Thanksgiving Pizza

Young Brazilian, Caique, who is called to serve in Santiago Chile East mission (where Elder Nate is)

Dear Family!

It's so good to hear that Mom and Phil made it home safe and sound. It sounds like everyone had a busy week and a lot of fun!  Thanks for all the pictures of family and everything.  I'm a little jealous that I missed out on a good ol' Thanksgiving dinner, but, Elder Fernandes and I had our own Thanksgiving party and bought ourselves a pizza. 

So this past week has been really busy and we have been working really hard. It's the start of a new transfer and Elder Fernandes and I have cracked down and wrote down a few names that we are really gonna focus on and help to prepare for baptism this transfer.  I'm really excited and I think we're gonna work miracles in this area.  I guess the biggest highlight of this past week was we had stake conference which had a big focus on missionary work.  The sessions were held in the stake center, which happens to be in Planalto, so I got the chance to go back to my first area and see a lot of the members and people that I worked with before.  The stake president invited us to go to all sessions and in these sessions he introduced some ways to get all of the members involved in missionary work.  One suggestion he made was giving out a paper that the members fill out with names and addresses of friends, neighbors, and aquaintances and the members are to pray about this list and focus on two or three families that they can invite over for a dinner and introduce them to the missionaries.  It was a really inspiring conference and I hope that it got all of the members excited and ready to do some missionary work.

We are still continuing to work with Nisi and Leticia. We have an interview set for them on Friday, so if everything goes right, they will both be baptized on Saturday. We had a really good lesson with Nisi this past week where we talked about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  She understands the doctrine really well and she definitely has been prepared by the Lord wayyyyy before we started to teach her. 

We also got the chance to talk to Barbara's mom about letting us teach her and she said that if Barbara goes to church and feels good about it and that she really wants to commit to it, then she can be baptized.  So we are going to continue to work with her. Not only Barbara, but we also started teaching Diego's older sister, Larissa. We were able to teach her about the Restoration and she agreed to study and pray about what we have been teaching her.  We are really excited to work with both of them and help them come closer unto Christ.

Sorry this letter is a little short but I'm running out of time and I still have to write President Tanner.   I just want all of you to know that I'm loving it out here in Brazil and there is nothing I would rather be doing with my life than what I'm doing right now.  I love you all and I hope everyone has a great week next week! 

Love,

Elder Schwartz

With previous companion, Elder Steil