April 15, 2013

That is really weird that you have been running into so many people from back home while you are in Arizona, but then again, perhaps not. I tell people that sometimes it gets to like 45 C below (with windchill) and they just nod their head like they know what I am talking about. I try to explain how cold it is with examples of things, but I don't know if they can really imagine. Most people in my mission have never seen weather below freezing, let alone snow. They think that 15 C degrees above zero is really cold.

I have had some pretty interesting experiences here for sure. For example, the lady this week who had a Catholic church missionary sticker on her door and then denied belief in Jesus Christ, just to get rid of me. Or the lady who told me that she couldn't share with us because she was ironing her baby (like ironing board ironing). It makes more sense in Spanish...kind of.

My companion is pretty cool. He is from Guatemala City, Guatemala. I actually talked about him a little bit in the recording, but we get along really good.

I am going to try and get the pictures  of San Pedro this week and upload them next week so that you can see some of the stuff.

The amount of kids we teach alone might seem weird, but you would probably be surprised at the number of missionaries that go on missions without family support. There is an elder here that when he told his dad he was going to go on a mission his dad punched him in the face and told him that if he went he was going to be disowned, so you see a little of everything.

That is pretty much everything for this week. I love you guys, 

Jord

Summary of audio...

This week we tried to deal with a membership issue. Here is Chile there is a problem with people losing their membership records. No one really know why it happens, but it happens quite a lot. I think it's because people move around a lot and the ward secretaries struggle to keep track of them. In these cases, they need to be baptized again. There is one lady here, Tanya, and she's lost her records, but in the meantime, she has been living with someone. We learned this week that she is not going to be living with him anymore so she'll be able to get baptized and we were able to confirm it's all a go. These baptisms count for the mission. It's really cool because she's a really good person and a super active member... so it's pretty sweet. She's a bit different, but she's super funny. I think once she gets baptized she'll be a really strong member. 

There is a kid I mentioned last week - Sebastian. He's getting baptized April 27th. His whole family are members except his dad. He can't get baptized because he's living with Sebastian's mom and they aren't married, which is really, really common here. So, we're basically working with him until his baptism when his uncle is coming and will do the baptism.

The other kid were we teaching is Marco. We've challenged him to baptism, but he has to make up his mind now. He's really good and his mom likes the church, but says she will never get baptized. She's ok with him getting baptized if he wants to. Again... this is quite common here, where people say it's good for their child, but not for them, so it's interesting. It is nice that she doesn't have a problem with it. He's a super good kid. He comes and plays soccer with us some days.

Today for P Day, we didn't do anything too special. We went and played some soccer and then some basketball. I don't really like soccer much and even basketball doesn't thrill me that much, but some of the guys here are pretty serious about it. You know how I am... sometimes I play if I feel like it. One cool thing that happened though, we were going to play soccer and split into 3 teams. One team went off and took all the best players and the rest of us, including 2 members, split into 2 teams. We won every game - it was so funny. That was pretty cool. Soccer's still not my favorite, but sometimes it's fun when the teams are a bit balanced and you have a chance to win some games.

I hope you're all still reading the Book of Mormon as you indicated. I don't know if I told you that our whole mission has been challenged to read the Book of Mormon in 1 month - I'm in Alma 44 so that pretty good. It's only the 15th and I'm over half way through. All  the Latinos who can read English have to do so and the English speaking missionaries have to read in Spanish, so I'm reading in Spanish. It's good. I understand most of it except maybe the Isiah chapters, which are even challenging in English. Elder Lopez is in 3 Nephi, he's super far. He speaks fluent English - actually he rarely talks so I don't really know, but he understands everything. He watched conference in English. He's been to the States about 5x for a month each time. He's seen conference live more times than Elder Steiner, who lives in Utah. He understands English very well. He's flying right through it... and it's 100 pages shorter in English.

That's about it. Have a great week in Arizona and we'll talk to you next week!

Jordan