Yeah it was really hard the first couple days because I guess this is the first person who I was really close to since Grandpa who died and it was so unexpected. I'm really worried about Shon and Brady too. I was thinking about that after I left the library last week. Kelly was really the life of that family. Especially Brady. She really pushed him where he needed it most. DON'T LET SHON THROW AWAY KELLY'S COOKBOOKS! If he doesn't want them I will gladly take them! She had a lot of gems and whenever I was over there with them she always brought them out and shared recipes with me! I always learned a lot of things about cooking whenever we stayed with Kelly. Tell Maleah I don't blame her. I don't know if I would've faired any better at her viewing. I definitely want to go put flowers on her grave when I get home. Tell Grandma thanks (for sending him some shirts). We actually have this one investigator who is old and has SO much stuff lying around her house. She gave me like 20 shirts! They smelled awful though. I haven't tried them on yet but I washed them today (they still smell like their house, I think it'll take a couple washes and some heavily scented detergent to smell normal) and hopefully they'll work. The big issue is pants. I have two 34" waist pants, which are a little roomy, and then all my other pants which are about 10" too big. They work for now though so I wouldn't worry about it too much. I'll hopefully come into some more later though. I need to start sending some of it back to you though. I have WAY to much clothes in our closet and more than half of it I don't wear. Something you might, just as a standing request, put in the box is just dried mangoes. They remind me of home and they're a hit with Elder Calderoni. He says he's "converted to Filipino." This week has been a crazy busy week! My Portuguese is improving bit by bit and I can understand Spanish really well now. It's a little bit tougher speaking it though because in my head I translate it straight to English as I hear it but I don't translate it back very well. Still working on it. We worked like animals this week. We picked up 15 new investigators! Which is more than I've gotten in any two weeks combined! We found two amazing families! One is from the Philippines and one's from Costa Rica. The dad of the Filipino family is JUST LIKE DAD! It's pretty funny. He has the same accent and he just thinks the same too. It's funny. They're both really excited to learn though. We really saw the miracles as we worked hard and showed faith. One thing that really changed the success that we saw was our prayers. We decided to devote the last fifteen minutes of the night to singing a hymn, sharing scriptures about prayer, and then having a really great personal prayer. The day after we did that for the first time and then every time after that we saw huge success in everything that we did. Prayer really has actual, literal, and colossal power. We almost set one of our new investigators with a baptismal date but she said she has to pray about it first. We're planning on a lot of the people that we're really working closely with to start progressing really fast and getting baptized. I have a feeling that we're going to see this area explode in the next couple weeks. Faith is as big a part of what we do as hard work is. But when both are adequately combined and properly applied it is incredible the miracles that you will see. The Costa Rican family contacted us! We were just walking on the street and their son ran up to us and stopped us. Apparently they had seen us earlier that day and then seen another set of missionaries in Paterson earlier that day. When they saw us at that time they thought "now we just have to see what they're all about!" We can't wait to see the wondrous miracles that we're about to behold here. Please give everyone my love, especially Shon and Brady, and tell the girls to read their scriptures.
-Elder Guinto
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