April 24, 2017

I think it was something i ate last week that made my stomach sad. and yes i did have a bump. My garments are getting small. and i can do like 60 pushups now. We didnt see jose cruz a single time this week, and he didnt come to church. Florencio lives with a member so the member helped us in our lesson this week and we taught him about the book o fmormon. he works every day but saturdayand sunday, so we dont get to teach him tons. We are teaching this guy Gerardo who is way solid and lives in a cabana, i didnt really know what a cabana was when he told me, but when i saw it i understood, its a little bamboo house he made down by the river, its rad. Awkward experience...a testigo de jehova was telling us we dont believe in God, and we didnt want to argue but we kept trying to tell her we believe in God and she was getting mad. i guess that was awkward, idk, everything is awkward. We taught a good lesson to Lupita, she is a less active with a sad life. Elder Stubbs is safe and keeps me from getting killed, like this week someone offered us a ride, and i said , sure, its hot. and elder stubbs said probly not a good idea, and i said, ya...guess not. This week was good, i read all my journals today and wrote down noteworthy stuff, so maybe my email will be better. We went to visit this inactive guy and he pretty much just hated americans. he was telling us about how terrible arizona is, but in america everyone has AC while there are people in sonora passing out in the streets from the heat. and we bombed japan and germany in world war 2 and that was bad, and when the english came in colonial times they killed all the indians instead of mixing with them, he was crazy. and the reason he fell away and doesnt read the book of mormon is because the names are all in english...?¿?¿? i dont even know. Also, in english class this week we taught everyone how to sing I am a child of God in english and they were so terrible i had to try really hard not to laugh but it was super cool too. afterwards a member with a really nice truck and a really nice sounds system and he only had one seat in his truck so me and elder stubbs were all smashed in and the member starts playing "i dont f with you" by big sean on full blast, and it was so loud he couldnt hear us telling him to turn it off, i wouldnt suggest looking up that song, just know it says more swear words than other words it was so bad but so funny. Also, one day we were in the colonia de carton (cardboard colony) its out in nowhere, its not even on the map, and we met this family and they offered to show us a shortcut to bugambilias, another colony, so we went with them. we were just scaling straight rock, the path they took us was overthis rocky pass that looked like thunder mountain in disneyland, and the wife got tired so the husband just left her at the top and went down with his kids. On divisions me and elder shehee went and did service with that family, i hope we can start teaching them. We also met another crazy guy that talked about how michael jackson and john lenon sold their souls to the devil and how the catholic bible says syria is going to get destroyed like sodom and gummorah, and tons of other crazy stuff, like how if you fold the 5 dollar bill a certain way it has donald trumps face with the iluminati eye, it was weird, and he wouldnt let us leave forever. another crazy guy told us he knows more about the book of mormon than me and elder shehee combined, and that he was atheist, and i invited him to pray and he told us he prays to the devil, and i asked him how he is an atheist if he believes in the devil, because if there is a devil their is a God, then he got mad so we left. Now time for the cool spiritual stuff, so we have an investigator and her grandpa moved in with them, and whenever we pass by he just yells "im catholic", from the couch no matter what. "excuse me, is sara home?" "WERE CATHOLIC", so after like 3 times of that we prayed he would have a softer heart and he came out to talk to us, which was a first, and he was nice and told us we could go back another day. Then, we were taught by an investigator that jumping the border is like conversion, you hop the fence and run through the desert in the dark, trying not to get bit by snakes,and then when you see the lights of the highway you know you are close, you just have to get to the highway where they have someone to pick you up. its like runnng through the dark with sin looking for the true church, and the true church is the highway. that was a nice new perspective. Also, Maria came to church for the 4th time this week, General conference straight changed her heart. Its so cool, we are also teaching her in laws but they arent quite ready, but her niece is always running around in with all 500 of the other kids that lives there. but i guess she has been listening, she is only 7, but when her uncle that raised her gets too drunk to function she sits with him and reads him the book of mormon to try to help, if baptismal dates right now, which is crazy awesome.

April 17, 2017

I am doing good today, my stomach is messed up from something i ate yesterday i think. the heat isnt great, but theres nothing you can do. i do indeed have enough short sleeve shirts, my stretchy ones are a little smaller now, im getting fat from all this stinking rice and torillas. we dont really do any service ever which drives me crazy, i want to get my hands dirty and do stuff. its going fairly quick, the days feel like weeks and the weeks feel like days, its wild. its fun for the most part. the drunk people dont like us because were both american. I am getting to know the ward a lot better. Our mission leader is so cool and way solid. my spanish is functional, i think i have about maxed out for having a white companion, its like shooting yourself in the foot. i am fairly fluent, some things are still hard to say but i can say just about everything i want to. Easter?  Here it is called holy week and everyone just parties and shoots fireworks for a whole week and everyone doesnt eat meat and sunday was kinda just a ghost town, everything shuts down, all the stores and everything all weekend. they drink so much beer here it blows my mind. maria didnt come to church but we taught this guy florencio and he has some crazy stories, and we set a baptismal date in our first lesson with him, it was so cool. he seems way solid. We taught jose cruz to keep the sabbath day holy this week because his baptismal date is in like 2 weeks and he didnt come to church last week, and he doesnt have a job, he is a temp so he just goes whenever someone calls him with work, and last sunday he didnt have any food or any money and he got a call for a job so he went instead of coming to church, and elder stubbs was slamming him for it and i wasnt backing him up because i didnt know what to say. Jose asked about the ox in the mire and asked if no food and no money counts as an ox in the mire, and elder stubbs didnt understand and i didnt have enough faith to tell him he needs to go to church in that situation, but then he didnt come yesterday either. the book of mormon is written specifically for us. help them understand that. tell them to pray for a desire to read it (This last few sentences were written in response to what I should teach the young women about the importance of the Book of Mormon.)

