This week was good because I went to a specialist and he cleared a lot up. The other doctors thought I had something a lot worse so I had to buy all this expensive medicine that wasn't working. Turns out all I had was an allergy to something. We don't know what but it is far from serious so no worries.

   It is HOT here, and only gonna get hotter. Transfers are coming up in 2 weeks so I hope to get sent somewhere cooler than here, but it is more likely I’ll get sent somewhere even hotter.

   In our mission we just count contacts. We meet someone on the street or knock on their door and talk about the gospel, and ask them if they want to hear our message. We don't really have golden questions that I am aware of we just talk to them about the Gospel. The whole point of a contact is to get an address or something to teach them. We are supposed to do 10 each every day, so 20 per companionship and 140 per week. In our area no one wants to be rude, so everyone will let you

teach them so it is actually pretty hard to get all these contacts because we have to teach too and it takes time. Normally we do just a few per day each. But this last week we went to a new place in our

area besides the favela we normally work in. We didn’t have any references or investigators in this area so we basically contacted all day. This last week we had a little over 50 contacts. We did not do
this every day, just a few days this week so 50 is pretty good for us. With regards to Book of Mormons... we do not count how many we give out because we are not supposed to give out Book of Mormons to people on the street. There are a TON of churches here. Literally, it's like Texas but in a city setting. Imagine San Francisco or Oakland with a different church on every street corner. So a lot of other churches do not like us because our church is true, so they tell all of their members to ask the Mormons for their Bible. So we get a lot of people here who say "oh! the mormons! can I have one of your bibles?" We were given talks from members of the seventies who said we are not walking free bookstores. We are teachers. So what we do is we give Books of Mormon to people who we give the full first lesson to. It's pretty funny, these people who ask for a Mormon bible. We say oh sure we'll give you one. We can give you one and your whole family too! Can we drop by your house sometime, leave a message, and give you one? It's pretty funny. Almost everyone will walk off angrily because they do not want the lessons, just the book to give to their preachers. So the preachers read the Book of Mormon and find solitary scriptures such as the eat drink and be merry scripture and say that this is what we teach in our church and such. Many people do not like us because their preachers have done this.

  Ok, as I said before we proselyted in a new area of our area this week so we have lots of people we are going to visit this upcoming week. We hope they become new investigators. We did find one new family in Vila Juaniza who is actually married! We were so excited because this is rare in Vila Juaniza. The only hard part is they are pretty firm Catholics, but they love our message and said we can come back whenever we want. Not too many spiritual experiences this week, just trying to feel the spirit to find the houses that have people we can baptize. It's been really long for us since we had a baptism and this is not normal in the mission. Usually missionaries average one baptism every few weeks here, and most more than this. So it's been tough emotionally and spiritually because no one realizes how important this is. We teach them and show them but nothing will happen if they do not help themselves and pray and read.

The address of the Internet Café I am in right now is:

Rua Comendador Bastos 279; Ilhã do Governador

Well I hope all is well, Lots of love from my end.
Elder Baldwin