10/7/09 Letter from Elder Shelhamer

These past few weeks have been great. I love it here. I am doing well, and am healthy. The work here is great, and everything is just, wonderful. Life is good.
So I am currently serving in an area called Fonte Aleixo. It is cool. This past week the power has been going off every day though. Its crazy. Also, we didn´t have water for about three days, it came back yesterday, and now it is gone again. Haha. Crazy.
Work is going well. We have an area called Patim that we go out to. Its about 30 minutes away from our house by car. To travel to this area, we travel in their method of public transportation. They have pickup trucks with bars on the side that we hope in and go flying down the road. It is always an adventure.

This past week when we were out there we had a very interesting lesson. We know that Heavenly Father loves all of His children, and everyone needs to hear our message, and so, we try to talk to everyone. This past week we went to this one woman, who lived in a small cement-block house. It was in very poor condition, and smelled bad. We entered and she gave us her best chairs to sit on, which as a normal American, you wouldn´t want to sit on them. We sat down, and started a lesson with her, and then her 6 children came in. They had on either no clothes, or a t-shirt that was ripped, torn, and dirty, but they had smiles and were just wonderful. They all gathered around their mother for the lesson. As we taught the lesson, a neighbor came in, and stood to the side and listened to the message. It was a older lady. She took one of the kids into the hall of the house and started hitting-beating this child. The child returned to the room a few minutes later crying, and the mother was upset. Remember, we were in the middle of a lesson. This old lady had something against these children, because as she stood there during our lesson, she kept moving closer to the other children, and kept hitting them in the head. It was very sad. The mother got very mad, and screamed at the lady to leave, but she wanted one of our pamphlets first. We gave he one and she left, and the lesson continued... Life for the people here is rough. But this is their live. They love their Heavenly Father here, and we have many strong members. But there are times with interesting things like this.
I am out of time for today, until next time.