You've gotta give these emails an interesting name sometimes to get you guys to want to open it up jajaja. I have been told that I opened up my mission call more than a year ago now. That's pretty weird to think about. This week we got a new investigator named Michael. He's a psychologist. We got the reference to him from one of his friends through the internet. We went and were like, so why did you decide to listen to us? He told us that he had been helping people his whole life as a psychologist, but felt like something was missing from his own life. He decided that that thing was Jesus. So he talked to his member friend and got super interested. We had a powerful first lesson and he decided to get baptized. Not only that, but he wants to get the whole family this special message that we carry. When we went back for the second appointment, we were excited. When we asked him if he had read, he said he did and he really connected with it and gave us a super in depth analysis of it, probably better than I could pull off jaja. We had left him Alma 41 since he told us that he had a cousin pass away that really affected him. He even said he liked it more than the Bible. Throughout our citas with him I've felt the spirit reveal things to me about him and have been told things that I needed to tell him. He's an amazing guy and a real blessing to have as an investigator. Don't forget to read the Book of Mormon daily! Have a good week everyone!
Monday
Rider called us this morning at like 7:15 or so. He wanted to confirm that we were going to pass by tonight to teach him. He talked to his brother and they both have interest in learning more about the Book of Mormon. Cool stuff. For breakfast I fried myself a tequeño and two pasteles. This is where it ends. I've maxed out. There's no foreseeable way to improve breakfast. I like it. They say that you can't buy happiness, but I did. It's sold for 50 centimos ($.16 US dollars) cada uno (each). Three words, eight letters. Say it and I'm yours. Te que ños! Where's Jaxon when I need him? He would love that joke if he had a tequeño. P-day was a no go today. We're going to the temple on Friday. We're toast man. I had a severe lack of energy and motivation today due to that. We went to internet this morning for just a bit to send emails to President and to tell our families that we'll call them on Friday. We started the day out with a lot of positive energy ready to work. But holy crap my dude, the rejections were hard today. I don't think that I had a half decent contact all day long. I'll take this as a sign; Mondays are sacred and specially reserved for P-day, and that's why not a lot of stuff happened today. The shoemaker that works in Kiosko Azul went to church on Sunday with his family, so we stopped by to say hi and see if he was interested in learning how to obtain more blessing from Jesus. He was down, but he needs to talk to his wife first because the Hermanas went there a while back and she wasn't having it. He turned to Elder Cabral and said, "Do you want to know what your name means in Spanish? Gay. You can use it as slang to say that you're gay." That's the first time that we've heard that so we don't know if it's totally true. It was funny though. We went to go visit Juan again today. I know he has always had a bit of trouble feeling the spirit and stuff, but I had no idea that he had so many doctrinal doubts and stuff. We spent a while trying to reestablish doctrinal truths, such as the resurrection or that God is a person. He's out of a job right now too, so Elder Cabral talked to him a lot about the autosuficiecia stuff since he knows a lot about that. Rider sent us a text to let us know that he wouldn't be able to meet because he had to run his mom to the hospital since she was in a lot of pain. Understandable, so we fixed a cita for tomorrow. We met with the Villafuerte's tonight. They were all like, "Jherson hit 5 months the other day." Shoot man, I was here when that dude left. In our apartment we have a white board where we write random hashtags of things that happen in the week. It's pretty funny.
Tuesday
This morning I fried my pasteles and tequeños again. I put them on my plate and then walked away. Elder Cabral came and put my hot oil directly into the plastic "taper" (I forgot what it's called back home) and he walked away too. We both walked back in a saw that the oil had completely melted through the bottom of it. I was like, "Dude! What were you thinking?" He just told me, "The taper said it was microwave proof. I thought it was ok." *Facepalm. There's oil all over everything right now. My boy was tryin' to deep fry plastic containers for breakfast. What is Brazil up to these days? That is why they lost 7-1 against Germany in the World Cup a couple of years back. This morning we went and did a service for the President of the Elders Quorum. He's building a place to live on the 3rd story of a building in our area. The way he made it sound, I thought we'd be painting. Turns out that we sanded for 2 hours straight. I got some serious wax on wax off action going. He had us in a room where they had put this white primer/putty stuff on the walls and had us smooth it out and knock off all the extra. It was slow work because he gave me a 360 grit. I found myself an 80 though and it was real nice after that. After we finished that room, he sent us into another completely unfinished room and had us sand the concrete. There was sand flying everywhere. Oh, how I miss power tools.
