Week 34 (Nopal)

Hey so changes were this last week and I got a new comp. Elder Castillo from Honduras. He is pretty cool but also a bit weird, but he can sing so that’s good.

This week was pretty crappy. Literally everyone here that I teach who wants to get baptized, can’t because of things I can’t control. It’s starting to get frustrating, because they progress so well, and then they have a spouse who refuses to get married with them. Or a guy who is so close to getting baptized but we haven’t had a lesson with him in 3 weeks because he works in San Salvador and only comes to his house the weekends if that.

But I don’t know, I feel like I am working hard, and trying to be exactly obedient but I don’t know. It’s hard over here haha. However we did find a couple of pretty positive people who I feel could progress and they are actually married, which is so rare for this country and we are going to really try and focus on finding a bunch of people this week to basically start over from the beginning, again. But that’s alright.

General Conference is next week which I feel like we just had conference. Um this week nothing really that interesting happened. We found a person who has been inactive for more than 15 years and she wants us to print off her patriarch blessing. She was really cool and her husband who is catholic is really cool too, so  hopefully her blessing says something about her returning to the church and bringing her husband too. We talked about the sealing power and she said her mom and her sister were recently sealed in the temple, and how she really likes that idea, but the Catholics teach that we won’t be as families in heaven. So we will try to bring them to conference.

Um we also met a mom who is really cool and we had a really good lesson with her. She is catholic but doesn’t really go, and  that’s kind of rare. Um we basically said goodbye to everyone in the beginning of the week which was sad. I wasn’t really expecting to have changes so that was surprising. Um I don’t know what else to say. Basically the same old same old.

Love,

Elder Blanchard

Week 33 (Nopal)

So I forgot my camera so no pictures this week. I had like 50 too. But this week was pretty good. My district did better so that makes me less stressed. 

Did interchanges with one of the missionaries who is new and it was pretty fun because he’s a little weird. It was pretty cool cause we saw a miracle with finding new people. 

For the week the standard of excellence is 14 new people. And it was Friday and they only had two, so we put the goal to find 4 people that day. Well it was like 8:20 and we only had 3 so we went to the side of the road and prayed for help to find that one more person. Well we were knocking on door after door and no one let us in because at this time its basically 10 for us in Utah and super dangerous. 

Well at 8:50 we were both ready to return to the house because they like us to get home at 9 if possible, but we kept going because we wanted to compete the promise we made with God. And at 9:00 we found someone who let us in for 5 minutes. So that was really cool.

Also we contacted a referral we received from another ward about this woman who went to church in another ward. I heard she had been taught before so I called the old missionaries from this are and he laughed. Because she is crazy. Well I want sure what to expect so we went to know on the door. Well she answered the door not wearing pants, and only a longer t-shirt and sunglasses, she is like 50. That was the first sign of craziness, then we started talking and she tried convincing me that the united states had 53 states because they recently bought Alaska. Then she made fun of the name of my comp for like 5 minutes saying that wasn’t his real name. Then she starting talking about Trump. She had a maid and the maid and we were laughing like crazy. Then we were going to start with hymn and told her to count to three to start us off. And she did in the most enthusiastic way so when we were supposed to start to sing we both started dying of laughter. And she was super confused. haha The maid had to leave the room because she was laughing so hard.

Also everything is going good. Pray for Y..... so her husband will want to get married with her. And for S....... so that his wife will want to get married with him so that they can get baptized. No one is married here and it makes everything difficult.

Also we had three lunches yesterday which sucks. I am still stuffed from yesterday.

Love Elder Blanchard

Week 32 (Nopal)

So this week was weird.  Two of our dates dropped. Then we put two more dates. In the last baptism a guy’s brother came and he likes it a lot. He invited us to a "small lunch" and how it was super close to us. It was still in our area but we asked permission and it was ok. Well we went, it ends up being 30 minutes away. We went with the brother to it cause he is our ward mission leader, and we had no money so we couldn’t leave either. We were there for 3 hours. We had a five minute lesson with him and gave the reference to the elders in his area. It was super weird. 

