This week!‏

Hey everyone!

How are you all doing? It was great to see the video of Carrie in Disneyworld! She´s always getting more and more adorable. I bought some surprises for her today, so I hope she likes them! I was thinking about Grandma and Grandpa all day on Saturday, so I hope the party turned out great!

As for us, this week was good. We contacted two good referrals, and found some good new people. We contacted Silvia, a referral from a missionary in another ward, who´s the mom of several members. She´s very cool, a 70-ish year old woman from Uruguay who has quite a bit of an accent. She´s great, kind of a brusque old woman who told us we´d have to answer all her questions, and she has a lot, but she was willing to let us try. I really liked her even just the first visit. We also contacted Laura, the 14 year old friend of a 50-ish year old woman in another ward, the wife of one of the ward mission leaders. They´re friends from a sewing class, and the member friend offered her a Book of Mormon. So Laura is very cool, very active in her Catholic youth group, super spiritual and interested in the BoM.

Unfortunately, we´re going to have to give up Laura to another ward, as our boundaries changed yesterday! Yesterday the 7th ward in Uruguaiana was created, another Ipiranga Ward like in Santa Maria. So they stole one street from us, right where Laura lives. But I´m excited for her, she seems really interested and I´m sure it will go great with her and the elders.

Also in exciting news, we got a bishop yesterday! A man who nobody thought they would pick, as he was already bishop a little while ago. Another Marco (the same name as the last bishop). But he´s very cool, so it will be great! We also got a new ward mission leader, which will be really cool. The new one is a young guy who got home from his mission a few years ago, so that will be nice -- the other one was great, but he only had like a year and a half in the church, so didn´t know how a lot of things worked. But he´s now Elder´s Quorum president, so that´s cool.

But as for the story I said I would tell! Let me see. It all starts with the fact that it seems like all of a sudden we have bad luck with men! It seems like all the men we make missionary contacts with end up getting the wrong idea. So we talk to a lot of people, lots of them men, just "making contacts" as missionaries do. And up til now, it´s always been so normal. But lately it´s getting all weird! Just one of the various examples is Cristiano.

Cristiano is a street sweeper who we passed one day and he asked us what time the meetings were at church. So we made a contact with him, told him when to be there on Sunday, and asked for his address. He lived far, so we called and gave it to the elders in the other ward. But imagine our surprise when he showed up on Sunday!! It was amazing, I mean even the people we´ve been teaching forever often don´t come to church, so we were overjoyed to see someone we´d met only once. He got there as our sacrament meeting was ending and the other ward´s was starting, so he went to the other ward. We were all happy, and reinforced the commitment of the elders to go there, telling them how excited he was.

So then we didn´t hear more from him for a bit, until we passed him in the street again! This time he was kind of weird, saying, "Oh yeah, now that I saw you guys, I´ll definitely be there Sunday!" So we went on our way. But imagine our surprise when he showed up again Sunday! This time with a friend. "Wow," we thought, "he´s a super elect! Even bringing his friends to church!" So after, we had Gospel Principles class, but they left soon after we explained that the next class was just for them with the other men. But yet again, we were surprised when we walked out of church and Cristiano pulled up on his motorcycle!

That was the first time the "weird-alarm" rang in my mind. He pulled up and started talking to us, not beating around the bush much before asking, "But umm....do you guys go to the movies and stuff?" A pause. Dang it, I thought, he´s not so elect after all. "Umm, no. No, we don´t." "So you don´t date?" "No...no. But the elders are coming to your house, don´t forget."

So...that was the long story of how we got asked to the movies. It wasn´t a scary stalker experience, as it just occurred to me you guys could interpret it, just another funny mission experience like when I got knocked over by the dog:P Later when we went to Luciano´s house, the first thing he said was those guys had weirded him out a little and we should be careful, but then when we said we already knew and had already crushed his hopes, he and Alba proceeded to tease us about it, and still do.

But that´s about it for this week! Things continue to go well, and I´m making the most of the time I have. Thanks so much for all your love and support! I love you all so much! Have an amazing week!

Love always,
Sister Madsen