We had a cita with Jherson today. Nothing too exciting happened there. We're gonna see if we cant take all the recent convert to the temple here real quick before one of us leaves. There's this dude in our area named Ivan. He's an RM. He went inactive and stuff for about a year, but he came to church on Sunday and is ready to come back. We went to go visit him because I can see how he can be vital piece to help the ward and he's also got a bunch of PF's. He served his mission in Mexico and had a lot of cool stuff for us to hear about questions that we can ask people and stuff. He's a great guy. We tried going to visit Rider, but he wasn't home again. We were kinda surprised. We had a meeting with the Presidency of the Elders Quorum. They're probably the weakest of the groups in the ward here. We were looking for ways to help them and the quorum. In reality though, we mainly just talked about ministering the whole time. My chair for my study desk is currently being held together by only duct tape. I guess that I was sitting a little to aggressively in my chair. There's this dog by our house that's almost always chill, but will freak out on us every once in a while. On those nights I just look him in the eye and say, "Eat a Snickers bro. You're not you when you're hungry."
Wednesday
We had a consejo de distrito this morning. The zone leaders always say that they've got a bunch of surprises for us. Sometimes it's churros and sometimes the surprise is that there actually isn't a surprise. Elder Cabral and I were in charge of the training for our district. We both felt like we needed to review how to filter people. I felt like we did a pretty decent job of teaching filtering people. We were doing practices at the end when Elder Topham walked in. The assistants coming was definitely a surprise. I was thinking that we were just gonna take another group picture at the end or something. I'm just glad that he wasn't there when I delivered the training. After the practices and during the actual consejo part, he had some really great advice to share with us. They delivered a training to the zone after about being humble. They didn't really burn us, but it was good what they said. After lunch we went to visit Jherson for just a few minutes to prepare him for the temple. San Fransisco got a reference from the internet, but it turns out that he actually lives in our area. So we went to go visit him today. He was a pretty cool dude. Single and late 20's. He works as a psychologist all over Lima. He just felt like even though he was constantly helping people fix their lives, he feels something was missing in his. So he talked to his member friends and the next thing ya know, he's getting baptized May 25. He was super open with us. One of the spiritual gifts I've noticed God has blessed me with is the gift of discernment. From looking someone in the eye and talking to them for a few minutes, I can tell you whether or not they're really interested in coming to church. Sometimes I even know if they're married or not and how many kids they have. In the cita with Michael he told us his parents were divorced when he was 12. At that moment the spirit explained to me that that was super hard on him and he had felt super lonely, so he became a psychologist to help people not to feel bad the way he did. I even confirmed it with him. I don't know if that is considered revelation or discernment or what, but it's pretty cool all the same. We applied what the assistants taught us today and we took down 4 citas from contacts. We need to have them swing by more often. We swung by Dante's. Tuesday we'll see if he needs another operation or not. Fingers crossed and prayers are up. We taught him the commandments. He accepted pretty well.
Thursday
We did weekly planning this morning. That wasn't very eventful. All of the citas today, which were all contacts from yesterday, fell down and crashed and burned and I just watched our hopes for the day deteriorate. You can't let a good fire go to waste though, so I pulled out my marshmallows and enjoyed the occasion. Or in other words, I went contacting. I contacted this old dude, about 84. He started talking to me really. In Quechua too. So I was just like, "Ima watsutiko?" He got excited and talked more in Quechua. That was a mistake on my part. Turns out he knew Spanish though. He had some pretty strong opinions about Jesus. It was kind of hard to understand him though because half was in Quechua and the other half in Spanish. It didn't help that he only had 3 teeth either. Long story short though, I don't think he's coming to church on Sunday jeje. We went to an attack as a zone in Amauta. While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, I noticed that there was a pirated movie playing in the street. Anyone that knows me knows that I'm an anti-spoiler fanatic. But we'll see how well I can do I guess. The people here like giving spoilers out too if you're not careful. The attack actually turned out pretty cool. I went with Elder Salway. We also went with Elder Napier and Elder Orteta and the hermanas. We contacted in this big park/market area. It was a great place to contact. Instead of having him contact, we instead had Elder Salway sing the whole time since he's pretty much David Archuleta Jr. He got a couple of people interested. More than anything though it was just nice to be able to listen to someone singing while I was working. There was a golden retriever that I petted and it followed us the rest of the night. Even after we got separated and were far away he still found us. I liked that dog.
Friday
P-day. At long last, p-day. We had to wait 246 hours for this moment, but who's counting? Today was also P-day de temple. That's always a great P-day. We had our session at 9, so we got there bright and early. It was pretty nice. They say that you learn something new every time. There were some connections I made, but it'll take some more pondering to see how they apply. Afterwards we met up with Elder Costa and Elder Kimball by chance and our Brazilians decided to go to Rodizios, which is kinda expensive at 60 soles cada uno. But I told Elder Cabral that I'd go where ever he wanted to since it was his first temple p-day, as long as he would pay his part. We got there and saw that it was actually 65 since it was the weekend. But those Brazilians were set on eating their meat. They got Elder Jensen and Elder Lainez, who share the room with them, to come with us too. You feel less guilty blowing a lot of money when there's a bunch of you doing it. Drinks were extra too, so we'd all just occasionally steal a sip from our water bottles. That was some pretty good meat though. The dessert was good too. We had a lot of fun.
