Hey,

It’s hard to describe in words what we are experiencing here in Maio. This is easily the most amazing mission experience I have ever had. And easily, probably, the most amazing experience I have had in my life. I do not exaggerate when I say the Lord has truly blessed Elder Christensen and I by putting us here to open the church. This has been so incredible. There are so many things that have happened I don’t even know where to start.

I guess we can start last Wednesday. We woke up at 3:00 am to catch a boat going to Maio at 4:00 am. We traveled with one of the members of Praia named Natalino, who is a church worker that helps establish churches and chapel buildings. He will be here to help us make a start in the establishment of the church. We also came with one of the very few members of Maio, Julio Almada, who is incredible. The mission bought his plane ticket so he could come to Praia to attend Stake conference. As a result we got to know his girlfriend Julia (ironic huh?). Julia actually has a ton of interest in the church, she came to watch stake conference. We gave the reference to some Elders in Praia and now she is being taught and now they are preparing to be married and their daughter will be baptized on the 23rd of this month. What a miracle. Anyway, back to the story, we arrived to Maio, tired as can be and loaded all of our stuff into a big truck and took it to the house. We unloaded, organized and set up everything for a good 6-7 hours. We actually managed to mark some people in the street and teach 2 lessons later that night.

President Oliveira and the assistants recently came here and that’s when they decided to open the island. We had 2 main family references that we utilized. There is woman named Segunda (like 70 years old), who has like 7 kids, each of these kids has a spouse ( most not married, of course) with kids. We began to divide the familes and teach them individually. I have enver taught so many entire families ever in my mission. We have taught a ton of families. In the last 4 days we have managed 31 new investigators.

We are working with a family of Tine and Joanna, they have a lot of interest and could make a very strong base for the church. We are also teaching an already married couple named Marino and Nilda (its basically impossible to ever find a couple that is already married), that has a ton of interest and has accepted to prepare for baptism. We also have an incredible investigator named Indira who has been loving our lessons, The Book of Mormon, and tells us that God has answered her prayer that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God.

Other than that we have been carrying 50-100 pass along cards with us at any time to give to everyone in our sight. We are trying to talk to the most amount of people possible to let the island know the restored truths are on the earth. Not only that but we are giving our investigators pass along cards to give to their family and friends. They are all super excited to share the gospel and they all want to bring someone to church.

This Sunday, we saw the most incredible miracle. Since the day we got here, I haven't felt that we have rested for more than 5 minutes, we have always been doing something! After all the hard work and teaching and preaching, the fruits of our labors arrived, thanks to the love and hand of God in our work. Before church I saw some teenagers walking down the road in white shirts, and I thought to myself ´´are they coming here? I hope they do.´´ I walked up to them and said ´´where are you going?´´ they said ´´the catholic church´´. I briefly told the restoration and bore testimony and promised them they would learn a lot more in the Church of Jesus Christ. I invited them in, they hesitated and entered, that was sweet. We had 2 hours of church, the 1st hour, we taught the Gospel Principles class, which went super smooth and everyone loved it. Then we had sacrament meeting. Everyone was very reverent and payed attention to the talks and I even got to use my newly acquired skill to play the piano for the whole meeting (I knew I would need it some time). All the talks were simple and powerful. After 4 days (3 and a half days of teaching) we had a final count of 37 people. What a blessing. The Lord is so loving.

I know that the Lord works with us. I know that He loves us. I know that He hears our prayers and He answers them. I will never forget Him, and I will never forget what He does for us. I know God lives, this is His work and His church. How lucky are we?

Love,

Elder Rice