Howdy Family!! (Week 15)

Hey Folks!!!

The sun is strong here! It's changed or faded some of my ties and pants. Haha!!

Happy to announce that we had two more Baptisms! Maria and João! They are fantastic! Maria is such a good example. She continues to make the best choices. Her family is always drinking and making many, many bad choices. João has a sister that returned from her mission a couple months ago. He noticed a huge difference. Maria and João both want to serve missions one day!! Oh, and Sister Lago (Mission president's wife) surprised us with attending the baptism!

One of the great blessings of serving a mission is that we have an hour every day to study the gospel! I love starting the day with studying the scriptures and have learned so much. This week I will finish reading the Book of Mormon in Portuguese for my first time! I'm so pumped! I encourage everybody to read and study the scriptures every day. We need to charge our spiritual batteries!

So our faucet has been broken for a long time. It still works but it's really sketchy. Last week, it started to leak water and other Elders from a long time ago jerry-rigged it with a shoelace. So last P-day I replaced it. I also convinced the mission to pay a little bit more to buy a faucet with an attached filter. This would save us so much money every month and not have to carry a huge tank of water to our apartment every week. Anyways, we now feel spoiled with our fancy faucet! Oh, thanks Dad for teaching me how to replace a faucet--Teflon tape and all! Oh, and our neighbor Leo drove us downtown to get a cheap one! Leo is the best!

Don't have too much time this week, but I love you all so much!!!

Have a good week!

Love,
Elder Hillam

Baptism!

Baptism!

Cutting Elder Moody's hair this week!

Howdy Folks (Week 14)

 You know that you have adjusted to the climate of Teresina, when you need a sheet covering you at 84 degrees. It got down to 84 one night in our apartment this week and I was cold! Like what!?!

We had another fantastic week this week! Woohooo! We met so many people prepared to receive the gospel. Booyaa!

Many people ask how we arrive in a country not speaking any of the language and learn it so quickly! Well, we have a special gift called the "Gift of Tongues"! When we serve God and do our part He blesses us with this gift, the ability to learn the language super fast! But this knowledge can be applied to so many other things. When we put God first, or when we need or want something and have the right purpose (building up the Kingdom of God), He gives us what we need!

The members here continue to impress! One of the hardest things about being a missionary is that we can't be everywhere at one time. This is when members come in! There are so many fantastic examples of Christ-like servants here. Two members that have been a great help are Kelly and Isabell. They are both recent converts of seven months, just dying to serve a mission, but they have to wait a year before they can serve. They both have testimonies so strong that they give all their free time to the Lord. We asked them if they could wake and pick up our other investigators on the other side of town; that involves a distance of 45 minutes of walking in the sun to the church.

They arrived to church with six of our other investigators!!!! Keep it up!

This week was full of miracles, learning, and trying new things!

Love,

Elder Hillam
austin.hillam@myldsmail.net
ElderHillam.blogspot.com

Just a family of our recent converts walking back home from church. I snuck a picture!

LEO! Our super cool next door neighbor that's fluent in English and is studying to be a lawyer.

Hey Family!! (Week 13)

We had another fantastic week here! The weather here is always Sunny and blue skies!

It's always fun when we knock on someone's door and wait for them to come out. We stand flat on the door/wall to be in the little shade there is! Haha

That was another revelatory conference! Que legal! Every 6 months we have the opportunity to hear from the Prophet and 12 apostles. Its a great opportunity for our investigators to gain a testimony of a Prophet, apostles, modern-day revelation and so much more! The church is living! Go watch the talks on lds.org.

All the members meet in the chapel to watch conference. All of the general authorities speak wonderful Portuguese! We watched Saturdays session in Portuguese and Sundays in English. But there's pros and cons to both because there is air conditioning in the chapel, but conference is in Portugues so I can't understand 100 percent especially because they're reading so fast! Or I can bake in the secretaries office and watch it in English haha. Only joking.

We had 3 investigators show up to watch woohoo.

Out baptism fell this week. Well not really. We just almost baptized this man again. His records of his baptism were lost until the morning of his baptism. Long story short was that he moves around a lot and his records were in Fortaleza.

So many different kinds of fruits here. The Bishop is growing these in his backyard:

maracujá
manga
acerola
goiaba
mamáo
atá
Siriguela

Some other fruits ive had here are these:

Caju
melancia
carambola
jaca
Banana Maça
Buriti
Jambo
tamarido
laranja
Pitomba
Cajá
Bacuri
Cupuaçu
açai
guaran

And there's a lot more too!

Hope your week is fantastic! Continue the good work wherever you are!

Love,
Elder Hillam

Elder Moody ran into a tree and ripped his shirt!

Couldn't Think of a Subject (Week 12)

Another great week folks!

Our Baptism this week fell through, but no problem-- we will come back strong next week! It was a bummer because it was the last week of the transfer (missionaries can be moved to a new area every six weeks (one transfer).

Saturday and Sunday mornings are always a blast! On Saturdays, we actually don't teach many lessons because we are using our time to invite everyone to come to church! Sunday mornings are a blast too! We have this one street where we have a ton of investigators (people who are investigating the church) and recent converts. Church starts at 9:00am, so we wake up really early to go and wake up everybody up. Literally. We wake people up in all sorts of ways, whether its shaking them, throwing their dog and/or cat on their bed with them, or pouring water on them. They always thank you later for waking them up. We go house to house grabbing all of our investigators and then one of the greatest feelings is climbing this big hill in the sun on the way to church with all your investigators. Church is so important. The Church is like a Hospital. We all have different problems (like in a hospital--we are all there for different reasons), and we need the Hospital to get better. The Church is the same but helps us heal spiritually.

Sunday Mornings are crazy!

In Doctrine Principles Class a couple Sundays ago, they asked me to lead the music. But I was the only one with a hymn book so I lead and soloed the four verses! It was a lot of fun!!

Elder Moody had this giant in-grown toenail that was taken out last week. That was cool! We also helped move a member from one house to another! I almost fell out of the Uhaul--although it wasn't a Uhaul! it was more like an oven on wheels offroading.

Sorry, this email is all over the place! Everything is fantastic and can't wait to get back to work! I also saw President Lagos (our mission president) for the second time, today! He is awesome! Every week he drives to areas to visit missionaries that are 9-18 hours away. How great of him! He does this every week!

Love You all!

Keep up the good work in the States!

Elder Hillam

Oh, and I met this one woodworker guy. We were friends instantly!

Family of Sebastian! There all new members! 

Just one more member that needs to get to the font! They are awesome! 

Can you see my orange peel hanging from the ceiling?