We live in the center of Belo Horizonte, and our area is way on the outskirts of the city, so we have to walk like, 8 blocks to the bus stop and then take the bus to our area from there. Between our house and the bus stop, there's this one street that we walk down every day that only sells mannequins. The whole street is just a huge line of naked mannequins. Apparently it's the only place in the city that sells mannequins, so it's a hot spot for clothing retailers- people come from all over to get their mannequins here by our house.
Our whole mission has been fighting to get all of our media references contacted before the end of the month, and we had a couple that we weren't sure where the were, so we just kept asking directions and finally ended up very far into the sisters area- so far in fact that we ended up running into them around 7pm. We told them where we were going and one sister says, "Don't go there at night; you will die." So we turned around and started heading back to our area. We hadn't walked 20 yards when this guy walks up to us and starts telling us not to go to house number 90. We were like, "no problem, we were leaving anyway. We don't even work here." But then he kept insisting that we not go there. He was very concerned about his friend that lives there who has started following this religion of ours. "I have nothing against you guys," he says, "I just don't want her to be brainwashed by your church. And let me tell you another thing: Jesus is not an American! And he never went to the United States! You know why? Because they didn't have airplanes in his time!" It was all very unreal. I wrote down the address just to appease him and assured him that we would not go there. I found out later that it's one of the sisters' recent converts and that the guy is the lady's crazed ex-boyfriend.
I did my first baptismal interviews this week. The first two weren't really ready; they each took about an hour. Neither of them passed. The third one though, went really well. She was a 13 year old girl that has been coming to church for about a month. She knew everything, and really seemed like she was ready to be baptized. So we were all set and I just asked her if she could say the closing prayer for us, and she was like, "no."
"What? I'll help you."
"No. I know how to pray already. I don't want to."
"It's really simple, you can just repeat what I say then."
"No! I'm not doing that."
I spent about ten minutes trying to get her to pray, and to figure out why she wouldn't do it, and finally she stands up and says, "Man! This is taking forever! I'm outta here!" And she left. Weird. But she's still getting baptized on Sunday.
Two days ago we were waiting for the bus to take us home at night and this guy drove by and offered us a ride. He said he's a member from another stake but he knows a bunch of people from our ward. When he saw us waiting for the bus, he just drove by, but the spirit reprimanded him, he said, and he felt like he just needed to give the elders a ride so he turned around and came back to pick us up. Who knows? Maybe we would've died.
Then yesterday, Elder Madeiros the 70 year old missionary from our ward came out to work with us all afternoon. It was really good to work with him, he has no fear of anyone. I sent you a picture of him a while ago; he's the old man with a plastic white hand. So, that being the case, I'm concerned that he may have been offended when, as he was descending a muddy slope, I asked, "do you need a hand?" Especially since that doesn't translate in Portuguese.
"What?"
"I mean, do you need help?"
Hopefully he knows I wasn't mocking him.
I decided I'm going to kill whatever missionary came through our area and did magic tricks for all the little kids. Everyone under the age of 12 in our area knows the missionaries as "those guys who do magic." They all follow us around when we're walking asking us to do magic. I learned how to "rip off my finger", but I think that one's getting old. It's so bad that last night a girl followed us onto the bus asking us to do magic. The driver told her to get off so she left and ran and jumped onto the side of the bus and, looking through the window, yelled, "magic!" I felt like a famous person being persecuted by paparazzi.
Well, that's all I've got for now.
'Til next week,
Elder Sisco