And I'm without pictures this week! What a surprise? A lot of funny things happened, but I took videos of them to show back at home.
Okay, well, lets just cut to the chase, shall we?
INVESTIGATORS
Aaron - He's progressing, but he's just SO THICK. Like, honestly, we have to tell him around 10 times just one idea so he understands it. It's really slow working, but he comes to church on his own. His baptism is scheduled for this week. We'll see if he makes it or not...
Adriana - She's a contact we made. We haven't been able to find her very often. We put a baptismal date with her, but couldn't get in contact again to be able to teach about Sabbath Day so she would come to church... So we're kinda just stuck trying to find her again so we can actually start working with her. She seems pretty nice. Just doesn't want to read anything out loud.
Santa - Old investigator that honestly doesn't look like she has too much promise. Other elders that served here kept telling me that they wanted me to baptize her, but I honestly don't want to, because as far as I can tell, it looks like she just likes missionaries, not the actual church. I mean, when a missionary told her she had to stop worshiping the Virgin Guadalupe, she got really offended and didn't come back to church... I highly doubt we'll see progress, but Elder Luna wants to continue teaching her. No baptismal dates, because she says she only wants one when SHE feels ready, so... yeah. Kinda slow.
The hardest part about what's going on right now is that our leader is just telling us that we need to work harder and get more stuff done, but when we contact and knock on a bunch of doors, we end up losing time and lessons, and so then we just end up with nothing every day because we keep losing appointments because they fall through and stuff. It's kinda annoying to have leaders tell you to work harder when you don't have anything to work harder with, you know? Eh. Ya me voy.
FUN
1.) So, last week, for a day, Elder Luna and I changed bikes just for fun.
It was the worst decision of my life. My bike is made of aluminum, and it's got a good chain and sealed bearings in the star, so it is SUPER light and easy to get up hills.
My companion's bike is made of steel, has a rusted chain, and sealed bearings, but the bearings don't move as smoothly.
Oh man, I about died that day.
I managed to stay at my normal pace, but I had to kill myself to do it. Going up the hills on my bike was hard, but doing it on Elder Luna's bike was impossible. Elder Luna, who has been using that bike the whole time, just shot up the hills and kept telling me how easy it was. It wasn't really fair, because Elder Luna is a lot stronger than I am, and a LOT better on a bike.
2.) That brings me to another point. Elder Luna is just like me, just better at everything. He's better at computers, bikes, sweeping, opening doors that have locks, speaking Spanish, and contacting. Just you name it, and he's better at it. Even piano! He plays some REALLY cool songs on the piano. He can't sight read, but honestly, who needs to? Just learn some cool songs and you can get any girl to fall in love with you.
3.) I hit a dog with my bike the other day.
I was riding, and I saw this dog on my left start running at another dog across the street on my right.
Well, he started running and I started to pedal harder to pass him, but just when I pedal harder, he starts running faster!
Basically, I had no way to avoid him, and just as I pull my brakes, I feel my front tire collide with his neck, and the dog makes this weird noise like,
"bleejjjhhhh!"
And it stops and lets my bike pass by.
I laughed so hard at that that I had to stop and wait so that I wouldn't fall off my bike. My companion laughed really hard too. Serves the dog right. It was pretty ugly by any means...
4.) Well now, we come to one of my favorite happenings of the week.
We were at the chapel for our CES meeting (Correlacion Ejecutivo del Sacerdocio) I don't know what that means in English. And in this meeting, we had all arrived on bikes, and we left them just outside the door of the chapel because we figured that it was inside the gate, and that if someone showed up, someone would see and be like, HAY! YALL CAN'T TAKE THAT JANK!
As we came out of the meeting, one of the brothers came up and asked us,
"How many Elders are there?"
And we answered four. Then he said something that made my heart stop:
"Well, that sucks. There are only 3 bikes outside."
My bike was the nicest and most expensive of the 4, so I knew my bike had been stolen.
I rushed out the door to check, and to my surprise,
It was still there! They had stolen the bike of our District Leader!
I felt a little bad, but at the same time, he HAS been being kinda dumb lately about contacts and stuff. We laughed so much about it, and the best part was that he was actually SO prideful about being our leader that he said he wasn't even mad. But we all know he was because he didn't want to even be at the church anymore. He started sternly telling his comp that he had to go.
I was honestly just happy that they didn't take MY bike. haha
5.) Also something really cool that happened:
There was a gas station that blew up!
Here, there are two types of gas stations, 1 which is the normal gas station like in the US for cars and stuff where you can pump it.
The other is a station of propane gas. Basically, it's just a place where they have very large reserves of propane in really big tanks.
Well, we were sitting with a member, talking about the mission when all of a sudden, we hear this soft boom.
We looked around and were like, "What the heck?"
Then we hear another one, and the brother looks outside his window and sees smoke, and he suddenly says:
"Woah! The gas station is on fire!"
We all ran outside to see, and sure enough, there was black smoke coming from just over the ridge, and we could hear the explosions from the tanks. there were quite a bit of them. We even saw the flames from the explosions rise over the slight incline. It was such a big explosion that we saw the flames. It took so long for the sound to arrive to the colonia we were in that we saw the flames, and then 5 seconds later we heard the explosion. It was insane.
No one died, but there were 8 wounded and 1 in critical condition, according to people around here. It was pretty cool.
Okay, so in just a week longer I'll be able to talk to you guys again. Did I just talk to you a couple months ago?
The wait between January and May is a lot shorter than May to December, so it seems much faster between the calls. But I'm fine with that. I'm sure you guys are too, right?
See you all next week.
Elder Carter
