Fantastic Week

For a follow up on Brad's sleep issues, he seems to be doing a lot better!  He said he is sleeping better and better everyday and he is very grateful for that blessing and for good doctors that have been able to help him.  He would love to hear from all of you and his address for the Brazil mission home is on this site.  Thank you for your love and support as well as your prayers.

This week was fantastic!
We had another baptism! Barbara´s sister Laleska was baptized, out of the blue. Just like Barbara haha. AND her mom, sister Rebecca, and boyfriend Wellington are marked for baptism! How sweet is that?? So we will be spending even MORE time there this week than usual. It´s incredible how in two weeks everything went from awful with no solid work to do, to extremely busy with almost TOO MANY people to visit! And this family loves us! It´s great! We finally found that family every missionary wants to find. It´s so wonderful to be able to teacvh them and watch their testimonies develop. We had one lesson with them where Elder Atkin and I basically sat there and testified to them for an hour because they were having doubts. The spirit was crazy strong until Rebecca just burst into tears and left. It was strange but a really powerful experience all the same. I´m really looking forward to this week with them. Also we had lunch with one of the Utley boys mission companions from 2004, Elder Kavamura would have been his name and he gave us two more families to teach... wow. We´re gonna be super busy but I know there was a reason we had to go through those hard times. We had to prove to the Lord that we really have the desires to help his children here. Speaking of which, we had a unique service opportunity last night. We were on our way to a teaching appointment around 7 o clock at night when we saw this guy with no legs laying on the ground. He was pretty drunk and was crying. We stopped to see if he needed anything and he said he hadn´t eaten in four days, and you could tell too! So we went and bought him a big water bottle and four loaves of pão de leite (MILK BREAD)  and gave it to him. I then realized it was sunday but I thought the Lord would be okay with buying on sunday because we were trying to help someone. It was a really cool, but simple experience and a great opportunity to be real missionaries and representatives of Christ and serve. Well, I don´t have much more to write this week except everyone go on youtube and look up Swagger Rangers UVU. It´s a dance crew and they´re crazy good and Alex Fuchs (the not aian one) is my AP! hahaha. He´s awesome! Anyways, I love you all! Things are going really great here and I´m looking forward to another great transfer here in Monumento!
Love from Ipiranga,
Elder Marley

First Baptism

Olá  Well this week was a huge surprise of a week! I was in and out of doctors offices all week to get this whole insomnia thing under control so I think I spent 30 bucks on bus trips haha. But everything is good. Surprise! We had our first baptism this weekend! Whoa! Barbará was baptised! We taught her last sunday and she got baptized yesterday! We´re teaching her entire family and they´re super excited about the gospel. It´s incredible how this all happens at once because we´ve been praying for this for weeks! Barbará is 17 years old and has a two year old daughter named Ivy that is so adorable! She has gone through some extreme trials in her life and was looking for a church to raise her daughter in and after we talked about the restoration she said she wants her family to grow up in the mormon church. It was incredible. Now her sister, her sisters boyfriend, and her mom want to be baptized next week. What a miracle. It just goes to show that even though we weren´t having any success, that God was preparing people right under our nose to teach. This family absolutely LOVES us and I love them so much. The father is an evangelical pastor but doesn´t live with them. He was there for the first lesson and that was interesting to say the least. It´s the end of the first transfer and I´m so happy I survived! Only 17 left! Talking to you guys yesterday was a huge blessing and made me so happy! Everyone looks so good and I´m glad to have received an update on everyone! This week was really an eye opener for me. I experienced some very interesting experiences that I will hold sacred for the rest of my life. I never noticed really how I walk down some of the world´s most dangerous streets every day and feel completely safe, I literally feel the Lord´s promise of having angels on our left and on our right at all times. As we strive to live the commandments with exactness we will be preserved just like Helaman´s 2000 warriors. What an amazing blessing and I, like them, am taking what my mother taught me as a child and applying it in a battle of a different sort but of equal importance. What a blessing it is to be here and like we always hear `No one ever said it was going to be easy, He just said it would be worth it`. I know this is the most difficult thing I have ever done but I know it´s also the most important. Having a hand in literally helping the Savior save souls is a marvelous honor and I couldn´t be happier to be serving the Lord where and when I am serving Him. Thank you so much for the prayers, I feel their effects every day. And Grandma and Grandpa Peterson and Marley... Thank you for the letters! They made my week even greater! Love from Ipiranga Elder Marley 

We Must Smell Bad!

Olá minha querido familia e amigos!
Okay. This week was pretty rough! We no longer have any progressing investigators! A variety of interesting events occured this week to bring that to pass. My theory is that it´s just because we smell bad. But really. Our water got shut off this week because somebody forgot to pay a water bill back in... wait for it... 2008. And they just shut off the water in 2012. hahaha. Oh Brazil. Anyways that was pretty funny. We spent a couple days in the favela this week including a saturday night. Mistake. Things get so nutty on saturday nights in favelas. They don´t have to work on domingos so they just live it up with really loud funk music. Brazilian funk is like ghetto rap. It´s hilarious once they start dancing. Anyways, let´s not get sidetracked. Our four promising investigators just up and moved to Curitiba this week. Surprise! So Marcus will have to baptise them when he gets there. We started to finally get to work with the members more, they´re opening up to us! So hopefully this week we´ll get a lot of good work done. We have a bunch of part member families and less active memebers we´re going to start working with this week and I am super excited. It´s tough to take pictures here because cameras get stolen so often so I hope that explains the lack of photos lately. It´s been raining like CRAZY here! Man oh man! It seriously flash floods a ton here and people have two doors. One regular one and one of cast iron to stop the flood waters from getting in. Crazy life! Hmmmm, oh! The ward I´m serving in has a missionary serving in PORTLAND! Elder Lima! So look for him! He´s from the Monumento ward! This week we had a good experience. It had been a really really tough week and we were getting down because it was just feeling like we weren´t being blessed for all of our hard work. We were walking home last night and saw some people moving some things into their new room. So we decided to help them out because that´s what we do. Well we helped them, and set up a time to go talk to them later this week. After we did that, we got home and ta da! Our water was turned back on! Blessing! It was cool. I also learned that faith is developed over time but really in reality is a gift from God and we need to exercise our gift or we will lose it. I hope everyone has a great week! Thanks for everything!
Elder Marley