Marituba 15

Hello People,

Literally nothing happened this week exciting.  We worked and taught people.  The world cup here is great and exciting. However one day we left our house at 10 in the morning and found a drunk man laying in the gutter on his face next to the trash can singing.  It was 10 in the morning.  Brazil is great.  Everyone here is still saying that Brazil will win the cup but I am having my doubts after their first two games which didn't go too well.  However I am having fun watching all the games and freaking out with everybody. I love the intense emotion they put into everything here. Literally everything has a reason to celebrate over intensely.  If you have an arm wrestle everyone will film it and try to place bets and literally freak out and scream.  However watching soccer is another thing all together. 

This week was the last week of President Stasevskas and he was at stake conference on Sunday and shared a good testimony.  It will be sad to see him go, I will miss him, he was a good president; and before leaving switched our email time from 1 hour to 2 hours so that was a good legacy to leave.  I hope everyone's doing great and I will keep things updated when something exciting happens.  

On a different exciting note we got a new bishop who is really excited and wants to focus a lot on missionary work and has gotten the members excited too and we are getting lots of references to work with.  I will keep you updated and sorry I don't really have that many pictures to send.

Love,

Elder Holcomb

Marituba 14

All of the streets are painted up for the world cup

Dear people,

This week was pretty busy and exciting.  On Thursday I got to go on divisions to Mosquiero, the area of two other Elders in our district and it was awesome.  The area there is huge and it is on a beach so it was pretty exciting.  My companion for the day was from Argentina, and yes, he has seen real wild penguins so that made me jealous.  His name was Paniagua, and yes, if you say it in Spanish his name literally means bread and water so we call him Elder Sacrament.  It was fun to be with a non Brazilian and was kind of funny to be two white foreign people.  He wants to learn English and marry an american so I helped him with English and he helped me with Spanish and it was a weird three language mind hurting day but lots and lots of fun.  We went to the beach and got lots of pictures.  

The 6 baptisms we had were super fun.  Lots of people came to watch and it was pretty exciting.  We had a little bit of a party after and played soccer and ate food, and I think everyone was super happy.  Also, Mateus, I had hold on to the camera to take pictures, and he had fun taking selfies and random pictures so that should explain some of them.  The world cup was lots of fun.  Everyone talks about how during the cup in other countries everything shuts down and no one does anything, but I didn't realize how true that was until yesterday.  Literally nothing was open and there were literally no cars on the street. Everyone was literally just screaming and watching the game. It was epic and completely awesome.  

My spiritual thought for this week would be [Nephi 7:16-21] when Nephi gets tied up by his brothers and they want to go back to Jerusalem Nephi prays and asks for strength to break the bonds and then after he bears his testimony to his brothers and they are humbled.  I think it's important to note that Nephi didn't ask for God to get him out of the bonds or stop his brothers he only asked for strength to be able to do it himself.  May times we are caught in a bunch of bonds and feel tied up and I think sometimes we ask God to fix it but we really should just ask for strength to be able to solve things ourselves.  One of our purposes here on Earth is to learn and grow and we won't be able to do that if God just hands everything to us; sometimes we need to figure things out ourselves.  I see a good example in lots of the people we baptized this week. Both the family of Jaycie and Gabrielli have strong opinions against the church and were fighting hard for them not to be baptized yet they still had faith to go through with it anyways.  To me they were really tied up by there families and had to pray for strength and they shared there testimonies and sadly there family wasn't humbled in the same way as Laman and Lemuel, yet both of them are still willing to press on and continue to have a strong faith.  

Love,

Elder Holcomb

  

  

  

  

  

    

   

Marituba 13

Hello!!!

This week nothing too interesting happened but we worked a lot.  The 24th is stake conference so we weren't allowed to have baptisms the Saturday before because they wouldn't be able to be confirmed the following Sunday so  we ended up asking everyone we have with a goal to be baptized to move their goal to this week. Everyone was pumped too so now we are going to have 6 people baptized this week! So that is sweet and we look like super good missionaries to everybody so that is pretty funny.  This week we taught a lot of people with Mateus, the 18 year old chemistry student Elder Geremias and I baptized, and it has been super fun. He is great and everyone seems to like him, and his testimony about the church and baptism is super strong too, so it's nice to have people see the way the church has blessed his life.  Other than that nothing too exciting has happened.  My companion has some back pain so we have to go get X-rays for him. So I guess it's just a curse I have that all my companions need to visit the hospital  for x-rays but other than that nothing too interesting happened.  This week the world cup starts and I didn't know people could get so hyped.  All the streets are decorated and have Brazil flags and banners hanging everywhere, and everything is green and yellow, it's sweet. President has allowed that we can watch the Brazil games because no work would be able to get done anyway during the games because if you try to interrupt someone during a Brazil game it is like almost a federal offense my companion said; and after everyone is too drunk to understand anything.  So that should be fun. I am pumped to experience the World Cup in a place where people are actually going to get super hype.  I already have all the groups written down and it will be fun to watch the cup.  If I somehow get a new camera this week I will try to get pictures of all the decorated streets and fun stuff.

