Email:

daniel.blanchard@myldsmail.net


Packages/Mail:

All packages are to be sent through the U.S. Postal Service. They do seem to arrive intact within 2-4 weeks.
Elder Daniel Blanchard

Mision El Salvador Santa Ana

Apartado Postal #142

Santa Ana, El Salvador, C.A.

Monday, November 21, 2016

Week 16 (Campestre, Atiquizaya)



I got my new companion that I will be training for the next three months.  Luckily I don’t have to teach him Spanish. His name is Elder Hernandez from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.  He is really short and snores really loud haha, luckily I’m a super heavy sleeper and only heard him snore because I went to the bathroom in the night. He is, interesting. He has been a member all his life but was inactive for the majority. He returned 8 months ago. He does not speak English which is really good for me. He was worried he was going to get a gringo he couldn’t understand, but he said my pronunciation is good.


Although in a lesson he threw me under the bus haha. We always sing a hymn before lessons, Elder Rosales could sing so it was good when we sang. Elder Hernandez is like most of the people here. Completely tone deaf haha. Entonces, we went to have a lesson with an old investigator who is working on getting married so she could be baptized. So we went to go see how that was going but her parents were there. They were super nice but crazy haha. They had a bunch of questions about Mormons and it was interesting trying to answer all of his questions by myself )my comp is super quiet in the lessons.  But then I asked if we could share a small lesson with them and if we could start off by singing a hymn.


They said they would love it because they love music and hearing different types of hymns. Well we start singing and I think it was Jesus es mi Luz, but we are singing and I’m trying super hard to keep the tone of the song because previously mentioned he struggles to keep anywhere close to the tone. Well he kept getting lost in the song because there are some parts where it is a little tricky to stay together, and usually I’m pretty good and staying in time if I can hear the other person singing, well since he was singing a different song I couldn’t do that haha. So there were just some parts in the song where it was just painful haha. Well we finished singing, and the dad was like, you guys got a little lost there, and my comp was like ÿeah sorry it’s hard because my comp still can’t speak Spanish and struggles to pronounce the words because he knows the hymns only in English, and it is just really hard to sing with someone like that.


Haha it was really funny and now my comp wants to practice hymns in the night so I can learn to sing them with him. But like I said he’s super interesting and it’s gonna take a lot of work. These next three months are gonna require a lot of work. Since he returned pretty recently to the church he still doesn’t know all that much including the lessons. On top of that our ward mission leader apparently released himself about a month ago. During my training we weren’t able to utilize him very much because he could only go out with us in the morning and I had study until 12. Well we don’t have language study anymore so we can leave at 11.


Well I thought, hey I feel super overwhelmed right now maybe we can get some refferals and go out with our ward mission leader. Where apparently he was offended by an elder and decided to release himself from the calling like 5 weeks ago. So it’s gonna be difficult without one of those. 


And on top of that I’m training which I feel super inadequate to do that, and since he is new and doesn’t really know the lessons I basically teach all the lesson. All I know is the lord is testing me right now and I just need to keep working really hard. We already put 2 dates for baptism which we now have a total of 5, which is really good, but none of those five have come to church, and if they don’t come to church they can’t get baptized. So we have been trying to work with them but it is really hard cause some work on Sundays and can’t get it off, others live super far away so it is hard to keep contact with them all the time. Hopefully all of them can be baptized.


Also on top of that the water here is turning off until Thursday because it hasn’t rained for a while here. So that’s great. This just goes to show that prayers are answered in mysterious ways, because I have been praying so that I don’t have to take cold showers anymore, and it looks like I won’t be able to shower until Thursday haha. But that also means we can’t use the bathroom in our house, and have to walk to the church like 10 minutes away just to use the bathroom haha.
Yeah I think we are going to start trying to work with the members again. There are three recently returned missionaries that are starting to go out with us a lot. 


Hopefully this week we can have a lot more investigators that have the desire to progress.

Other than that everything’s going good, just need to work hard and hopefully we see more success in the coming weeks.

Elder Blanchard

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