August 8, 2011 Sinergy

Ola Gente,

This week started out with a ton of meetings. Tuesday morning we had Zone Leader Counsel. It was really good. We managed to target a few topics to focus on with the missionaries this month and I found out that some of my best friends (Elder Griffin, from the not to well know town of Newton, Utah, and Elder Hickenlooper) on the mission were called as Zone Leaders too!

Wednesday we had zone conference. Pres. Pinho is trying to inject some new ideas into the mission so we had a conference completely different from any other that I´ve seen. He is from the business world so he uses lots of words like 'Sinergy'. You honestly need a dictionary. Anyway, we had 10 groups that all focused on different techniques in teaching and rotated so that by the end of the conference we had to be experts of the topics. I was in charge of the topic "Teach People, Not Lessons". It was all about asking questions to discover the necessities of the investigators and then follow the spirit to change the lesson. It was good but I learned that most missionaries teach a bunch of memorized lines that don´t really resolve anything. I tried to help them learn how to adapt but I think it came off like I was burning everyone. A really prideful greeny got super made at me when I was trying to help him and that left me a little ticked. I hope I didn´t make too many enemies that day. Haha!

The week was a little tough as far as the work goes. Naldo has been false with us the past few weeks and his wife told us that he is drinking and smoking more than every. The last time we were teaching him he got up in the middle of the visit and left without expination. When we were walking down the street a few minutes later we saw him drinking in the bar. It really teaches you how important the word of wisdom is and how addicition destroys families.

Robson is also falling through. Whenever we visit his family he stays in him room. He didn´t go to church either because his friends play soccer Sunday mornings. Another soccer related slap in the face came when Antonio Carlos told us he doesn´t want to get baptized until 2014 (when the World Cup will be in Brasil).

It may sound like everything is going wrong right now but we are actually finding some really good investigators. We recieved some golden references that we marked to visit this week so we are going to do our best to get them baptized this month and find even more people for September. We´re also going to set up a stand in some squares with Church material so that the elects come to us instead of us going to them. I´ll let you know how the first one goes next week.

Well that pretty much it for this week. Sorry there isn´t much to say. Love you all!

Elder MacLane Taggart