Boa tarde! Hope everybody had a good week. Our week was a liiiiittle hectic... okay, a LOT hectic. I thought the power outage was interesting... heh.
My new companion arrived! Sister Miranda, from the state of Espírito Santo, city of Vitoria. She's hilarious, I love her already. We walked a ton this week, and spent the majority of the time singing Backstreet Boys. She's the first brasilian I've heard that really, really speaks english well. Maybe because I'm the THIRD American companion she's had haha. We laugh about that.
She has 6 months in the mission, and she came from Brasília to Tocantins to be my comp. She was really nervous to serve here because it's HOT.
Just to give you an idea of what the temperature's like these days, I had a boy in the ward help me with the conversion the other day while he had a laptop...
last night it was a nice, cool 75 degrees. (this is at 10pm.)
these days, (and mind you, this time of the year is COOLER than normal for Palmas) it's about 90-95 degrees Fahrenheit.
Yep. There's that.
So she was afraid to come here. Because yes, it's hot. Sometimes I wonder why I ever take a shower because it's going to be for nothing in about 10 minutes after I take a shower. But yeah. She's here! And I love and adore her. I love all of the hilarious phrases and words she knows in English, she has me laughing all the time.
But this past weekend was a little crazy.
So! That house we've been waiting to move into since I arrived in the mission! We got the call that it was ready to go. SoFriday night we packed up all of our stuff to move out on Saturday morning. The houses in Brasil are a little different than the US when moving/selling... you take everything. EVERYTHING. The fridge, washing machine, cupboards, oven... everything. So 4 irmãos from the ward came Saturday morning to help us, one with a small trailer on the back of his car. The new house is not close to our old house... so we started moving everything there, 2 Sisters at the new house moving things in, getting things started, and the other 2 Sisters at the old house helping load things onto the trailer and getting things out.
After Irmão Tião (in the car with the trailer) finished loading on the THIRD TRIP (we have a lot of stuff!), we get a call from Sister Craig (she's Sister Soares's new comp, from Colorado:) with some news. They arrived at the house, andeverything was dirty. So we couldn't move things in until we cleaned, no big deal. They used water and started cleaning the floor. But after some time, the water "acabou". Ended. It was gone. For some reason the government shut off the water in our house... who knows why. So we get this lovely call from Sister Craig, after we had finished loading EVERYTHING up and sending it over there... that we wouldn't be sleeping there tonight. That it looked like we would be sleeping in the old house, with some cushions on the ground.
Long story short... 30 minutes later after that, we were in our old house, with nothing in it, eating our Almoço on the ground because an irmã brought it to us as we couldn't leave because of the move.
Long, LONG story short... we had 2 houses, and we couldn't sleep in either one of them. Lovely, right?
But then, Irmã Giann came to the rescue... we ended up sleeping at her house Saturday and Sunday. She is the wife of a non-member, she has 2 boys who are active with her. She is fearless. Goes to church every week, served a mission in Recife... she's one of my heroes, as she goes to church every week without her husband. She's incredible to me. And yeah, she saved us. We got permission from Pres. Lundgren to sleep there for a couple days until we can get this resolved... and know that president never lets anybody sleep outside of the missionary's apt. So this was honestly a miracle.
We did a Noite Familiar (fhe) with them last night about the story of Noah. We had everybody write down with about 30-45 seconds, all of the people that they know. Then they circled who they had in common... the family members, of course. Taught a little message about the importance of families. That exaltation is in FAMILIES, despite the fact that salvation is individual.
I know the Lord has a plan for everything--who knows, maybe all of that had to happen for us to share that message in the house of Juka (her hubbie).
And we're here, P-day. Juka helped us a lot this morning, drove us back to the old house to get the cushions, dropped them off at the old house... We'll be sleeping at the old house until all of this is resolved. Because the new house doesn't have air conditioning, isn't clean, and doesn't have water. And has problems with the gates... it'll be an ongoing project.
So that was our little trial this weekend! It was interesting how the 2 new Sisters arrived, and we all had to learn a lot of patience this weekend with the move-not-move. But now we've all found our peace, accepting the will of the Lord for now as us 4 are sleeping on 3 cushions on the tile floor in our empty apartment.
Besides that... everything is good. Love my companion, I'm definitely learning to rely on the Lord here. I know He has a plan for everything! I know that He loves us individually. I used to think it was a blanket love... that He loves us, and it just happens to touch each one of us. It's not like that at all! He loves us as individuals. He has an individual love for every one of us.
And this love is the Atonement.
I'm grateful for this opportunity I have to be on the mission. It is so hard--but hard things make us so much stronger. I know that the things I'm learning now are changing my life for the better.
Thank you for your prayers and support. I'm grateful for every one of you. You're inspirations to me. <3
Muito amor,
Sister Hill
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