houses. We had our worst week this week in every subject except street contacts but we didn't really have that good a week with them either, just not our worst. We found a couple of new investigators, One is a 14 year old girl, she is the one that we were trying to get someone to come with us to teach. However yesterday was very a very good day. We got a call from an old investigator who had gone out of town for 2 weeks and was back in town and wanted a lesson right then, so we went, It is only the second time we have given a lesson befor 11 in the morning, the other was also him, we really need to work on getting out and working before lunch, we almost never do. He was very courious, we had just been talking about authority, centered around the apostles, when he asked how John the Baptist had authority to baptize. I had to explain it because elder Ramos has never read the Old Testament. He wanted to know all about the 12 tribes why levi had the priesthood who was Moses and who was Abraham and when they were born. It was great but it was also a huge tangent from the lesson that elder Ramos chided me about, but if the guy was asking I just had to answer.

I have to go, love you all, Tell Blake congratulations on being alternate to state.

Elder Reed Risenmay