well here it is! 3-24-14

This week was a really good week! me and elder Arraes talked a lot about what we needed to do to help us have more sucess.. and we tried to applied and it showed! we had tons more sucess!! 

we decided that we would start working in an area that is about 2 kilometers away from the city, seeing as we had had very little success inside the city, and our first day there was amazing! we found a family there and started teaching them! marked them all to baptism! was awesome!  found a young man who was baptized but never confirmed, started talking to him and he told us that he wanted to be baptized and this time confirmed so that was super exciting! hoping to baptize him this next week! we also decided that we just need to start talking to tons more people, so that is what we did! haha started talking to everyone that we saw.. hopefully we didnt freak to many people out! haha but it was really good, if you want to teach people you got to start talking to them! haha on thursday and friday we found 2 more families to start teaching! which im super excited for! teaching families is the best! because really, the gospel was made for families! it helps strengthen families unlike anything else! so we are super stoked to be working with families now! the only real bummer about this week is that no one came to church again.. but that really isnt a surprise, but we talked to our zone leader, and he gave us lots of good ideas so hoping that next week we can have at least one person at church! haha

thursday one of the elders that we live with, had his birthday.. because the branch here is so small, the members who are active love the missionaries, so they threw him a surprise party and that was fun to participate in! really i just was there for the cake! haha just kidding! but the cake was pretty good! haha

this week in my english class we had a grand total of.. one person! haha, one of the youth in the branch came, but he really liked it and im hoping that he will tell all his friends and we can get a good sized class going! its wierd.. but i realized that i started forgeting things in english! haha 

oh i forgot to say that the new area where we are working has tons of huge hills!! like ive never seen anything like them! sometimes when we are walking up them i wonder to myself.. why did they build houses here?? haha but that has been a work out! haha i will try to send some pictures! 

well this week i learned that if something isnt going right.. work hard and find a soluition and change your circumstances! i think that lots of times, as missionaries, we pray to have a change in our success, that we will find more people to teach and things like that, and then we dont change anything about the way we work,or where we work. i learned that after you pray for these things, youi need to do everything that you can to change your circumstances. read this one talk by Elder Bednar that talked about applying our faith! that if we just believe that things will change without giving it our alll, nothing will ever change. sometimes the blessings we recieve from God arent him placing people in front of us to teach, although he may do this, but more often than not, he will give us the strength and desire to change things for ourselves! hoping that i can start applying this more fully in my work! 

well hope that all is well for all of you back home! love and miss you all!

Elder Ryan

This weeks news! 3-17-14

o this week was a difficult one for us! 

we had been working lots with less actives and investigators of other missionaries, and it looked like we were going to start having some success.. then like everything fell through, all the people we were working with didnt want to continue meeting with us.. cant lie it was pretty frustrating! me and my companion have been trying to figure out what is going wrong and things that we can change to imporve, so far nothing has happened! haha but hopefull that this week will be lots better! 

on the bright side the season of rain just started and so it rains almost everyday all day.. which is nice in the sense that it isnt like 1000 degrees! haha but on the other hand im soaking wet every day! haha

we had zone meeting this week and that was good! our zone leaders addressed a lot of the problems that we were having and gave lots of good suggestions of how to help out our investigators! was good! only problem is that it is a 3 hour bus ride from viçosa to maceio... on a bus that was made for midgets! haha so my legs were pretty destroyed after the 6 hours total on the bus! haha 

so last week i talked about how we were starting an english class to try and fins people to teach, we spend the whole week planning and inviting tons of people, it seemed like we would have a pretty good outcome and i was getting pretty excited.. when saturday rolled around, no one showed for out class.. it was a bummer! but we are gonna try again this week, hoping for a better outcome this week.. maybe at least one will show?? haha

realized this week that about 600 people in this town, which has about 3000 people total, are members of the church,.. our branch has a steady attendance of 15.. its crazy to see how many people fell away.. it makes it hard to work because this town is so small,everyone knows how the church had a huge fall in attendance and stuff so the church has a bad rep here... makes things a little more interesting! haha

well that is about all for this week! it was hard and we are struggling! really hoping for a week of more success! haha just trying to keep chugging through it! hahah

well love you all and appreciate the letters that you all write! 

