Week 5 (Campestre, Atiquizaya)

This week has been good. Me and my companion get along really well. I went to San Salvador with the other new missionaries and they were are talking about how they wished their companions were more obedient, and I guess whenever they try to tell them that that’s against the rules their companions say, "tranquillo". Haha luckily my comp is nice. The only problem is we have a bad habit of talking in English. We are trying to stop though.

We have 4 progressive investigators but it is really hard to teach them. First we have this guy named G*****, he is this 60-year old crazy guys and he loves the bible a lot. We went out with the 2^nd councilor to go teaching and contacting and we went to G*****’s house because the second councilor knows him. So we had a discussion on the side of the dirt path sitting on a curb but then it started raining like crazy so we went into his house which was super small and had two logs just lying in the middle of the room. The lesson went alight and he had a lot of questions, but it didn’t seem like he was interested, but we made an appointment to come back. 

The next lesson went really well and we talked about the restoration and it really seemed to click with him, because we asked him stuff about the organization of the church and priesthood and Joseph Smith. And you could feel the spirit really strong, after we left his house we saw him leave his house just pacing around as if he was thinking. We returned on Saturday and we had another really good lesson, and it was going really well and he's been praying for an answer and reading the Book of Mormon, and so we challenged him to be baptized and he said if he receives and answer he will. 

But then when we invited him to go to church he said he couldn’t this week because he had a family event thingy, but he said he has a problem going to our church because I guess he had been to our church before and a women had been his teacher. He says that since the bible says the man is the head of the house, that it isn’t right for a women to teach a man. So that’s our problem with him haha I don’t know how we are going to help him understand that being taught by a girl isn’t bad. 

Usually after that we go a couple houses down to where a man named P*** lives. He lives in a house that the gate is on the side of the road but a ramp goes down super far to his house which is basically a swamp, and he can’t walk. He has been baptized before but he was never confirmed because he didn’t think he needed to.  So we have been teaching him and helping around, and he agrees to everything we say, and believes everything, but he doesn’t seem very interested. 

Maybe because he can’t roll away on his wheelchair fast enough. Whatever happens though will be he needs to get baptized, which means he has to go to church three times, but he lives super far from the church and has a wheelchair, and his wife is super old so she can’t really push him, and he doesn’t seem interested. 

Then we have a family that seem to be the golden investigators. We were contacting door to door one day and all the sudden it started pouring really hard, and so we got our umbrellas out, and we saw a house with the lights on, and we almost kept walking but we decided to go knock on it anyway, and so we knocked and the guy was super nice and invited us in without us even introducing ourselves. 

The lesson went really well and he and his wife seemed to love everything we were saying and we left them a commitment to read a pamphlet, but that’s been the only lesson. Every time we go back one of them is working or neither of them are there, are they both just left, but they kept the commitment and we have an appointment with them today so hopefully they are there. 

Then the last is K****, we have only had two lessons, but she is never home cause she works, and when she is home we need another guy from the ward to go in the house with her cause she is a single mom. But every time she is home, no one is home to go with us to her house, so that is pretty frustrating. A

 lot of times with families we contact that seems to be the problem is that we can’t enter the house because their husband aren’t home.

We have this part of our area that is pretty far and we have to talk a bus through a jungle for 15 minutes to get there it is really cool. But there are only like 3 members up there and they all have referrals for us but whenever we go up there to go with them to the referrals houses they aren’t there. 

Yesterday we were there and we were trying to find one of the members houses but it was super far off the colony, and we ended up getting kind of lost in a huge corn field in the middle of the mountains and we couldn’t find it. 

Another interesting thing that happened was the bishop's wife took us to a family where the daughter is a member but the rest of the family isn’t but we had to go through a mini jungle, a broken barbed wire fence, and a swamp to get there. It was a cool little farm house thingy. We sat on two chairs outside her shack and she had like 50 chickens and ducks, we were kind of just making small talk because she was making tortillas so she was a bit distracted. But then we found out her 33 year old son had been missing for 4 months so she is kind of mad with good. My comp told me he was most likely dead haha. I still haven't seen a dead person but I have seen a lot of dead cows. I guess you only see dead people if you are in the city. 

Which today I ate subway for lunch and 3 guys with a shot gun and AK 47s stared at me while I ate my sandwich. I guess there is a pretty dangerous part of the colony that the members told us not to go during night, but I have not once felt in danger.

We went and looked at a new house because we can’t get service in our house and my comp is the district leader. We even got a second phone which we still don’t get service. We have to walk to the church whenever we need to call someone. So we are looking for a new house, but the one we looked at was gross haha, first off the little front yard area it was overgrown with plants, then on the front door there was the biggest spider I have ever seen, literally the size of my hand, and it wasn’t a tarantula. (The guys showing us the house didn’t notice it and leaned on it haha) but the house didn’t have a kitchen and was covered in animal poop, and it was just gross. We aren’t going to buy it haha.

The gecko is our pet named Esteva. 

One day we came home and there were a bunch of cockroaches because I might have left a pan dulce out on the countertop. We spent like 15 minutes screaming and killing cockroaches haha.