wow, another week has flown by and now we´re almost in december! Christmas is definately in the air here! This week was a good one :)

We finally had a zone conference with President Torgan. They came out with a new curriculum for all the missions in September, I think, and in the new curriculum we only have interviews and zone conference every three months, instead of every transfer. So it feels like forever since we had had a zone conference with President. He talked about how we can open our eyes (spiritually of course) and gave us a step by step process of conversion- for us and also for our inveestigators. Desire, which comes from our testimony, leads to obedience. From that comes faith and repentance- feeling the remorse of sin and changing. As we make and keep convenants, we have the company of the spirit, which gives us spiritual power. As we act with power and open our hearts we will be able to open our eyes as well, and be truly converted. It was really interesting everything that we talked about, and the scriptures he shared. I don´t have my notes with me to give the scriptural references, but you can study them out and find them :) But the conference was good.

On Thursday was Thanksgiving! Our ward is all brasileiros that don´t do anything for thanksgiving, so we didn´t have any invites to eat with members. So, us and the elders in our ward had our own thanksgiving lunch. They actually made (and bought) almost everything, which was really impressive! We had chicken, mashed potatoes, stuffing (it was real homemade stuffing!) and rolls...not too shabby! It was fun to celebrate, even if it was just us. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving as well.

On Saturday we had a baptism- Maria José, who´s an older Portuguesa. She started to learn about the church a year ago, but decided not to be baptised. The irmãs had just started teaching her again right before I got here. Whats neat is that one of the elders who started teaching her a year ago returned to this area for his last transfer right now before he goes home. So he got to baptize her. She was really excited when he returned, and it is so neat to see that really each of us has a purpose in being where we are! We´re teaching another friend of her´s that will be baptized this next Saturday, and also her cousin. She´s really great :) The baptism was really special and had a sweet spirit.

So, those are the highlights of the week...I can´t believe that we´re almost in December, before you know it Christmas will have already passed! So we just have to take advantage of every day that we have :D Hope you all have a great week and remember I love you!

Love,

Irmã Geiger

ps- to any who are planning to send packages\cards or something- the mission christmas party is on December 21 and is when we will get all the stuff that is sent to the mission office. It normally takes 8-10 days for things to get here, so it would be a good idea to send items in the next two weeks :D

Wow, I can honestly not believe that I´m already writing again! Time
is flying by so quickly.

This last week nothing unusual really happened. The ward members here
like to feed us, which is nice of them, but I feel that we lose a LOT
of time by having a lunch with members every day. It´s hard to be
charitable and grateful sometimes! But I just need to get better...

This week we continued to work with two women who are preparing to be
baptized this Saturday. One of them has been investigating the church
for a year, and finally decided to act and get baptized. The other
lady is her friend, that has a lot of drama in her life (divorce,
daughter with depression...) a lot of problems in the family. Trying
to help them both with their problems has made me so grateful for my
relative problem-free life!! Also there is an investigator and a
member here who are both facing the problems and drama caused by
breaking the law of chastity. I am so grateful for the commandments!!!
It is soo obvious why they are so important when you see the suffering
and problems caused in the lives of those who break them. Truly they
make us free.

So, are you all looking forward to Thanksgiving? There´s no
thanksgiving here- just another normal day. Everyone is already
getting ready for Christmas! There are lights in the streets and all
the holiday decorations in the stores :) It almost makes it worth
being cold...

Not really much that is noteworthy has happened...I finished the Book
of Mormon again today :) It´s interesting that I never noticed how
much it talks about the ministery of angels at the end...In Morôni 7
he talks about the ministry of angels to men- that they manifest them
to those who have a vigorous faith and a mind firm in sanctity (vs
30), and of the importance of this ministry to prepare the way and
fulfill the covenants of the Lord. I had never noticed before that one
gift of the spirit is to see angels and ministrating spirits (10:14).
How neat! I decided that I would like to develop this spritual
gift...so we´ll see how that goes! But it was just something that
stuck out that I have never really thought before.

I hope you all have a great week and a great Thanksgiving! Eats lots
of turkey for me, and cornmeal rolls :D

Wow, another week has already flown by, and we´re in the middle of November! I arrived in my new area, Mem Martins on Monday (well, technically at 1am Tuesday morning). The executive secretaries were asked to give all the Irmãs rides to the new areas, but as all of the areas changed, it took a while for all of us to arrive. But, eventually we all arrived :)

Mem Martins is close to Sintra, which is supposedly a big tourist spot...hopefully I´ll get there on a pday soon. There´s a big castle on a mountain that we can see from where we live. It´s a lot different from Lisboa- there´s green! There aren´t as many people in the streets, which is a little sad, but I like it so far.

My companion is Irmã Reis, this is her second transfer in the mish. She´s originally from Angolda but has been in Portugal for about 10 years. She´s fun to work with and so far everything is going well!

