President Beardall,
The work is going so well here! This might be a kind of long email, but there is a lot of stuff
happening that is really incredible that I wanted to share with you. We are getting super
busy.
We have been able to get in touch with a good amount of Brasilian members now. The
Abreus (less active), Da Silvas (less active, part member), and Fowkes live in Kirkland. A
recent convert lives in Bellevue. There are four families of members that live in Bothell that we found on facebook. There are also a few families in Renton.
The english classes are going super well. English Classes are pretty much the only way we have been able to find and teach people, but it is going amazingly well. Every night, we have time to teach 3 english classes between 5 and 9. That is pretty much the only time people are home and not working. Teaching the individual classes works incredibly well for teaching the gospel afterwards. Here are a couple things that I have noticed about the english classes that have been really cool:
We have been able to meet with everyone consistently and multiple times a week without
having appointments fall through. We are building real, solid relationships with these people.
All of them genuinely love us and support us. It is rare for us to leave without being given
food. All of them want to support the church as well. We have told all of the people we teach that we are trying to get the branch started, and all of them except one has said that they will be there when we can meet.
We have tried to make sure that we clearly explain our purpose in teaching these people
both english and the gospel. We almost always are able to not just leave messages and
invitations to hear more, but to actually teach the lessons and help people progress. We are seeing a lot of people truly progress. Because we are serving them and forming
relationships, people actually listening intently to when we teach the gospel and try to
understand what we are saying.
The people that we teach english are actually keeping gospel commitments that we leave
them. I am not sure if it is the relationship that we have with the people or the gratitude that they fell for learning english, but these people are actually doing what we ask. We have had so many people actually read the Book of Mormon, gain interest in it, and actually be able to teach us what they learned as they read! I have never had so many people keep commitments in my mission.
All of these people immediately love us because we love their culture and speak their
language.
Our friends are becoming curious about us and what we believe. Oftentimes, we don’t even teach the lesson that we had planned because our friends ask inspired questions that we are able to discuss and that we use to teach the gospel.
This teaching pool that we have because of the english classes is honestly the biggest and most solid teaching pool that I have ever had in my entire mission. I have never taught so many people that have genuine potential. I think part of that is because all of these people are prepared by the Lord, and because they are different than the typical people that we find as missionaries. They are as a whole very motivated. They have come to the US to improve their lives.
We also figured out a very simple but extremely effective method to find new people to teach english. In the last two weeks of the transfer, I have friended as many Brasilians that live in Seattle as I can find on Facebook. Because of Facebook’s algortihms, almost all of my suggested friends are now Brasilians that live in Seattle. I don’t even have to search for them on Facebook anymore. They just pop up. As soon as someone accepts my friend request, We immediately send them a message explaining who we are and that we teach english. We ask if they have interest in learning english, or know anyone that would have interest. We have had so many people respond just in the last couple of days that we have started doing this. This would definitely work for any of the other language speaking missionaries in the mission. They would just need to find and friend enough of the targeted ethnicity that live in Seattle that their friend suggestions become others of that language group that live in Seattle. They would be able to find the specific ethnicities through Facebook groups or through their member’s friends. Up to this point, I have friended over 150 Brasilians in the last 3 weeks. My suggested friends are almost all Brasilians in this area now.
We are now so full at night that we sometimes have nights double booked so that we teach 6 english classes in between 5 and 9. On the nights that we have double booked, we do an exchange with Elder Buhler and Elder Collingwood so that two of us go to three classes and the other two go to the other english classes. We don’t do this every night because that would take them away from their area too much, but we definitely have enough people that we could do that every night.
We have been in touch with some of the other Portuguese speakers. Elder Beardall, Elder
Ward, and Elder Brammer all have good grasps on the language and enough experience to help out. Elder Justeson also might have. We don’t know about him yet. We are going to try and continue finding people that want english classes and are interested in the gospel so that we know how many people we could teach when the next transfer gets here. I could definitely see us needing as many companionships as possible.
It is so incredible to see all of this happening. I really believe that this branch is going to
happen. We got close to getting some people on date this week. We did not get anyone new on date, but all of the lessons turned out really well and lead to our friends progressing.
Thanks for all that you and Sister Beardall do.
Love,
Elder Dudley
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President Beardall’s Response
Wow! Thank you for taking the time to put all of this in writing. Would it be okay if I shared
your letter with others, specifically my counselors who are working to help others get English classes started and with other language missionaries who are trying to do what you two have done? There is no reason to keep "reinventing the wheel!" What you have done is provide us with a model to follow. The "theory" is turning to actual results as you have pressed forward in faith. Yes, as we get closer to the transfer, we will discuss how to best deploy other Portuguese-speaking resources. Thanks for blazing the trail! We love you!
