July 22, 2013

Hi everyone! Today is my first Pday as a real, live missionary out of the CCM, and I couldn’t be more happy to be here. I’m in an area called Braniff in the actual city of Santa Cruz. The ward is super friendly and very eager to help the missionaries, which is great. And I have a great companion, Hna Castañeta. She is almost done with her mission, has less than six weeks left and then I’ll be killing her off. That’s sort of interesting because normally you’re with your trainer for twelve weeks, so I suppose I’ll have two trainers. She keeps teasing me, saying I’ll be a trainer once she leaves. Oh gosh, I hope not ha-ha. What a disaster that would be. I never have any clue where we are with my lousy sense of direction, and there are so many people that I have a hard time remembering anyone’s names. Not to mention that I can’t really speak Spanish ha-ha. Just a little bit about the city and things... it’s super different from the US, obviously. The set up of most of the houses is, there is a huge industrial looking door that you have to bang on and yell into for ages to get someone to open it, then once you get inside, it is a big dirt and cement courtyard type area, where there are a bunch of lines for drying laundry, chairs, old grills, trash, just a bunch of stuff. Then there are a ton of small cement apartment type things where a bunch of families live, one in each apartment. They generally have one communal shower and toilet for everyone in the apartment area, and it’s just super different. This is one of the difficulties of the area, is that it’s hard to find people because we have to bang on the main door for a long time, have someone finally come open it, then ask if the person we want is home, have that person that opened the door go look, and come back and tell us. That’s kind of the set up of our apartment as well, but it’s MUCH nicer. We have tile, not cement, and we have a bedroom, a main room, a kitchen, and a bathroom that even has warm water in the shower! So don’t worry about the conditions here at all. They take good care of the hermanas.

Unfortunately, it looks like I got to the area right when the previous missionaries were having a slow time. They had a few baptisms scheduled, but they fell through, and so we’re sort of starting from scratch, lots of investigators, references, and contacts, but no progressing investigators and no one with a baptism date. Pretty much everyone is willing to listen to our message, so we have a ton of investigators. The challenge, however, is finding those who are actually willing and interested enough to act - to go to church, read the Book of Mormon, accept a baptism date, etcetera. But we have met some really lovely people that I have high hopes for. One is a boy named Abel. His sister Clarita is a recent convert, and she is so great. He has a lot of questions and isn’t very confident in God’s ability to answer them. Also, he has had a hard time with his parents. However, he believes what we have been telling him, he once again, doesn’t want to act on what he’s learning. We’re going to teach him tonight about having more trust in God so that he will hopefully feel enough confidence to try to pray. We also met a very kind woman yesterday named Daisy. We taught her about prayer and challenged her to baptism. She said she wasn’t sure about baptism, but she wants to keep meeting with us. She was so kind and seems like a very special, sincere person. She has a lot of love for her children and I believe that this love will inspire her to want to act because she will want them to have the blessings provided by the gospel. And then we also met yesterday with a couple, Omar y Noelia, that are living together and have two children, but aren’t married. Omar asked me why I was here from so far away in the US and I had the opportunity to testify of how the gospel has blessed my life so much and that’s the reason I’m here, doing something that isn’t easy, because I want them to have the same blessings in their lives that I have in mine. He seemed to be touched by that, and we’ll be meeting with them again tomorrow. These people are so easy to love and so kind. I just want them to accept what we’re telling them! Oh, and there is one more woman, Veronica, that does want to be baptized. However, she isn’t married and there is a problem with her papers, she has to go to Cochabamba to do something with them and that’s a long trip, especially since she’s pregnant and its sort of a precarious situation with her pregnancy. We just have to hope and pray that a miracle of some sort will occur, that the Lord will provide a way for her to be able to work out the marriage so that she can be baptized!

Anyway, that’s sort of how things are going down here. It’s FREEZING right now, I had no idea that it got so cold here in Santa Cruz during the winter, but turns out, it does! Obviously I was totally unprepared for cold, so I ended up having to walk around in freezing cold water in the streets above my ankles all day yesterday. But no worries, the elders are super kind and one of them lent me this huge coat that I’m currently wearing, and my companion lent me stockings, so I’m doing great and we’re going to buy rain boots and cold weather supplies a little later today. Anyway, yep, that’s the life in Santa Cruz! It’s not easy, but it’s great and I’m so glad to be here doing the Lord’s work!