On Sunday at church, I felt like I was in Brasil! Almost all of the members here are Brasileiro, which is a change but is neat. The ward is really strong and has a good missionary focus, so I think it will be great to work with the members here. They like to feed the missionaries..which is a bad thing for me! We have lunch almost every day of the week, and sometimes two meals in one day....yesterday we had lunch with a member after chuch, an investigator wanted to have a ´´lanche´´ (a snack or small meal), and at the end of the night another investigator gave us food to take home...aaaghh!!!

Apparently there´s no one in the ward that plays the piano, so I got to acompany the ward in Sacrament Meeting..the primary also asked me to help with the ward primary program that they´re having in two weeks...I think I´ll be playing a lot! But I really like to play, so I´m all right with having the chace to serve :) I´m grateful to be able to help.

Things are going all right with the work here. There have been a lot of recent converts, but the inctivity rate is high too, sadly. So we´re trying to bring them back while finding new people as well. We marked two women this week to be baptized in a few weeks...they´re friends, and older Portugues women, and they´re sweet. Hopefully they continue to progress!

Yeah, not really much new to say (well, everything is new, but I´m not sure what´s the most interesting). Christmas is already coming in ful force, in stores, at home...I´m excited!

So, today is transer day :( I´ve been praying all week that I wouldn´t leave, but as usual, Heavenly Father knows better than I do! I´m being transfered to Mem Martins, which is close to Oeiras, but I don´t really know where...I´ll be greenie-breaking a native! It´ll be nice to serve with a native again, my Portugues could use a little polishing :P (or a lot!)

But this last week was really good. Everything went well with Cesaltina´s baptism. Well, at least in the end everything worked out... the baptismal font in our chapel in ´´under construction´´ and locked to our access, which has been really frustrating. So we have to go to Gago Coutinho, which is about 40 minutes away, to have baptisms. Last week for Jorge´s baptism, we missed the bus to get there by 30 seconds, which was soo frustrating!!! Luckily the Bishop was kind enough to come pick us up. So, this week we got to the stop at plenty of time before the bus would come by. However, there was a protest going on in the same area (its by a big roundabout- Marquês de Pombal). Little did we know that the bus stop was closed off to vehicle access. So we watched the bus come, pass the area where it would enter the bus stop, and continue on around the round about! We started running after it, hoping it would stop for a few minutes at the next stop, but it was gone. So we had to wait another 40 minutes for another bus to get there!! There is always ´´drama´´ when there is a baptism. But, the elders helped us get everything ready and the members were great, and it was a really good service. Her boyfriend baptised Cesaltina, and it was really cute, although she had to go under 3 times to get everything covered! But it was awesome to see her and Jorge confirmed during church on Sunday. The chapel was full, and also the gospel principles for new members class, so its really rewarding to see how the ward is growing.

I have really LOVED Lapa- I love the members here, the new converts, and working in the city. I really didn´t (and don´t!) want to go becuase my heart is here, but I know that I´ll love Mem Martins too, in time. It just shows that time really is moving when changes come...

We had a cool experience this week with a less-active. I had in my mind for a few days the name ``Ribeiro Santos´´ like a streetname. I looked in our index of streets, and saw a rua that was ´´Ribeiro Sanches´´. So we went there and knocked the predios there. In one of the first few predios we knocked, we found a woman named Joy from the Filipines. She works in a house there and has been here for 3 months. She was baptized in 1987 and even went to the temple, but becuase of family opposition eventually fell into inactivity. But she was so happy to see us, and she really wanted to go to church and become active again. Just so happens that we have a single mom in our ward who is from the Filipines. We saw her the next day, so we told her about this woman we had found. She called her, and it turns out they are from the same island of the Filipines! Joy came to church on Sunday, and it was soo awesome to see her and Elsa together. Elsa has really needed a friend, and it is so good for her to have found Joy. They were both blessed!! It´s great to see them both so happy and have the chance to mutually strengthen each other. IT´s interesting how we were led to find her, and was really a testimony to me that Heavenly FAther knows and watches out for each of his children.

I hope you all had a great Halloween and are ready to settle into the holiday season! We busted out the Christmas music last night, and I´m officially excited :D But it´s crazy to believe how fast time is flying...

This week had its ups and downs, like always. We did a lot of procura but didn´t find as many new investigators as we would have liked. Its weird that at times it seems to easy to find new people, and at other times it´s such a struggle. It really doesn´t depend on us, but we just have to continue to seek direction and work, and the results will come. But, we did still see miracles :)

Yesterday Jorge was finally baptized! We´ve been working with him all this month. He´s from CaboVerde and came here for a leg operation and is recovering\ receiving treatment. These last couple weeks his family has invited him to spend the weekend with them, which is good, but meant that he couldn´t go to church. He finally made the decision that church is more important, talked to his family that he wanted to stay here for the weekends, which was the only thing he was lacking to be baptized! It´s been interesting teaching him- he doesn´t talk Portugues really, just criole, that isn´t all that understandable. But we´ve all learned a lot of patience in the last month ;) It´s been neat to see the changes in him over the last couple weeks, and so good to see him finally ready to be baptized. Our chapel is ´´in obras´´ and the baptismal font is locked, so we had to go to another chapel, which was a pain and a hassle. But, everything is worth it in the end!