After about 2 hours of making the occasional rounds, we started to slow down. I didn't stop because I was full, I stopped because I was starting to feel sick. I narrowed it down to 2 possibilities of why: I accidentally ate a bit of pork or maybe some of that medium rare steak was a little too much on the rare side of things. Eating under cooked meat in a 3rd world country usually ends badly, I'd imagine. The food was good though. We went to internet when we got back to our area. Turns out that Suki (our dog) almost died from an infection during the week and had to have an operation. (Note: It was actually that Suki's hind legs weren't working and we didn't know why. It turned out that she had a lesion on her spine and had to undergo surgery to fix it.) She can't really walk still. When I heard about that, I got really sad. I almost didn't get to say goodbye to her. I called home. It's kinda funny the difference between now and Christmas. Then it was super hyped and today it was just like, "Oh, hello again." It was just my second time calling home since then too. I can't imagine the other Elders who call weekly. We had correlations tonight. We also had a cita with Michael. It was dope. We were gonna go to his mom's house to teach them both, but it turns out she lives in Tilda. He came here in a moments notice. He already loves the Book of Mormon and says he connects with it. We taught the Plan of Salvation. He wants his whole family to hear the gospel.
Saturday
10 months. Crazy stuff. Double digits. We went to the stake center to practice and organize a skit as a zone that we had to do for a stake talent show. It took a long while to get it planned out. I think that it was pretty funny though, I think and hope. The 4 of us went to Plaza Vitarte to look for a place to eat. I don't trust those Peruvian shop restaurant things in markets, but we wound up having to eat at one of those anyways. But hey, I'm not dead (yet), so that must mean it was ok. Those things would be shut down 22 1/2 times over by an American food inspector. But we're in Peru now, which means our bodies adapt to Peruvian standards, right? We had to go straight back to the stake center though because there was a CCM attack. It was a pretty big attack though, so we took our dude back to Alameda with us. His name was Elder Redding who's from Nebraska.
He's about as Nebraskan as it gets, down to the way he talks and moves his mouth when he does. I liked it. We tired visiting Rider's mom, but she wasn't home. We spent the majority of the time with him contacting. He wasn't half bad. We went and visited Angi to get her ready to go to the temple Not the most exciting cita ever, but it is what it is. We tried visiting Dante, but he wasn't available. Elder Redding was a pretty cool dude. He liked those combios haha. Elder Carrera told us all a story about how he and his comp had 4 with fecha, but 5 was their goal. It was the end of the month, so they did a fast. The next day they received an internet reference about a dude wanting a Book of Mormon. So they wen there, met a teenager that requested it and long story short, got baptized. Then he told us that even though he lost contact with his convert, he was a cool dude. And then he said, "But he's here. Elder Montero and I spent the day together." What a story! The talent show turned out pretty well. There was some talented people. Paul, for example, sang and danced with an old lady. There was a rock band at the end; they weren't that good and couldn't sing. I think they were looking to have a gig. haha
Sunday
Guess what I did this morning. I went to church. Not only that, but I also went to ward council in the morning before. We went to go pick up Michael to go to church together. There were some good talks and classes. The members went out of their way more than usual to present themselves and talk to him. That was cool. He said that he liked church, so that's always good. The attendance at church has really dropped. At the start of March we hit 173. Today we were at 107. I'm dying on the inside due to that. Last might I got bored. Elder Rodriguez is a pretty good pick pocket and due to that, he's hard to get. But I managed to take his plaque without him realizing it. Twice. Each time I gave it to another missionary. It took him some time to notice both times. So then we all stole each other's plaques and held them hostage. Good times. Elder Anieves and Elder Rodriguez are my Mexicans. We came back to the room and broke the fast. Another hermana sorta bailed on us, so we went to Mari Caris for almuerzo (lunch). That was pretty good. We stayed there a bit and then left to go visit Arlette. She didn't pass her interview for a temple recommend, so we taught her about he Gospel and repentance and stuff. She, and all the other recent converts as well for the most part, have been dropping off as of late. It's really concerning. There was a zone attack in Vitarte today. I went off with Elder Rodriguez and Elder Jones, who are both missionaries in their training. The goal was to have everyone preach on the same mountainside. The only downside was that they only scheduled it to last an hour. But it started 20 minutes late or so and it took us 10 minutes to get there. When we did though, I pointed to the top of the hill and said, "See that pink house? We're gonna baptize those guys." Then my Huaycán instinct kicked in and I sprinted 60 yards or so up the stairs in a bit over a minute, only stopping once to make a contact. They weren't home really, but it was fun knocking doors.
A kid's homework from the ward. It asked for his schools name, except he
didn't know it. The school's stamp is in the corner of every worksheet.
Rodizios.
A photo I found from the airport in Atlanta on our way to Lima.
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