Elder Ryan

This weeks news: Carnival 3-10-14

well to start things out, this week was carnival, aka, brazilians gone wild! haha so that made things pretty difficult for monday tuesday, and saturday, when basically the whole city here was out partying! but other than that it was a good week! 

on tuesday, we helped out with the youth conference and that was a lot of fun! we did created some activities for them about what is the book of mormon and how it can help them in there lives, and how they can share it with there friends. also did an activity about unity, where we tied all 11 of them to gether with rope and they had to walk through these mazes of strings that we made! it was pretty fun to watch haha! also i got to use some of my eagle scout abilities! haha the leaders couldnt quite figure out how to start a fire.. i mean they could get a little one going, but they cold get a real fire! haha just kidding but had some fun using my pyro skills and getting a pretty big bonfire going! after that we had a "lessons from the trail". that was a blast from the past moment to the many campouts with dad and the many lesson learned and sharing them around the fires! it was a great time, made me realize how much fun those camping trips where! thanks dad for all the work you put into those, and i cant lie, im wishing i could go camping right now, so start planning now for when i get back! haha

we have been having some good success with our area book, we have found lots of people who had investigated the church like 3 years ago, and we are working with them now, hoping that we can get a baptism this week! 

also we are planning to start an english class here. the branch here said that missionaries had lots of sucess with that in the past, so we will be starting that this next saturday! it was weird because while we were preparing, i realized that my first responses to questions and when people talk to me is always in pórtuguesse, like i actually have to think about what im going to say in english before i say it! so weird! also started dreaming in portuguesse pretty consistently which is kind of wiggin me out, its so wierd because i rarely ever think in english now, it is so wierd how learning a language works! haha

this week was good for me because i finally feel like im in my groove again, for this first time since the transfer, so that has been really nice, this week im hoping to continue in the groove haha.

the only bummer this week was that out toliet started leaking when you flushed it.... yeah that has been quite interesting to say the least! haha but we have a contract for a new house here, hoping that we will be moving in the next week or so! haha 

my pearl of wisdom that i learned this week is work.. even when its hard and it seems like you wont have any sucess. this week during the times of párties and stuff it seemed like we would teach no one and have 0 sucess, but we kept working anyway and we had a decent week. even when its hard, if you work hard and put everything out there, you can make sucess! well that is my pearl for the week! haha

well sound like everything is going well back home! hope that all continues to go well for you all! know that i love and miss all of you and hope to continue to hear from you all! 

Elder Ryan

The Weekly News 3-3-14

So here is the update for this week! 

Most of this week was just getting to know our area and trying to find new people to teach! but overall it was good! also one of thing that we have been working a lot with is reactivating people! one thing i learned this week was that this area used to be a ward with over 100 active members! i'm not sure what happened but there was a huge drop in active members until it was only like 10 people active! apparently the mission president almost closed this city! crazy! so that is one thing we have been doing a lot of, visiting lots of inactives and trying to help them come back to church! its been quite a challenge so far with little success! but we keep at it, hoping that we can help some of these people out! 

also we have been knocking on tons of doors and talking to people on the street! this also led to little success! but 've learned on the mission that if something doesn't work one time, it doesn't mean it isn't effective! its the "Try, Try again" method! just keep working at it and eventually we will have success! 

we did have one huge bright spot this week! one of the members in our ward is the only member in her family, so we went there to talk to her family! we gave a good lesson to her 2 sisters and mom (the dad was working in another city) but it went really well! we asked to pray to know if the church was true and all that normal stuff we invite people to do! the next day we came back and the mom told us about this dream she had, it is kind of complicated for me to explain it in english because there some words that i know how to use in portugues that i don't exactly know the exact meaning in english! haha but overall the mom got an answer that the church was true and she wanted to be baptized! so that was legit! but the only hold up there is that the husband is hard core catholic, and even though he doesn't attend church ever, he doesn't want his family to join the church because it would ruin the tradition in the family!  but we are trying to work with him.. actually we haven't even talked to him yet, he always avoids us! i think he knows that if he talks to us he will realize that he is wrong! haha but it is interesting to see that people are so scared to change! they like to just stay in there little comfort square and stay there.. even if doing something can help improve your life so much!! its hard to watch it, because i know that if they just try and apply the things that the gospel teaches, it will improve your life in so many aspects! 

also this week i did a division with elder Rosa. he just finished his first transfer in the field! so that meant that i was senior for a day! ahaha it was fun! it was interesting to see how far i have come! see the differences in how to talk to people. the mtc teaches you that you need to just get out there, teach the people and then batize them. but one thing i learned is that you need to show that you aren't just there to throw them into the water, to show them that you actually are there to give them something that can help them out in life, and that part of that help, is baptism. interesting to see how my views and abilities as a missionaries had improved just after these 3 months more in the field than him! but he is a good missionary! he is so excited to be there and doesnt have fear of messing up! he just goes, which i thought was so cool! he didn't try to be something he wasn't he just did what he could! its cool to see that everyone can teach you something! i think that i have learned more for the people here, than i have taught them, or could ever teach them! haha.

Carnival started this saturday... and things are getting crazy!! haha the people get really into it! but it has been a little difficult to work, because no one wants to talk to us because of the parties, and we have to be home before 8 because it is pretty dangerous with all the drunks and crazies! hahaa! our house is like right in front of the center of town, where all the partying is! so there has been barely any sleeping! im not sure how the brazilians are not deaf! hahah they listen to music sooo loud here! 

but it has been a good week, learned a lot about myself, being a missionary, and the culture here! hope that all is well for you all back home! appreciate the letters and emails! love you all! 

Elder Ryan