Starting from Ground Zero!

These 2 are me Saying Goodbye toParque das Nações! 

Last night with Jefferson & Karina! 

Elder Baisdon is returning to the States!

Hello family!!! 

Shouts out to Craig Chilton for his birthday on saturday! hope you had a good one! And also a Happy Birthday to Rachel! Hope you had a fantastic day as well!! 

Things here as normal are nuts! Getting to a new area is always an adventure. Got here on Tuesday and so far so good. I'm opening an area...again...which is an adventure within itself! My new comp is an Elder from Brasil, Sao Paulo actually. He lives literally about 2 hours away! haha! So he's close to home! He only has two more transfers until he goes home. He was just called as a zone leader this transfer, so looks like I'll be training him, even though I was never really trained!  Just went with the flow! Now I am in the Santo Amaro zone! Santo Amaro is where the mission office is and it's super fancy here. Super big city with a bunch of sky risers and apartments and what not. That's where the secretaries work and a few other sets of missionaries. Anyway, my area is just across the river....where the favela starts! Oh yes! My area is called São Luisand. From what I can tell until now it's dope sick, as Scott would put it! haha The ward seems to be struggling quite a bit actually and the number of people yesterday was not super high. So we for sure have a bunch of work to do in this area. We are opening an area and unfortunately nothing was left here for us! We are starting from ground zero and working up! I guess you gotta start from somewhere! We met a recent convert and her family on the first day and marked a family night with her! She's going crazy to share the gospel! She invited a bunch of people and we had 9 people there who aren't members! This week we will be visiting all of them and bringing them to church this next sunday! We also found a couple on Friday who are super awesome! They just have to get married!!  but they went to church alone and loved it! So we shall see where they go. It will be a little hard to teach them because they work a ton but we're excited to have them here! 

The new area is sweet and a huge part of it is favela! There this one favela called "favela do campo" because it's literally built in this vallyish place around a soccer field. It's so sweet! At the bottom there's this huge field and then surrouning it is just a bunch of houses going up the hill! It's crazy cool! The only bummer about the area is that the chapel is all the way in Santo Amaro so it's like 20 minutes on the bus! Oh well, other than that the area is pretty sweet! 

As for Mother's Day we will be calling around 5 or 6 o'clock our time! i don't know what time it will be there but 5 or 6 here! SUPER stoked to talk to all of you here in  a week!! A bit bummed that scott won't be able to be on skype but sounds like he's living the life!! 

Love you all and hope you have a great week!! 

Elder Holmes