Casamento marcado!

Monday January 19, 2015

Oi fam,

Big news of the week is that after a lot of hard work, lots of trips to the cartório, lots of prayer, lots of fasting, lots of insisting, and lots of help, we finally marked Fernando and Luciclea´s marriage and baptism, and it´s going to happen before I go home! On our fifth try, this morning everything worked out perfectly. Mark your calendars, Feb 7th 2015 we will be having a giant wedding party, (all right, probably not so giant, but it will still be fun.)

I don´t know if I´ve let you all in on all the details, but we´ve tried to mark this wedding a lot. The first time we found out that their ID´s were expired, so we went to Campinas together, and got them renewed. But for some reason, I don´t really remember to well now, Fernando´s document gave some problems, and so a couple weeks later we had to go back to renew it again. And then we had everything ready at the end of last year, and went to mark it, just to find out that they don´t accept ripped birth certificates, and Luciclea´s certificate was really old and worn out. So they denied us again. And so then Luciclea has her Mom go to the cartorio in Bahia just to find out that 10 years ago almost all the documents had been burned, so it would be tough to get a new certificate. And then a littler later we find out that her birth certificate was one of the few documents that survived the fire. Yes! And then we started a race against time. The information paper we had said we have to mark the marriage at least on month ahead of time, so about 2 weeks ago, we were in a hurry to mark it so I could participate before going home. So her mom was finally able to get the certificate and sent it priority mail (which should only take 24 hours), but it didn´t show up, and didn´t show up, and didn´t show up. And then a month before I leave hit and so we tried desperately with the old certificate again, but they deny us again! So I was pretty sad, but then good news... Since the two of them already live in Vinhedo, it only takes 16 days to process, so we bought a bit of extra time. And then the certificate finally got here, and we went to mark the marriage again, just to find out that they don´t mark marriages on Friday, and so today we went back, and tudo deu certo. finalmente.

Sorry. Kind of long with a lot of details, but I´m happy now.

We also took them to the temple on Saturday and they loved it. Luciclea is already making me promise to come back in a year for their sealing. I didn´t promise anything, but would love too.

Hope you all have a wonderful week. Try not to count down the days ;).

Love,

Evan