Love ,

Elder Holcomb

Marituba 12

Hello people,

This week was good and busy.  We worked a lot which I enjoyed, and enjoyed that my companion was willing to work a lot with me.  We only saw miracles this week.  

We started teaching a little young family and they were already married on paper, which was a miracle because nobody here gets married on paper, but you have to be married on paper to be baptized.  They really liked the lesson of the restoration and asked lots of questions and so we gave them a goal to be baptized on the 23rd.  Then later in the week when we went back the husband still wasn't back from work, but when we were walking back he caught us on his bike to talk to us and he was like, "yo its true." And told us that like they read the little pamphlet and prayed and then he felt like he didn't get a response or anything so he was like, "hmmm" and then they were talking to his wife's mom  and she said that Mormons are a cult full of secret symbols and women are useless in the Mormon religion and so they were like "oh ok dang."  But then he was like, "no, the missionaries said that now since we found the truth the enemy would try to get us away from it" so he was like, "hmmm it must be true if we find out about it now and then we get all of this hate."  So he was like, "hey, lets read the pamphlet again and then pray again." Then he made us take out the pamphlet and he showed us this part at the end where it talks about how the Holy Ghost responds through feelings of tranquility and calmness and he was like, "that was my answer!!!" He was like, "it's all true can I get baptized earlier?" So we were like, "ummm we still have to teach you some things first because we aren't here to just throw you in the water an baptize you. You have to learn about some commandments and things first." and he was like, "oh ok."  So he was awesome.

Then we had this other guy that walked into the church last Saturday and asked us questions and we said the best way to learn is visit on Sunday so he did. Then we taught him this week and he was like, "ahhh this makes so much sense."  Then this Fast Sunday he was visiting again and everyone was sharing testimonies and he got up to share too. I was kind of nervous like, "ummm what's he going to say?" But then he was like, 

"I have been in a whole lot of different churches and visited a lot of different churches but all of them I went to I never really felt like it was a church being directed by Christ or the church of Christ himself so I left all churches and just lived for myself. Then one day I had a dream and Christ was like, 'What are you doing?' So then I woke up and the next day I was walking past the church and saw it open so walked in to ask the missionaries questions and then after I talked with the missionaries this week I know this is Christ's church."

 And everyone at church was like, "dang."  So now everyone at church thinks we are super good missionaries.  

We are still teaching Jaycie and she is doing well.  

We taught Loyana about the law of chastity because she isn't married to the guy she's living with and we were like, "So will you get married?" and she was like, "no, I don't want to get married to him." We were like, "ummm why?" She said that there is lots of problems she has with him and then he showed up with a bunch of cops and the cops were asking for his documents, and we were kind of like, "oh, these kinds of problems."  So we took that as our queue to leave.  

So people we are teaching are doing well.  My companion is good. The first thing he had us do is deep clean our house so now the house is all reorganized and things, so that was fun.  Nothing too funny happened this week to share, but I basically forgot it was my birthday until the Mission President's wife called and sang "happy birthday."

Love,

Elder Holcomb

Here's Isaac's (edited) letter to Brian that may be interesting to you too:

haha the stress of school is real for you too.  Thanks for the birthday shout out it was a good birthday. We walked and taught people.  Yes, everybody has to take English at some point, but nobody goes to a public school here because they are super expensive. So you just pay for like a high school type thing, but you can take it at any age so you have like 30 year olds that decide to finish high school and will be in the same class as high school kids. HAMILTON is good I am glad you are listening to it again. 

 oh and Elder Dornelles is cool. He is from Rio Grande do Sul. Also he has seen snow before.  He has one year and 5 months in the mission so I am still only with companions that are close to dying off.

The statue is called "menino jesus" and its like a community park thing

That was my birthday I bought pizza for everyone to eat and Irma Daniella baked me a cake, it was fun.  Their family is awesome. They are lots of fun. She is basically the missionaries' mom and reminds me a little of Grandma Nancy in a way. 

Here's pictures from the baptism mentioned in last week's letter: