Week 2 - Transfer 2

this message didn't go through last week hopefully this week it will. I copy and pasted the message, so if it doesn't go through this time i might have broken some secret government code or something and i am being censored. But I don't think that is likely.

It was the best of times and the worst of times. This week had so many ups and downs I don't know that I have time to explain them all. First things got real ugly. Last tuesday Elder Ramos refused to talk to me all day. And the water for half of the house didn't work so i didn't get my laundry done and we got absolutely no work done in the evening and I was very angry. I did my best to control myself and told Elder Ramos we had to talk. He refused. It took quite a bit of persuasion to get him to finally talk. I asked him what the problem was. He insulted me to my face. That made me angrier, I wasn't looking for a fight but he was about to get his face rearranged. He told me I was ignorant and rude. I did my best to keep my composure when I asked him in what way. He told me I didn't know anything of Brazil and that I was insulting people. That made me furious and I lost it for a second and yelled at him, "and who's fault is that, I have never been to Brazil before and there is no way for me to know anything about it unless you teach me." I regained my composure and tried basically pleading with him to teach me anything (because he literally was not teaching me anything. I was only following him around. He mostly ignored my questions and I was not teaching any lessons). But the insult was all that he heard and we started yelling at each other. I was so angry that I lost two hours of sleep thinking of ways to kill him, mame him, or other wise hurt him. I came to the conclusion that if things weren't better soon I would brake his left arm.

So that was the bad but then it got better, not good but better. The next day was district meeting and I talked to my zone leaders about it and told them that if something wasn't done I would kill Elder Ramos. I told him how we never talk and how I was not giving any parts of lessons and that I was very angry. Elder Wright suggested that we do a division that day and said that he would talk to Elder Ramos. It wasn't all that necessary because we were in ear shot of Elder Ramos and he got the point. So we had a division that afternoon. It was stupidly funny how desperate I was to do something. The zone leaders also are the (more or less) secretaries of the president, meaning they are the office. They have a third companion that is the financial manager of the mission. He, Elder Peterson, went with Elder Ramos and I went with the zone leaders. They had a few things to finish up in the office before we left. I literally about cried when Elder Z. Santana asked me if I wanted to help him with something. We went out and taught lessons. It was great. I actually got to do something for the first time in over a week. So that was good and the next day things were a little better with Elder Ramos. We had companionship study for the first time a week or so and we actually worked together. But that didn't last for very long. Some things are better but the majority of things are the same. So i was starting to feel down again. But then we has saturday. We spent the majority of time committing people to come to church on sunday, we had a goal to have 10 people in church and we actually worked toward it. WOW. We committed 10 people to come to church and had one baptism scheduled. We had another division for the baptismal interview and the interview went great. So everything looked good for sunday, we figured that some of our commitments for church would fall through but it still looked like it would be good.

Sunday morning came and everything fell through. We had no one at church including our baptism, we went to the house of each of them before church and only one of them was there but she didn't want to go because her husband was gone and she wanted him to go. So we ended up having a bad sunday. Other than the lunch that was great.

Then came monday. Monday was the day of our interviews with the president for the transfer. My interview was very eye opening. The president revieled to me why I was with Elder Ramos and I felt sheepish. He told me that he had not given me a great trainer for a reason. He told me that he was perfectly capable of giving me a great trainer that would tell me everything to do and be very helpfull and be a great example. But he hadnt because he wanted me to grow faster then that. He told me that the regular path of a missionary in the mission need not apply, I don't need to be trained then be a junior then a senior then a district leader then a zone leader then a trainer or follow that pattern at all. I need to be ready for leadership now. He told me that he needed me to grow faster. He explained that the leadership of the mission is split pretty much evenly between Americans a Brazilians, but for the last 5 transfers before mine he had only gotten Brazilian missionaries. Which means the mission is over 70 persent Brazilians. So he told me i had to grow faster because he cant wait five transfers for the americans to be ready for leadership. This made me feel sheepish, I had only been worrying about how my companion was not the best trainer. He told me that when i was called i was qualified, if i want to teach more lessons don't wait for it to be given to me take it, tell my companion that i want to teach half of every lesson tell him we have to have companionship study and he will not say no.

Time is short so i will quickly end by saying my eyes have been opened and I thing things will be much better now that I understand what is going on. I do feel allittle sheepish for not doing it earlier but that is life.
love you all bye for now.
Elder Reed Risenmay