Also the dates who dropped was super sad. One is one who wants to get baptized but his wife is crazy and evil and refuses to do so. They are super poor and building a house. He makes his own adobe to build the house by taking earth out of the well that was in the pictures a couple of weeks ago. Then he had to clear a bunch of rock hard dirt. We have been helping him every morning because he doesn’t have any help. My hands and body are dead. The bishop of another ward offered him a job too but his wife wouldn’t let
him take it because she wanted him to work on the house. This guy didn’t even have money to buy breakfast. Super sad situation. 

The other just didn’t come to church because he was only here two days and he was supposed to have jury duty on Tuesday but he was gone, so the guy gave the paper to us cause we are his neighbors. And we gave it to him after the lesson on Saturday night which was a really good lesson, getting him to be excited for his baptism, but Sunday morning he left super stressed out in the morning to go and figure out what to do about the paper. That sucked. 

We received a referral from other elders about a lady who went to church and wants to get baptized and lives in our area, so we will contact her this week. hopefully that goes well. Also on Monday we made a fire and s’mores with the guy who is really poor. like everyone in his family ate like 50 each. 

Then we had interchanges with the ZLs this week, there’s a new thing where when ZLs do interchanges the two comps both go to their area because it needs to be the model area. me and one of the ZLs found 11 new investigators haha. 

We went to an part of their area that is super far and started knocking on doors. We find a women and she wanted nothing to do with us but we asked for referral and she gave us her front door neighbor. It was more a clan then a family. There were 8 people when we went in. And while we were teaching, more and more people kept joining us. It was really funny. Then while we were praying  and so there’s a bunch of religions who pray really weird and they were evangelicos so they say stuff like "thank you Jesus" and "oh hallelujah Jesus" and "yes please Jesus" while the other people are praying, which is really hard to pray while they date that, but to end the lesson one of them were praying so while they were praying my comp started doing it too. I was trying so hard not to laugh, because he was doing it super weird, but to the other people its normal. I was having to cough to not laugh.  But yeah that was funny.

 
Here it rained last night for the first time in a while. I hate the heat. 

Have a good week,

Love Elder Blanchard

Week 31 (Nopal)

Hey so this week was alright. This week the Zone was sucking it up. There was only five dates in all of the zone. And we had two of them. We had interviews planned for Tuesday and so President had us have a zone conference and he macheted the zone. 

Our district then said we would put seven dates this week for the 25th. And it looked like we were going to do it and then Sunday came and none of the people came to church. So that was disappointing. And since I’m the district leader, it’s my responsibility. Which is one of the bad things about being it. So hopefully this week is a lot better.

Me and my comp almost put two more dates this week, but in the last second an emergency came up and she and her son couldn’t come to church. And without coming to church it’s not a real date. So this week we will hopefully put a lot of dates for baptism.

Interviews were really good too.  Also something cool that happened is that our investigator that was supposed to come to church saw a miracle with the Book of Mormon. She has a husband who works a ton. She only sees him like every 3 months for like 2 days, if that. And now he just got a job for 10 years in Costa Rica.  So he was there yesterday looking for his passport. And he saw her Book of Mormon and sat down to read a little bit of it. This guy hates religion. He is like the .1% of people in El Salvador that hate religion. And then he asked her what was something he could read real fast, and she she told him the chapter we left her a while back in Ether 12, and she said she was watching him read it and he started to weep. He wanted to take it with him, but then he forgot it. But it was really cool to here that. 

Also last week we went to eat in a place called Ataco which is like the Park City of El Salvador. We went to a restaurant called Raclette. We got the raclette.It was so good. But so expensive. But it’s really cool up there and pretty. 

Then we went to a place called Apaneca which is even further up in the mountains. It seemed a lot like Switzerland because of the overcast and mist and there were a bunch of rich people. Every p-day we play soccer. I love p-days now because we just hang out with the zone leaders.

Hope everything is good at home.

Love Elder Blanchard