Week 8 - Dead Tired!

This week has been good.  Tiring, but good.  Seriously, I am so exhausted after the day. When we come home to plan, I like struggle so hard to stay awake to write the next days appt.

Ummm sooo this week:

We worked hard - 51 lessons and 51 contacts, the contacts are supposed to be 80 for the week oops......

There’s like a giant hill called AV Revolution, it’s a massive hill that seriously sucks so hard to climb. At the top is like a poor area, the rest of the area is like slummy houses and like they are all pretty similar with like a big metal door on the front and behind is a little courtyard thing or a hallway or whatever and then you get to the house.  Oh, and all the houses are like connected, like the pictures I sent last week.  I’m doing a terrible job explaining this, anyways Marvillosa, I think is what its called at the top of the hill, is different.  The houses are more shack like and disconnected and they actually have yards - not like an american yard; like a Mexican yards - anyways way poor at the top of the hill.  I saw a couple dogs eating what either was a dead human or a dead dog. It was that eaten it was hard to tell; pretty gruesome.  At the top of the hill are a couple of families that are pretty faithful.  When we visited them we got a bunch of contacts that actually turned into appointments.  i.d.k. People seemed more humble up there, but it’s so far away.

About halfway through the week I was told that I was going to work our area with someone else cause my comp was going on splits with the DL.  I nearly died.  I was so stressed about it.  Like, literally I was resigned to just being lost all day long.  Sunday morning, the day that the splits were supposed to happen, came and my comp cancelled the split cause I would’ve just been wrecked.

I mean seriously only a week and a half in an area and not speaking spanish, you can handle this on your own right? no.

Spanish:

Much better than last week.  I can use spanish well (after I wrote that I laughed... well is relative) during lessons with sharing stuff and teaching doctrine, but conversationally… haha… ya,  I’m not there yet.  I definitely understand more than I can say.  

Two of our investigators with baptismal dates fell through, which sucked.  Fell through as in they didn’t come to church this week, so we have to move the date back further. We have two baptisms this Saturday which is cool though.  We had three investigators come to church, so that’s cool.

So we taught a couple of investigators with members present, but the members are less active. It’s a little annoying.  This has happened twice now; the members, during the word of wisdom lesson, say “like, but Jesus drank wine, why could he drink wine and we can’t?”  Finally, in one lesson, in my terrible spanish I was like “In the Old Testament, when the Israelites came back to the promised land, they killed everyone that was there -  the women, children, cows, goats, etc.  Is it okay to kill people today because they could in the bible?”  My comp was like “In the law of Moses, if you didn’t keep the sabbath day holy you got stoned to death, why don’t we do that now?”   It was a little harsh but it wasn’t that harsh in the lesson.  But seriously people, if the church is true and God said we can’t drink alcohol then that’s why.  Isn’t that enough? Cause it should be enough.

Umm… funny thought that popped into my head: our laundry is like soaking our dirty clothes in dirty water and then calling them clean. haha it’s kind of a joke.

We have/had 5 baptismal dates, which is cool, but two didn’t come to church so there’s that. Haha with one lady, who I thought was a member, we were visiting her and we taught “The Restoration”, which is a little weird to teach a member, but some members need that, so I didn’t think to much about it. Haha, at the end of the lesson we gave her a baptismal date, ya she was an investigator.  Haha my bad. 

Oh, theres one lady that we talk to that acts like I´m speaking some language other than spanish, maybe the other members are being nice and pretending to understand, but I’m pretty sure my spanish is adequate in that I use verbs.  Maybe I conjugate them wrong but it still should make partial sense.  This hermana (sister) just turns her head and says huh?  It’s frustrating.  Haha, the funny part is that she speaks rather slangy and not good spanish either, so I have a hard time understanding her.  Haha, ya we visit her all the time, she is a recent convert but she practically knows nothing, we go and define words for her which is hard for me cause I have to recognize the word in spanish and then try and explain it in spanish.

Ummm… this letters been long.  The hills are tiring and the altitude is like double that of Utah, so its tiring. I get home and have to walk around from like 10:00 - 10:30pm, so I don’t fall asleep.

I’m trying my hardest to be a good missionary, and I know I cant do it alone. I haven’t gotten sick yet so… lets hope that keeps going.

Love you!

Elder Blotter

P.S. There is this lady we are teaching, that is a member of some crazy religion, that believes Jesus or another form of Jesus is some old Korean lady, and she is called the church of god or something weird.  Also they have a religion here that worships saint dead, also very creepy.