6/27/2011

This week has been super different from the whole rest of my mission! I feel a lot more like a missionary now haha, i can´t explain it. But before with elder Orcohuaranga it was almost too easy to baptize and stuff. He was such a great missionary. But now everything is tough, Elder Insaurralde and I have to struggle for every lesson, and the best way to describe it is just work. Tuesday morning we went to the bus station which is always super crazy on transfer days because there are TONS of missionaries there and it´s really fun to see everyone. There are already a lot of familiar faces. Anyways, i went there with the zone leaders and picked him up, and we grabbed a cab back to our area with just us two, and it was in the cab when it really hit me that i would be directing the area, and that he knew absolutely nothing about campodonico! Not gonna lie, it was (and still is) a super rough transition from extremely junior companion to basically senior. Elder Orcohuaranga taught me well though and I´m to trying to teach Elder Insaurralde all I can. He´s a really cool guy, a little timid, which i´m helping him with, but he´s a great companion. He is from the very corner of paraguay like five minutes away from brazil. He speaks spanish (duh) english, portugese, and guaraní (if you spell it like that), which is awesome and i want to learn them all from him! As is imaginable, we didn´t have many appointments set for this week because orco was finishing off his mission, so we basically started from square one again. I feel like it´s even rougher than being in a completely new area though because i already know basically all the members and we already baptized all the easy part member families! so this week we knocked a lot of doors, and had very very little success with that. So we´re going to change it up this week. We got a few references, and i want to start visiting the old investigators again. But it´s been tough to find new investigators. This morning all the missionaries went to the institute of religion here to say bye to president and sister chipman. It was so weird to think he´s not going to be my mission president anymore! The mission Chiclayo officially starts on the first of july, and on the second we´re going to meet president Risso, from Uruguay! But it was really fun this morning to talk to some other missionaries. I talked to elder Seitz from vernal ut, and he gave me a bunch of sports updates! I heard Jimmer went to Sacramento! but he got drafted to another team originally... I´ve been completely lost as to the sports world. I actually forgot about sports. Not kidding.
Last night we taught a lesson to a 50ish year old man named Wilfredo Sanchez. He´s super into politics and thinks peru is the worst country in the world and basically worships america and germany. He was talking about how all the people are so wicked and spend all their money on alcohol, and we tied it in with how the world is going to get worse and worse until Christ comes again. I basically got on my soapbox and preached to him. It was awesome, because usually lessons are to people who just sit and listen to you, barely answer your questions, etc. But last night there was a dance party next door to where we were so we were already basically yelling and it just made everything more exciting. The spirit was definiately present and as i was telling him that the answer to all of his questions can be found in the book of mormon and that all he had to do was read and pray, i felt really grateful for having had it in my life always. I´ve taken it so for granted that we just have the book of mormon and know the church is true, but other people are so lost! I hope he follows through with his commitment to read. This week will be another hard one, but i´m ready to get to work! Pray for me!
Love you all,
Elder Hatch
ps the picture is of elder insaurralde and i with pres and sister chipman