7/18/2011

Mi querido familia, 

I´m doing super great! I´m starting to feel like Campodónico is my home now, i´ve been here for so long! And i know all the members by name pretty much, and they all call me elder hhhhhhhhach. 

This week has been a lot warmer, i don´t know what´s going on with the weather.. but no, i don´t have a blanket or a sweatshirt. i took one with me on the mission, but i left it in the mtc in provo with elder pritchett!  

As for the yucca, you eat the roots. They´re huge and super dry and basically like a potato. I´m used to it now though, it is normal to have chicken for breakfast, etc. luckily no intestines this week though. I´m so glad that i loved rice and chicken before the mission because that is seriously all you eat for lunch 100 percent of the time, and like 50 percent of the time for dinner! Elder insaurralde is struggling with it, but i love it! 

My shoes that are wearing out are the propet ones. They´re even worse now, the plastic inside is starting to chip off! 

The heber camp out sounds super fun! I loved the obstacle course stuff last year. And ben´s two years went by so fast, i still remember his farewell really well. And holy cow, i´ve almost been out six months, i still feel like a baby in the mission. 

This week our numbers were horrible, it was sad but we worked and did everything we could, it was just one of those weeks. For example, on saturday we had six appointments throughout the day and all six of them fell through. Two of our people with baptismal dates coming up didn´t go to church this week, so they can´t get baptized until they go twice, so the earliest we can have baptisms now is in three weeks. But, we had two baptisms yesterday! Pierinna and Kathia, Elio´s daughter and granddaughter. And the coolest part was that Elio baptized them! he´s a priest already and it was so cool to have one of my baptisms baptizing! so now their whole family are members and it´s so satisfying to see them so happy, and finally be united as a family. 

Elder insaurralde talked about faith and repentance in the baptism and i talked about baptism, per request of the ward mission leader. Also, next week in the Campodónico ward i got assigned a ten minute talk and i can choose the subject.. still no idea what i´m going to talk about. Before i only had to give five minute talks in english, now ten in spanish.. haha but it´s ok, i love the challenge! 

This week we attached the shower head heater thing, and after i used it it tripped the breaker and burned something, so we didn´t have light or electricity for two days in our room! that was fun.. But an electrician came and put in a new key (that´s what it´s called in spanish, i´m not sure what it´s called in english, maybe a breaker?) that can withstand more electricity, so now we have hot showers! yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! It seriously makes waking up in the mornings so much easier knowing i´m not going to freeze to death. Also, i´ve started working out in the mornings and this week we´re going to start running every other day, we´ll see how that goes because we´ll have to wake up earlier, a serious sacrifice. On friday we did divisions and i went with elder Burton, our district leader, in his area, Lopez Albujar. He had to do a baptismal interview so i played the piano in the stake center for a while and i realized how much i miss playing the piano. And it´s always really fun when we do divisions and i get to go to their apartment because they´re with the zone leaders, and we have a lot of fun with four of us there. The zone leaders gave me the package from mom early and i opened it and we ate all the sour patch kids (i´m saving the swedish fish for a rainy day) Elder Burton is really into snowboarding, so we ended up talking a ton about skiing and snowboarding, in english, and i felt really weird talking in english so much. 

Last night after the baptism we taught a lesson to Agripina, an investigator i´ve had the whole time here, and her daughter who´s about 30, Evelyn. Evelyn asked in what year the church was founded, which is like the best question an investigator could ever ask me, and we taught what may be the best restoration lesson i´ve taught yet. The spirit was really strong, and we used like 15 scriptures from the bible to back up all our teaching, and they were both really into it. I felt like the whole time we were just all feeding off of the spirit and all on the same page. I absolutely LOVE when the investigators have real interest and desire to know if what we´re teaching is true. We´ll see how their reading and prayer go before tuesday when we visit them again! 

The pictures are of the baptism, sorry i can´t tell you the  people in order because i can´t see them right now! but just love them, and then my desk on a typical day. chuck full of stuff to study!