*Elder Hatch returns home from his mission the last week of February and he will report on his mission on March 10th. More details will be posted as it gets closer.

Monday, January 30, 2012

1/30/2012

This week was really weird for me! It hit me that my mission is actually half over and i started thinking on what i´ve done so far and what i want for this second half. I´m going to make some goals this next week to push myself and really focus on achieving goals. I´ve learned lots about life and missionary work in this first year though! Here are some random thoughts i´ve had this week.. 

Before my mission i didn´t know missionaries worked on sundays.. I also thought missionaries got changed every few months (sometimes true, but definitely not for me). When i imagined missionaries teaching lessons, all i ever thought about was telling the first vision story. I imagined myself being junior companion until the half way mark of my mission. It was fun for the three months it lasted.. 

Elder Thomson is really improving on his spanish. There has been a marked change in his abilities, but he still makes some super funny mistakes! Last night i was looking through the new investigator information that he had written.. For one investigator he wrote- "very young. likes to learn, i think." When i found that and pointed it out to elder thomson i started laughing so hard i cried, and so did he. I haven´t laughed that hard in a long time! then we started looking for other funny ones and one time he was trying to say that a guy works as a mototaxista, or the motorcycle taxi guys. Instead, he wrote "I work like a motorcycle" I was dying! I had to put my head between my knees  with my face in front of the fan to stop laugning, but hearing myself laugh into the fan just made me laugh more. Sunday nights after reports are great. 

This week we had mixed success. We taught a ton of lessons and had 16 new investigators, because we went back to teach the 18 new ones from last week and none were there so we ended up knocking lots of doors and teaching new people again.. So now we have 34 new investigators from the last two weeks alone that we have to find and teach. its rough because this is their summer break, so everyone is always traveling, and they all go to the beach on sundays.. But we´ve found some really cool people. We taught one of the best lessons of my mission to a baptist lady. She asked us about the confirmation, so we explained that then made the transition into the restoration and focused on the authority of the priesthood and taught her the book of mormon and everything. She was excited to read, i hope she does! We went to an appointment with one of our investigators, a 40ish year old lady, but when we got there there was a party out front. When they have parties here it means there are those soccer tent pavillion things and a ton of chairs out in the middle of the street, music blaring, and lots of drunk people. We walked by and saw our investigator with a bottle of beer in each hand.. Two ladies did this nasty kissy noise thing at me.. ick. 

Not much else is happening with our investigators. We have a few with baptismal dates for the end of february, but they didn´t go to church yesterday. Brayan has been to church like 6 times and goes to all the activities, but still doesn´t want to be baptized.. sadly, i´m pretty sure this is my last week here in Los Amautas, so i´ll try to leave a lot of good stuff going for the next missionary who comes in. 

The package is yet to arrive! i´ll see what i can figure out today. 

The picture of elder freeman and his companion on his mission in the ward newsletter was so sweet! But we could never do that here because if we left the camera on the ground like that or took it out in public, it would be gone.. 

I taught the combined priesthood and relief society lesson on sunday about how to prepare people to recieve the gospel. The first thing i did was tell them to go to enos  verse 9 in the book of mormon. Like 20 seconds passed by and nobody found it.. Then finally a guy yells out "What chapter?" I said a little too loud, "there´s only one..." and everyone had a good laugh about that. But then i explained that when he was converted he wanted to help other people feel the same way. I came up with five steps to giving a reference to the missionaries. 1. pray, read the scriptures, and have weekly home evenings 2. think of people you know to share the gospel with 3. make a goal of when to do it by 4. make a plan of how to invite them to an activity, etc. 5. Tell the missionaries. 

four of the five baptisms i´ve had here in the ward have been referrals. It´s so tough to find good, prepared people knocking doors! The only person we found on our own was Estefany. 

I´m excited for transfers this next week. i just hope i have a change! 

Elder Hatch 

It was so weird to see American money when i took it out to deposit it for the package! It had to be in dollars for some reason? 

1301

You can´t really see what the sign says, but it says my first year! Elder Morales came to Chiclayo for a mission meeting on our year anniversary 1302

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