This week was a big change! On Tuesday, I was transferred to another town with Elder Abdom. He is from Brazil and is a very hard worker; we work great together! We both opened the area, which means we both had no idea about anything when we arrived here. We had to learn everything ourselves.

The new area is a lot different than Tatuí. I´m in the capital region now, which means there´s a lot more people and everything is more rushed. Our area has lots of “favela”, which is like a maze of humble houses all stacked super close to each other. Elder Abdom and I are super excited because it is a very good area to find people to be baptized.

On Tuesday, the President challenged everyone to baptize at least one person this weekend. Even though we new nothing about our area and had no investigators, we took up the challenge. It took one day to find our baptism for the weekend. On Thursday night we found a 15 year old boy named Lucas who was just waiting for the baptism invite. On Friday we returned to teach him everything. (To baptize here, a person has to visit at least two sacrament meetings. Being that we had stake conference on Saturday and Sunday, President said that each session counted as a sacrament meeting). On Saturday we returned to bring him to Stake Conference. But when we got to his house, he wasn´t there!! He was playing soccer, what every kid in Brazil does on Saturday.

We ran all over the neighborhood looking for him at all the soccer fields. We didn´t find him, and conference was about to start. Then we found out that there was one more soccer field in one of the schools. We ran to the school to look for him. When we entered the school we found him immediately! We all got on the bus and went to conference. Elder Rais, of the Quorum of the 70, was presiding. Lucas definitely felt the spirit at the conference, he even said he wanted to fast before his baptism to make sure he was doing the right thing.  After conference, we arranged his baptismal interview.

On Sunday morning we picked him up and all went to Conference together. After an amazing conference, Lucas was baptized!! He was super excited. Elder Abdom and I have a goal to baptize every week of this transfer. I am learning the importance of Faith in finding people to baptize. Heavenly Father is always preparing people; we just have to be diligent in finding them.

Have a Great week everyone!

Love,

Elder Olsen

I met a teenage boy a couple of weeks ago. I saw him sitting by himself on the street corner, so I walked up to him and started talking. He is a little autistic and thinks more like a younger child. He is very sweet and loves learning about everything we teach him.  He came back to church for the second time yesterday.

It was fast and testimony meeting and I asked him to go up and bare his testimony, but he said he was too shy. I kept nudging him to go up, but he was too shy. Then I offered to go up with him and help him. He finally agreed. When he got to the microphone, he didn´t even turn to me for help, he just started talking all by himself! He bore an awesome testimony of Jesus Christ and the Church.

Our area is huge, there are tons of people out there. We are always changing neighborhoods. Here, there are kids they call “Funkeiros” which are the people who listen to funk music. But not the funk we think of like jazz,  haha!

My companion, Elder C. speaks a little English and I´ve been practicing speaking Spanish with him. It´s pretty easy for me to speak Spanish now that I know Portuguese!

Love,

Elder Olsen

P.S. the Coca-Cola here is way better than in the States! Here they use real cane sugar instead of artificial sugar like they do in the States. People loooooove Coca here!!