General Conference!

Hey family!

This week was good! We don’t have a lot of people to teach so we’ve been doing a lot of street contacting and knocking on doors. As you can imagine, it’s a little difficult and not especially effective, but on the bright side, I feel like I’m getting to know the area well! And we did meet a few new investigators who seemed very interested. On Thursday as Elder Kocinba and I were walking to a member’s house, a man who was waiting for the bus with his wife and baby stopped us and said, “You guys are Mormons, right? Where’s your church? My wife and I have been wanting to go for a while!” As it turned out, they live in Morrinhos just outside of our area, but we referred them to the missionaries there and we were pretty excited!

We were all looking forward to conference all week, and it didn’t disappoint! We went to the stake center in Guarujá to watch all of the sessions there. I watched the first session in Portuguese, which was hard but I still felt like I got a lot out of it. Then for the rest of the sessions, the English-speaking missionaries and some of the fluent Brazilians watched in English in another room, so that was nice! It was definitely a lot easier to focus and also to take notes in English. Overall, it was great! I really liked all the talks, and the singing was super good too.

Not much else happened this week! Next week we have our big Easter conference, and apparently the holiday mission conferences are really fun, so I’m looking forward to that. We also have transfers! It’s hard to believe I’ve already spent almost a whole transfer in the field. President Cabral has made us think that there probably won’t be a lot of transferring for the Bertioga Zone, but I’ll let you know next week! Love you all!

Elder Maughan

[excerpts from some emails with Craig:

SCOTT: Craig, are you addicted to pão doce yet? It was always super cheap in my areas. I may or may not have bought one like at least every other day…

CRAIG: If pão doce is the pão with the sweet glaze and the coconut bits sometimes, then I may or may not have had one this morning. Names are hard at the bakery, so I point and say how many I want instead.

ERIC: Just every other day, Scott? I tried to buy one on every day other than Sunday. Like Manna.

Ah, the joy of three siblings all serving in Brazil!]