No water, no worries and a Happy Birthday!

The Adventures continue here in Dom Pedrito. It's really calm but still really exciting. As a missionary it's perfect. I think I would get really bored here if I wanted to do fun things because it's a very low-key, chill life. Very Gaucho! It should start getting cold at the end of the month; March is like our September. I'm in the third week of my third transfer on the mission. Just nine more to go! I'll have been a missionary for 6 months in April! Woohoo!

Answering questions:

We're on the 4th floor of our apartment so we have a fantastic view. I get to see every sunrise and lots of sunsets from here. I take a lot of pictures of the sky- it's always amazing but it doesn't turn out right in pictures. We lost our water here, so no showers. This will be interesting. Our apartment isn't too bad. And we don't have to worry about surprise visits; we're at least seven hours from the mission office and an hour away from any other missionaries! It's funny that you guys washed dishes in the tub. I find the tub / shower is the most useful place ever. I do laundry there!

The church building is pretty small and doesn't have a big ugly wall around it (just a gate) or an alarm system. Just goes to show how much safer it is here. The  baptismal font is Tiny, like hit-your-head-on-the-wall-hazard tiny. At one point there were four sets of missionaries here and two Wards. Now there's just one ward and one set of missionaries (us!) and a whole lot of reactivation. It's pretty funny because almost everyone in the world is related. There's a family with 14 kids, which is TV-show-rare here, and all their families are who we're working with. Some of our current investigators are relatives of them too. Haha.

This town is cleaner, has fewer dogs, same amount of horses or more, plus more trees and flowers.

There are different churches on almost every street corner. There's a supermarket a few blocks away and we will go there to make purchases during Pday, but there's a little corner market in front of her house if we need a *bolacha or something. *Translation: cracker, but really a Brazilian cookie.

My companion has been out for a year and 3 months and is really excited to go home. She's the first companion that wanted to run in the mornings (we ran 1 block because of time), which I'm pretty sure we'll never do again, but hey we tried. The only food she buys is corn kernels and fruit. So dinner is usually popcorn and fruit except we already ate all the fruit so now it's just popcorn. She has a fantastic testimony. She got baptized when she was 10, left the church, and was reactivated by the missionaries three years ago. She is motivated to baptize people but not just because of the number. We teach really well together and we work hard every day.

Sister Johansson, our Sister Training Leader, called. Today we will have a split with them and we're going to Bagé (birthday miracle! President cut our monthly travel budget so we wouldn't be going to Bagé this week without this split.) I'm spending the rest of my birthday with Sister Ampuero (so far the only word I have for her is "fancy".) I like her!

🍰   🍨  My birthday was THE best day of my life! The zone presented me with a cake and the birthday Jong (Portuguese and English). I'm the bus I zoned out thinking about it and sister Bagatoli asked me if Dom Pedrito was making me crazy because I was smiling to myself. I said I was thinking about my blessings and promptly burst into tears. Sister Bagatoli and sister Ampuero got me presents. We just had a fantastic weekend! When we switched back, SA bought me ice cream.

I've been spending a lot of time on my knees and in my scriptures. I am really liking the character of Christ self evaluation thing. I actually did it today. I was surprised to find that *patience is my weakest  also (I was expecting humility). I think it's valuable tool for everyone.
*I told her about my own evaluation. Patience is my Achilles heel apparently.

I firmly believe that missionary work extends beyond the area where a missionary serves. Lots of people let us in simply because they have a friend or met someone once that was Mormon. I think that's way cool! The Lord knows what he's doing, to put it simply- lots of lives change for the better (or worse, if they are deciding to leave the church.)


I am so blessed! There are so many people in my zone that are really helping me out and so many great things happened this week. I listened to elder Holland's talk about missionary work and I'm just moving all the music you sent with me. I'm loving the work and I'm learning A LOT!

Love you guys so much! Thanks for all the support you give. I pray for you every single day.

Até próxima semana!
Beijos!

Happy 2-0 to me!

Com carinho,
 Sister Hartman

(How cool that there's a missionary with your last name, Dad! I won't let you down!)