We also had a surprising miracle yesterday. There´s a young woman who is dating a boy in our ward that has been coming consistently for a few months. I had tried in the past to set up appointments to teach her, but they fell through and I didn´t think that she really had that much interest, but just came because of her boyfriend. BUT, yesterday she came up to me at church and asked if we could teach her the last two lessons that shes lacking (she was taught like 4 months ago the first lessons). Of course I said yes, and we set up an appointment for yesterday afternoon. We taught her, which was the first time I had had a prolonged conversation with her, and it was really good. She know so much and she has a strong testimony that the church is true. We talked about the gospel of Jesus Christ- the five basic steps. She said that she had already thought about baptism, and had wanted to be baptized before her birthday in the summer, but with holidays and other things, it didn´t work out. We committed her to be baptized, and she said ´´yes, as soon as possible...I've already waited months´´!!!!! So we´ll be having her baptism this Saturday. It was totally a surprise, but as we talked with her, she is so ready, and has such a strong desire. She talked about about how so many things have already changed as she´s gotten to know the church, and I know that she´ll be even more blessed by the decision to be baptized. Bençãos!!!!!!!!

So despite the work being hard or discouraging at times, Heavenly Father really gives us so many tender mercies and we see so many miracles. I love it!

Bem. Lots of random things happened this week, and I just wanted to give you a taste of what is missionary work in Portugal....

There is the ´´Portugues finger´´. When you´re doing something wrong, or somebody doesn´t want to talk with you, they give you the ´´Portugues finger´´, where they wave their pointer finger definitively in the air. The finger is the final rejection! ...there´s also ´´the hand´´ where you greet someone thats passing and they raise their hand, almost as if to greet you with a wave, but really it´s saying ´´don´t talk to me´´. When this happens we say to each other ´´you got the hand!!´´. It´s interesting talking with strangers all day.

All of the predios, or buildings, have a doorbell pad (I don´t know what you call it in English), ou seja, campainhas. You ring for each apartment, and they always say ´´Quem é?!´´ to ask who it is. If the pad doesn´t have an intercom system, they like to open their windows and yell to talk. This may work when they´re on the bottom floor, but when they´re on the 3rd or higher floor, it gets complicated! There´s no way that there going to hear or understand us, and we´re just there on the street yelling that we´re disciples of Jesus Christ! Not exactly the way I pictured contacting :P They also ask ´´quem é´´ when you knock on their doors. People here are afraid of opening their doors, and refuse to open it until they know who it is (and even then they don´t...) But when they can´t understand what you´re saying because there´s a door in the way, it can be frustrating!! It´s happened several times where someone came to the door and couldn´t hear or understand us because of other noise. They went back inside to turn off the tv or tell someone to be quiet instead of just opening the door and solving the problem!!! it´s interesting ;)

I always knew about the supposed discord between missionaries and dogs, but really never appreciated how annoying dogs can be :P There are so many dogs here...the streets are covered in dog poo! But they´re always inside the houses. It´s happened several times that someone said they could not open the door or talk to us at the door because of the dogs. The other week a dog bit me for the first time! Luckily it didn´t draw blood, but was a little scary....suffice it to say that the mission has sealed a solid dislike of dogs in me...

Other quirk of Portugues culture- when we try to talk to people who are in their house, they say that they came answer and that there busy, or whatever other excuse. Then when we go on to talk to more people in the same area, they decide to help us, saying at every house we go to ´´não há ninguém´´, or no ones home. This has happened many times that someone says that at the same time that someone answers the door at that house....interesting how they suddenly want to ´´help´´ us. The other week we contacted a lady that was in her window (they all like to stay at the window and watch the street) and she didn´t want anything. Then when we were contacting people on the other side of the street, she started yelling at them about who we are when they came to the window to talk to us (see two paragraphs above for an explanation of this behavior!) So they gave us the ´´Portugues finger´´ and went back inside. aahh, life is interesting in Portugal!!

I really do love it, sorry if these descriptions seem a little negative. It´s really not, just oddly absurd and at times I can´t believe that whats happening really is happening. But, you never know whats going to happen when you´re a missionary! We passed this potentials house last week and there was another couple there from Romania that didn´t really speak Portugues. We sang and prayed with them, and then tried to watch a dvd. She put in the film and then started asking us if we would give them money, because they´re behind on rent. Obviously we said that we couldn´t give them money. She wrenched the dvd from the machine, and they practically kicked us out of the house, all the while speaking things that I had no idea what she was saying....we just laughed about it afterward...so absurd.

But, it is awesome to get to know Heavenly Father´s children, of all varieties. I know that He loves each and every one of us individually, and that He has a plan. I hope that you all have a great week and remember that I love you!