Read or listen to José Luiz and Rosane Del Guerso’s full oral history. Original interview in Portuguese. An English translation is also available.
(Rosane) He was baptized in August 1974 and I was baptized in February 1975. 6 months apart. My reality was like this: I didn’t live in the same area as him. I lived in Méier and that neighborhood belonged to another ward, the Engenho de Dentro ward. But I didn’t know any of this and the missionaries knocked on my door. I had a cousin who was staying at my home, visiting us. My parents didn’t allow the missionaries into our home because they were Americans. They didn’t care about Americans. I don’t know why. Foreigners, right? They didn’t say American, they say foreign. And my father didn’t want to, but my cousin became very interested in the Church and gave her address to the missionaries, and they certainly sent someone. But she lived in the same area as him, which was the Madureira ward. And she and her family all got baptized in the Church, and she started inviting me and my sister to go.
We started going there in Madureira, not in a Church near our home. And we started going and the missionaries started teaching us in the Chapel. The same missionaries who baptized my cousin ended up baptizing my sister and me. My mother gave her permission. She wasn’t very happy, but she allowed us to be baptized.
I was 14 and my sister was 13. My sister was a little younger. And the interesting thing was that the day of our baptism was a Carnival Sunday. You know that Carnival in Rio de Janeiro is a very elaborate festival, right? But not in our day. At that time, it was more of a family thing, it was more of a family party.
So I remember we got baptized and went home. And on Sunday night, the whole family went to the Carnival. It was in a square, in Jardim do Méier, there was a bandstand, a band playing. And I remember that my sister and I said, ‘Mom, we’re not going now, because we can’t. We can only go after midnight.’
Today I think: the missionaries taught us about the Sabbath and we had learned about it. Even though going after midnight wasn’t such a good thing either, I thought we were obedient in a way. We went to Carnival only after midnight, and met up with our family there. We took part that year, but it was our last Carnival, because in the later years we used to go to the Youth Conferences. We started going to the Youth Conferences.
Later I’ll tell the story of the missionary. Another interesting thing I’d like to mention here, and I really benefited from this when we were missionaries, is that those young missionaries who knocked on my door, they don’t know about our story.
They just took my cousin’s references and passed it on to the other missionaries. So I used to say to our missionaries [when José Luiz and Rosane served as mission leaders], ‘Don’t be discouraged when you knock on a door and the person doesn’t let you in. Because that will be a little seed that you will plant and it can bear fruit. Even if you don’t know it, you won’t be able to measure it.’ I think about this a lot because the missionaries who knocked on my door weren’t the ones who baptized us, you know? They found us, but they didn’t baptize us.
