Tuesday, 31, 23:22 hours

Happy Birthday Father! I hope Wisconsin was all you hoped for.

It wasn’t until about 9:00 pm tonight when I was on the phone w/ Márcia Pickler that I had truly felt like I was fulfilling my responsibilities as a volunteer for the Employment Services Center. Márcia is the São Jose stake employment specialist, and as I spoke with her about our ideas and plans to teach the program here every week all over the state for the next couple months she got so excited. She began telling me about all the work she had done in the past and how she could help us, and things like that. It was really neat to see how much she wanted to serve in her calling (her volunteer position at the church) but that she explained how in the last couple months things have slowed down and she hadn’t gotten to do as much. I guess I had already met Márcia Sunday at church, so she already knew who Dave and I were… but with all the new people I met, I didn’t recall which she was. We arranged to meet w/ her on Thursday evening, since we’ll already be at the church playing soccer w/ the men. Márcia really has a strong love for this program and the course we teach, and so it was really fun to hear her excitement and see how we can help. I’m sure that she’ll be a great asset in the next couple weeks.

Dave and I probably made about 20-25 phone calls, off and on, between 6 and 9 pm. To our disappointment, a majority of the phone numbers we dialed didn’t work. The list of contacts with which we were provided was a few years old. So we spent most of the day trying to contact those who could give us accurate numbers for the people we really wanted to contact. We tried finding the stake executive secretary, councilors, anyone. After trying a few numbers Bishop Alberto gave us (he arrived at the church about 7:30 pm for some meetings he had), I finally got the number for the stake president of the Florianópolis stake. To tell you the truth, he was one of the last people I wanted to call, because I know he’s very busy and that he would direct me to his executive secretary. Well, after speaking for a few minutes he was quick to catch on to my accent, and asked if I spoke English… luckily I do. J Well he then proceeded to continue our conversation in English, though he struggled with many words, but he just wanted the practice. He was very nice and did of course tell me to call his secretary. When I then told him his number wasn’t working, he apologized and passed the new one to me. He then invited us to their stake conference on the 11th and 12th when Elder Arnold of the Seventy will be presiding. I told him we would love to be there and that’d we’d try our best. On the 10th and 11th we are traveling to a city about 2-3 hours away, called Joinville, to teach the CASP course, but we’ll see if we can make it to the Sunday meeting.

Another successful phone call was to Bishop Robson of the Palhoça ward. I called his cell phone and spoke with him about our desire to teach the course to his ward in three weeks. He was so excited, and he made sure that the course would be given at a time he could participate. We have been told the people of Palhoça really need help finding jobs, so I’m excited to get such a positive response.

From 1-5 pm I worked either in the Hotel or at our ERS office in the chapel typing the list of the 2005 participants, or making phone calls, or organizing something. Then from 5-7:30 we waited for the Bishop to arrive. At first Dave went to play the piano and I went out back to the soccer/ basketball court with a flimsy rubber soccer ball. Soon Dave came out and we got to kick around a bit. Twenty minutes later two neighborhood kids showed up with a basketball, so I let them in. As we were playing basketball, a few more showed up – I let them in. This time I left the mechanical gate open, and after I came back outside from getting some water, the number of people had doubled. There were 10 kids on the court playing basketball (yes, basketball! They were pretty good, too. Better than any of the kids I saw in Rio or Espirito Santo.) This made Dave and I a little uncomfortable, since we weren’t really sure what the bishop would say when he arrived. I told the kids they could play until 7:30 but they couldn’t dunk or hang on the rim (the rim was about 8 feet high, and just from their practice dunks, it was a good 2 inches off the backboard, ready to fall off.) I kinda felt like I was babysitting. As 7:30 approached Dave and I thought the bishop wasn’t going to show up, so we sent everyone home and began closing the gate… just as the Bishop arrived from the front area. He immediately questioned what was going on… he thought the kids had jumped the fence (like they have in the past) and he wasn’t too happy. Of course I explained what was going on. The bishop then proceeded to let the kids return to the court and play, since he was going to be in the church for the next couple of hours.

Earlier in the day we studied, nothing too different than yesterday, except maybe I studied for a little longer today.

For lunch we finally found a decent, cheap place, where they charge you buy the kilo. It’s a buffet. Good stuff. But our dinner it was amazing!! When we left the church at about 9:30 it was pouring rain. As we ran into the hotel, dripping, I asked the front desk if they had an umbrella I could borrow – they did. So Dave went up to the room while I offered to go to the corner supermarket and buy him some water, and buy us a hotdog at the corner stand. Wow, what a hot dog! Imagine: two hotdogs, grilled chicken breast, Parmesan cheese, peas, corn, potato sticks, sauces… em. And it was cheap… like R$3.25, which is about $1.50. While eating dinner… and until midnight, we watched the movie “Disappearings.” I guess it’s an older movie, but portrays what was happening in Argentina during the communist scares around the world, how thousands of people were kidnapped and just disappeared. It was a really good movie.

Tomorrow Dave and I get to/ have to go to the police station in Floripa to … I dunno, check in or something – to report we’re going to be here for 89 days. So I better get some rest.