HELLO AGAIN!
Yet another week has gone by in the beautiful Portugal. And i guess everywhere else too. hah
Sister Juilfs is supes awesome. But all of a sudden we have been eating lunches and dinners with lots of members´ families which like never happened before now and it´s awesome for me but poor sister Juilfs has always had a really bad stomach problem that doctors have not been able to find out what causes it but pretty much she can´t eat anything outside of most fruits and veggetables. If she eats anything else she gets terrible stomach pains. The members wonder how she is still alive even though she can´t eat meat (which is basically included in every meal and snack in some way here.) But we just go to the store and buy a salad for her to take incase they didn´t make one. Needless to say she´s super healthy. She can eat rice, but she hasn´t really liked it before until she tried mine! WHABAM! can i say pronta para casar? #no. But anyway i kinda want to try her diet while i´m with her. So i´ll live on oatmeal, apples, salad, spinach, cucumbers, carrots, rice cakes, and whatever else she can eat for the next 5 weeks at least. (i´m going to try to do it... this week i´ll just buy what she can eat but there are still a few more things in the house i´ll finish up but after that... vegan diet on sterioids baby.)
Like two and a half months ago when i was with Sister Lybbert it was the end of the day and "super" late, like 9 o´clock and pitch black outside (other missionaires--we go in at 9:30pm and the lattest we can be out is 10pm, we wake up at 7 hah) when we decided to do what we don´t normally like to do under those circumstances: try to enter apartment buildings and knock doors. But on the first doorbell we rang of the first building we tried (the building of a less active member we had just talked earlier in the day) (they have all the doorbells on a little panel by the main entrance to the apartment building) with outsomeone even coming over the intercom to ask who we were they unlocked the door from their house and let us into the building. We were surprised but headed up to the top (third) floor where we had rung) and knocked on thier door. This cute about 37 year old lady we found out to be named Mara, a brazilian opened the door and to our surprise and delight invited us to come in. (this never happens with normal portuguese people... the assume we are there to steal their souls or something right of the bat usually hah) We kind of stood there for a second apologizing for the late time we passed by and that we didn´t really need to come in and bother them etc but she insisted and we went in and when we asked if we could just say a quick prayer and come back another day she agreed and so we said a prayer and included her little kids in the prayer cuz they were sick and then planned with her to come back the day after next to teach about the plano de salvação which we left a panflet for. So we show up two days later and she didn´t answer the door so we wented and visited our less-active member and she said that the lady on the third floor moved yesterday back to brazil. We were pretty shocked and surprised (at first we didn´t really believe her, sometimes people make up stories for their neighboors so we won´t go bother them too haha) but when we kept trying and for a week or two after that no one ever answered the door so we assumed that that was true. We sadly gave up and moved on.
So this Tuesday with Sister Juilfs and I this lady with sunglasses walks by and we recognize each other and we start talking. (i'm playing along pretending I know who she is--happens all the time) but she says hey you'll have to come by and say another prayer for my daughter and niece... we moved up the street here's my addresss.. blah blah awesomeness and then as we were saying goodbye I said I was sorry I don't remember your name, MARA! Okay sweet, bye! DING! it all came flash flooding back. So to make a long story short we go back there and she was baptized when she was 12 and we'll go back and reactivate her haha! sorry if that doesn't make sense I was going to write more but I have to be done like NOW heh
Love you all!!
Sister shumway
