Howard, Keaton

Olá everyone!! Hope you all are doing well. Sorry for missing last week's email, it totally flew over my head. These last two weeks were pretty crazy. Transfers happened last friday. Our last week of the transfer was fine. Nothing too special. We have a tradition here in Chaves, that on one of the last days of the transfer, we go to an old Roman dam and have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch as we reflect on the whole transfer. It was super cool. Super calm. So that was cool. Another tradition we have, which is a whole mission one, is to open kinder surprise eggs to predict what will happen the next transfer. I ended up getting a goat, and so I was pumped about that. When we found out about transfers a couple of days later, I found out I actually was getting the Goat as a comp. I literally couldn't have been more pumped than I was when I found out. His name is Elder On, and he is really cool. It's gonna be a great transfer. During transfers, I stayed in a town ca...

Olá! Holy smokes, what a crazy past few days. I'll explain the title in a bit, but first, I'll write about all the normal stuff that happened. We just kinda ran through the normal motions the whole week. We were able to have a few divisions, both with the ZL's and another companionship in our district. Both went really well and were super fun. We also marked a baptism!! He is the son of one of the members in our group. Maybe I already mentioned them in a previous email, but I'll explain again. So the father is a less active member, and his son has just turned 8. And so they both have started to come to church because the dad was interested in maybe having their son baptized. They have come consistently the entire past month, which is awesome, and they have both been studying the Book of Mormon from the beginning, too. They both really like it, especially the son. His son, Iani, is super smart and LOVES scripture stories. His idea of a good time is to watch Bible videos ...

Olá a todos! Hope you all are doing great. This last week was a pretty good one in terms of missionary work. At least for here in Chaves, haha. As a mission we set a goal of finding 8 people for every companionship. Here in Chaves, it is a bit more difficult, but we still got relatively close at 5 new friends this week which was good for this area. We also had a ton more lessons, and had some members help us which was awesome. As a mission, we hit that goal at an average of 9.7 per companionship. So that was cool to see the faith everyone had in this goal come to fruition, and then a bit more.  This past week, we have been traveling a lot. And we have to use busses to get everywhere, and it gets pretty expensive. As a result, about 3/4 of our msf went toward travel and we haven't received travel money this transfer yet, so our money took a big hit. We haven't been able to buy groceries yet, so we have been getting creative with our food. Like worse than college level creative, ...

Olá everyone! Hope you all had a great new year! It was definitely a great one for us over here. We came down to Vila Real yesterday and spent New years with the elders there. After we got all our stuff done, we headed down to the main town square, and they had a huge bonfire going on and a bunch of bands playing stuff. The bonfire was one of the biggest I've ever seen, and it will probably be the biggest I'll ever see. They took whole entire trees and threw those onto the pile. It got super hot, and we had to stand about 30 feet away to not burn to death. Later, we set off confetti popper things and had a bunch of snacks, which was fun. And they set off a lot more fireworks than I thought. The apartment here has an amazing view of the whole valley, and so we were able to see everything. So that was super cool to see. This whole past week was a great one too. We had our first member meal! It was really good. They grilled beef and porkchops, and we had rice and salad as well. Th...