Also this week, someone threw rocks at us from who knows where, they were hiding in the trees or something and it hit me in the head and it hurt, but i pretended like it didnt because i didnt want them to know they hit me. Also, i got a plant like 5 weeks ago and I put it in a planter outside our door and we named it abraham lincoln, or Abe for short, I watered him every day, and then this week someone stole him. I was so mad. Who steals a plant?

April 10, 2017

Hey momma, whats kickin? This week was pretty wild. sometimes the ants get in my azucaritas (that means little suggaries, advertising is different here, theyre like frosted flakes) which isnt a big deal, but the lizards are getting wise around here, and on thursday i went to pour myself some azucaritas and a lizard was in my bowl of milk, it was very sad. we taught some good lessons, jose cruz decided he wants to get baptized so that was pretty neat. Well see if he goes through. Maria went to church again this week which was way super awesome because we have been working with her forever, and the missionaries before us for almost 2 years. We still walk a lot. today we went to cerra de la cruz again and elder martinez led us through the jungle and we got lost again, he calls it extreme p day. the ward mission leader is way awesome and today we went to his house and ate pozole. idk what else happened, nothing really. Im doing good. im always way hungry at night.im healthy and getting swole from my half hour workout everymorning, i can do like 7 pushups now. I studied the allegory of the olive trree some more and read jesus the christ. we have this new investigator named karin and she has crazy ideas about religion, but everything she knows about religion she has just decided through logic, im excited to help her find the truth because she has tons of questions. in spanish cielo means heaven and sky, and she wants to know where in the sky god is, which is hard to answer. well see how it goes this week. were going to tepic this week for divisions wiht the APs, im not sure why. i think they think were disobedient because so much crazy stuff keeps happening to us (not really). we had some good lessons. my interview was good, we saw a kid that was like 9 trying to fight off a 17 year old, the kid had rocks in each hand trying to defend himself and i told the other kid to get out of here, because the little kid had some gnarly bruises on his ribs, it looked like he got kicked by a horse or something. and elder stubbs said we arent sposed toi get in the middle of stuff like that, so i asked president and president told me im not allowed to. which is stupid. we also got stopped by state police (here they put big turret guns in their trucks, theyre the people who mean business) and they talked to us and were way nice, but they all had their big guns out and were searching the hillside, so we left.

Heres some pics that really capture the ambiance of our room with mosquito nets and christmas lights. the other ones were when we got lost last week

April 3, 2017

 not a ton happened this week. we walked a lot and taught some. we had these investigators that we had to drop because they never came to church, we dropped em at the beginning of last week and then they showed up at conference yesterday which was way cool, the second talk of the afternboon session was talking directly to them..  i think things should start picking up here but who knows, i dont have tons to tell. On tuesday we rewatched the transition from when they changed the schedule so that was neat. i learned a lot more. i feel like in the mtc you dont even know what youre preparing for, if you sent me back to the mtc and told ne the same stuff i would learn so much more now. we are teaching english class so that was fun, we had 2 days this week where every single one of our citas fell, so that was frustrating. appointments i mean. there is this old guy that lives here and has lived here for 50 years and is a recent convert that helps us a lot, we are going to have him introduce us to his friends because he literally knows everyone. we decided he is the key to missionary work. conference was neat. thats about it. On friday and tuesday we had every single one of our citas fall, which was 10. 10 appointments fell. what thet heck. it was lame.  we got way lost in the jungle today and walked like 8 miles, that was fun, we were with our district leader. 

March 27, 2017

Hey momma, this week was wild. We hadnt had any new investigators in two weeks, and the week before that we had 2, so that was lame. We spent most the days walking around, looking through names on the ward list and the old investigators list, which isnt the funnest because its really hot here. so on friday after food elder stubbs said we should fast, he said he had never fasted besides fast sunday before on his mission because it is kinda discouraged because it is really hard to be a missionary without food and water, but we did it and prayed to find people. Saturday we got 4 new investigators, in one day, it was so awesome. Then sunday we got another one, and we asked if anyone else was home, and he said his daughter was but she wouldnt want to listen, then half way through our lesson she came and stuck her head around the corner and saw us so she came down and sat at the table with us and listened. it was so awesome, we got 6 new investigators in two days. That was way neat. but on sunday 0 of our investigators went to church which kind of sucked, but there were like 40 or 50 white people there because its sprinkbreakerthon around here right now. i dont really remember what else happened, elder stubbs left a pan of rice on the counter all week so it got way moldy and he didnt want to clean it so he just through it away, and he trhough away our only lid, which i didnt notice but im not thrilled about. I finished the book of mormon and am in 2nd nephi again. i also read the book "our search for happiness" be m russel ballard this week, thats pretty sweet. i also realized how much faith ishmael had in the book of mormon, four teenage kids came and told him to leave with his family and leave all his stuff to go into the wilderness for...ever, thats a lot of stinking faith, but nobody really ever notices that guy. not much happened this week