Mafra Open House

President Fluckiger asked us to represent the mission by going to the Mafra new chapel open house. We both had to bear our testimonies and I directed the hymns.

New Branch President and his wife.  President and sister Ribeiro

Draping

The fabric stores are amazing here.  First of all, there are a lot.  Second, their window have manikins that have the most gorgeous draped dresses.  Here are just a couple of examples, but it is like this all over town.  I always think of Project Runway when I see their ability to visualize a dress or gown by just draping the fabric over the model.

Baptism in Caldas da Rainha

Mauricio Braz was baptized in September.  It was a wonderful day for his family and for our branch family.

Called To Serve

October 21, 2014 the European Mission Presidents' Conference was held in Cascais, Portugal.  Our area authority, Elder Teixeira asked that we have mission choir sing Called to Serve.  I was put in charge of the choir.  Sr. Fluckiger asked that we have a select group of good singers sing in 4 part harmony and I wanted to have a unison choir of as many missionaries as could possible.  Here is our collaboration choir.  They sounded great and it was truly a wonderful moment for all of us who performed.  The spirit was very strong and many of the mission presidents in attendance said that it was a wonderful, inspiring way to begin their conference.

This photo is representational of another choir that I directed, or was supposed to direct, on November 2 at our District Conference.  At the same time that we were holding practices for the Missionary choir in Lisbon, we were traveling all over our Santarem District to different branches to rehearse their individual choirs  to sing in a combined  large choir for District Conference.  We actually had 2 different choirs, a youth choir on Saturday night and an adult choir on Sunday morning.  Things were going pretty well until Saturday night.  I was overly exhausted and unmedicated to the point where I ended up in the hospital with Addison's crisis.  Very scary.  Sunday morning a sister Maribel from the Carregado branch volunteered to direct the choir when she learned that I couldn't be there.  She is amazing.  She was very nervous, but she had the courage to do it anyway.  We had a missionary sister, Sr. King, who went home on November 9 who played the piano for the meeting.  I feel that everything worked out for the best because the members got to participate more.  The Lord helped us all.

An interesting thing about Portuguese church choirs is that they do a "uniform" every time that they sing.  So I had everyone wear a white blouse and dark skirt, the men in suits with any tie that they owned that had yellow or gold in it.  I made 35 corsages out of yellow napkins and that was our outfit because had no money in the budget.  One choir that I saw in this district where the women wore orange scarves and the men wore orange ties, very fancy and beautiful.

Another thing that I have been doing at this time which really added to the stress was taking language courses from BYU on skype.  Those lessons were excellent, but there is much preparation to be done every week for each teacher.