Referrals From Timbuktu

I guess I'll put this at the beginning, but once again we still haven't gotten transfer calls. Apparently, this is normal but still annoying.

First I'll talk about the work for this week. It was good. Our friends are steadily moving forward. We also did some finding this week and we noticed a really weird trend. A lot of the people we are teaching are single moms. Even weirder is that most of their husbands passed away. Like we found some new people to teach and somehow more than half of them are single moms. Like we aren't trying to find them but somehow everyone we talk to ends up being a single mom. Anyway, besides that weird trend things are going well. The two couples that we are working with somehow made absolutely no progress this week, but that's how it goes.

Recently we have been receiving a lot of media referrals (people that view a post from the church and got in contact with the missionaries, then their information gets sent to us). Generally, you call the person and they aren't actually interested. However, Mozambique is weird and all of them interested and want to talk to you. The problem we have is we get referrals for people that live super far away. Like people who live in Tica, Nhamatanda, Matua, Gorongosa, etc. All of these people have no realistic way of getting here (which is the nearest church to them) but all of them want to talk to us. It is a bizarre problem to have. This week we got a ton of them and all of them live super far away too. We got like 12 and 2 of them live in Dondo. But I can't complain too much because the other Elders here got twice as many as us.

Also this week we got a visit from President Moraes. He came to drop off a ton of new stuff for our house. It was like Christmas came early, new chairs (that we already broke because they were super cheap), tables, cleaning supplies, clothes and much more. It was much needed and helped this house feel a little more established.

We had some baptisms this week so we cleaned the outdoor font the day before and man it was dirty! It was completely covered in dust and even had a dead lizard in it. That was pretty fun.

Sunday was pretty good this week, a bunch of people that should have shown up didn't. But it's normal. The annoying part is that we have 3 couples that are super smart and progressing well but they still haven't shown up to church. Some of them have work on Sundays sometimes but others really don't have an excuse. But again, it's just how it goes.

Both our Bishop and President Moraes told us that Dondo is going to be pretty important soon. They are putting a lot of responsibility on us to work hard to help these areas grow. So we are going to have to work extra hard to help these areas grow. Fortunately, we are getting support from our leaders and hopefully we can keep this positive momentum going forward.

Elders Coelho and Mateus with their Coco Pops from Sister Moraes

Lunch with the Elders in our apartment

New fry pan and colander

Baptismal font