We walked and walked and walked and walked...

Walk and walk, a hair cut and growing sometimes hurts!  Good to hear from our girl this week!  Love the pictures!  Mark and I got on google earth and found the church that she walks to.  Her house is a few miles from it.  It made us happy to be able to see where she is.  Love this girl more everyday! ~Momma Baker

November 17, 2014

Well, this week was below average and if i complain too much it will give me a bad attitude but i will just say that I have more patience then i ever had before. 

I cried for the first time because i missed my family this week. Don’t worry it wasn’t like a curl up into a ball and cry kind of cry it was just shedding a couple tears. I have a friend who found me on instagram and followed me and the rest of the fam bam. You probably saw. Her name is Barbara. She is adorable. But she talks super duper fast and has a really hard to understand accent. Anyway, Barbara followed me and saw the pictures that Zac and Al posted when i left and she thought it was the cutest thing so she showed me and i cried just a little bit. And i also saw the post of the monkey. Isn’t that the coolest thing though!! I am fine though. During the day i focus on everything other than the family because if i focus on the family i wont get much work done.

Well this week i thought to myself wow your hair would be a lot easier if you got layers. Well my comp Sister Moraes used to be a really good hairdresser so i was all hey sister, can you please cut my hair and give me layers? I think that would be really great and so she did. She managed to cut off 4 inches of my hair that was down to my bellybutton, but it turned out really cute. I didn’t want any length off but you cant really tell because my hair was really really long before. 

I feel like my portuguese has stopped progressing. I can understand a lot now. Its still really hard to understand everything especially old people. They are hard. I don’t want my portuguese to stop progressing! I am everything but fluent!! That would be a disaster! It is hard because when i start talking to someone my one companion Sister dV interrupts me and starts going of in portuguese or when people talk to me she interrupts and says she’s american, she doesn’t understand portuguese. I need to stop complaining. I know more than she thinks i know. And i understand when people talk slow and i know enough portuguese to tell them that i can understand when people talk slow. 

I need more patience.

She also has these crazy ideas about America. The other day she was talking with Sister Moraes and said that America doesn’t have catholics. I was all actually yes they do.  Just weird stuff like that. She has never been to America! She has no idea what she is talking about! We are in a trio because she was sick and couldn’t go to her mission right away so she feels like her mission hasn’t started yet. Well it has started. She called her sister yesterday.  I don’t know what to do! She disobeys mission rules and is driving me crazy!!!! 

We walked 5000000 miles this week. Mario is doing awesome! He is really getting into church and he loves it! I am so happy about that. Fransisca, another person who was baptized before i got here heard some bad stuff about the church i think and doesn’t want to go to church anymore. The 2 baptisms we thought we were going to have this week fell through. There are these two sweet teenage girls who know they should be baptized but they don’t want to live the rules of our church such as going to church on sunday and keeping the 10 commandments. We are working on them.

We fasted for water this week because Natal is very dry. We couldn’t take a shower or wash our cloths and dishes for 2 days because our land lady turned the water off. Dang it! but we drink out of a jug of clean water so we had enough to drink. 

 And i am 82% sure that you found our church. It is small, white doesn’t have grass right now because it is so dry. But yeah my house is only about 2 miles down the road. It it the second story of a 2 story house but the first story is a completely different house then the first story. It has a great view of the whole area. I love our little house. It is one of the nicer ones in the area. There are some nice houses here. They all aren’t very big but i hear that our area is one of the richer areas in our mission. It is nice. Not too ghetto. 

 We are also trying to think of some things that we can do in the community so that people hear more about the mormons and make friends with the mormons. Something fun because people wont come unless its a chill thing. I don’t know we will see. If you guys have ideas let me know!

Well sorry i complained. This last week was just hard! I will change my attitude and next week will be better. I am happy when we work hard though and i am determined to work hard. 

I love you all! I am praying for you! Thank you for your support and your prayers

love Sister Baker

ps. I spelt baixos wrong in my last letter. Baixos means short. Baijos is kisses. I dont speak portuguese yet!

Its weird how a testimony works. You have to have faith in all of those things but first you even have to have faith in your faith. You have to have faith that your faith will work and that faith even is faith. I love that principle. It helps me realize how small and insignificant i am and how God knows everything and truly can do all things. Just rely on him. And then act. Just do it. Just run into the darkness and have faith. That is the moral of my mission. Just run. and Have faith.