Ok. I feel like I can finally tell you about this because it's over- or ending. Our house: It's disgusting and terrible. I will take pictures before we leave, but I probably won't send them to you; I don't want you to get frightened. When we leave, we have to close the windows and lock the doors, and since we just passed 3 weeks of straight rain it gets a little humid. 7 of my 20 ties are unwearable because of the massive amounts of mold that is growing on them. I took a shirt out of the closet the other day that I had never even worn before and it had mold all around the collar. It was literally a blue fuzzy collar. 3 pairs of pants were rendered unwearable overnight- I had to wash them twice to get the mold completely off. If I leave my garments too long without washing them, they get moldy. There's probably mold on a lot of other things I wear too, I just cant tell because it blends in, I bet. The walls are covered with mold. It smells like mold. Our house is a rat hole. Speaking of rats, we have them, so we sprinkled rat poison all outside the front steps. I haven't seen one since then, I hope that means its working. When the mission president was here in Sete Lagoas his wife came to look at our house, since we had complained. She walked in the front door, her mouth slightly ajar and she said simply, "this is not good." That was last week. So last night we finally found our apartment, and we're working on closing today. I think we'll be out of there within 3 days. The other reason we're moving is because the ZLs are having some sort of problem and there needs to be an emergency transfer, and another companionship is moving into our area. I'm not sure about the details, since they don't tell us, so I cant really explain them to you. All we know is that last week President Frei was pretty chill about us getting a house and then two nights ago he called and was like "you need to get a house tomorrow." So we spent all day looking and finally found it last night. Our p-day has been spent doing paperwork. All day. I spent all morning in a real estate office. Tomorrow we'll have to go to Belo Horizante to get President Frei's signature on our contract. So this has all impacted the work quite a bit, we haven't been able to teach much, but I'm so glad that we're finally getting out of our crappy house.
We had 2 baptisms on Saturday and will have at least two more this Saturday, if all goes well. I'll send pictures- I wanted to today but its not looking good for time.
I was talking to this guy at church on Sunday and he was telling me a story about this bishop, not in our area but somewhere in the mission, who had this girl in his ward who was really upset about the fact that she couldn't pass the sacrament. She just REALLY wanted to help pass the sacrament, and she made quite a big fuss about it to everyone. So one Sunday the Stake President is visiting and he sees that the girl is passing the sacrament to the ward, and he says "Bishop, what's going on here?" and the Bishop says "Don't worry, President, I gave her the Aaronic priesthood."
Not sure if this is true, since it seems so ridiculous, but he seemed quite adamant about it even though I doubted it so thouroughly. If anywhere though, that would happen here in Brazil.
Speaking of apostasy, it's everywhere here. I have photographic evidence. Mary worship is a big thing in Brazil. My favorite so far is this poster we saw with a big picture of Mary and at the bottom it says "Tudo por Jesus, Nada sem Maria" or Everything by Jesus, nothing without Mary." Awesome.
There are a lot of poor Brazilians. A lot. The majority. The problem, that I'm seeing is that they don't know what to do with money. They have way crooked priorities. People ask the church for help, and the church gives them food or money for food, but then you go to their house and they have a giant flat screen TV and a nice DVD player middle of their crappy hovel, and all of their kids have cell phones. It's weird. Everyone has a nice TV and a cell phone, no matter how poor you are. Scary, actually.
I have to go, so I can't write more, but I just thought I'd leave that tidbit about the house with you all. Don't worry though, the apartment we found is SUH-WEET. I love it, it's sooo coool. And the guy who's renting it to us is awesome too. I want to baptize him.
Okay, I must go, sorry I spent so much time reading emails I ran out of time to write.
Bye,
Elder Sisco


Note from Amy: You can click on these photos to view them larger.