Bolivia Bound

One Transfer Down,

About A Million More To Go!

September 2, 2013

Hello everyone! As I said in my subject line, I have officially completed one transfer here in Bolivia. At least I think it’s called a transfer in English. In Spanish, it’s a cambio. Anyway, the important part is that I'm no longer the newbie here in Santa Cruz! Woo! Quite an accomplishment, I must say. :)

And that means that I have a new companion! Hermana Castañeta is now in her house and my second trainer is Hermana Maldonado. She’s from Cochabamba and this is her temporary mission. She served six months in Tarija, which is part of Mission Santa Cruz but is way far away, and she will serve six weeks with me here to complete my training and then she will go to her real mission in Venezuela. She is happy all the time and focused on the work and I think we will work well together.

Well, this was a week of a lot of highs and, unfortunately, some lows. First off, the highs. We have two more people with baptism dates! One is a niño, nine years old, named Augustin. I'm not too sure why he's not baptized yet because his family are members, but he's not so we're going to give him the lessons and get him baptized! And then we're also working with his cousin Abacuc. I don't remember if I've mentioned Abacuc or not. He's 10 years old and doesn't want to get baptized because he's deathly afraid of water. However, the goal is for him to get baptized on the 21st with his cousin and we're praying hard to receive revelation to help him do that. We've started to win his confidence, but we know that it'll be a slow process because he has been pressured for more than two years now to get baptized and he doesn't trust the missionaries much since he knows what we're there for. But we're going to do everything possible to help. Our other person with a baptism date, also for the 21st, is... remember Hugo? The golden reference from last week? Well, he surprised us big time by moving to our area for work! And so now we're meeting with him a lot and helping him prepare for baptism. He really desperately wants to change his life, but he doesn't have much confidence in God or in himself. We're working on helping him feel more confidnece and also to make friends in the ward, but that's a challenge since theres almost no one his age. However, I know that with the Lords help its possible! Other highs are that the members are helping us a lot! We got some references from the members and are getting all kinds of contacts and I think we're going to have a lot of new investigators very shortly. Also, we have a training with the 16 new ward missionaries this week, which will be a lot of help, especially with retencion, so I'm pretty excited about that as well. Yay!

The lows are that, unfortunately, both Karen and Soledad who had baptism dates for the 14th, didn't go to church this week, so both of their baptism dates fell through. :( However, we're going to keep working with them. We've recently started to see a change in Soledad, who seems to have more interest and be feeling the power of this message more in her life. What's missing is that she doesn't really understand the importance of going to church, and it doesn't help that her sister that she lives with, who is a member, doesn't really think going to church is very important either as long as you're praying and trying to do the right thing. But I really think that Soledad will get baptized. It will just take a little more time. Karen we are also going to keep working with for a baptism at a later date. She didn't go to church this week because she traveled to Montero, but we're really excited because we met her husband for the first time yesterday, and today we have a lesson with the two of them! Although it will take longer to work with the two of them, this is what we want to do, because after all, this gospel is all about families.

Anyway, I’m learning a lot and I'm happy to be here! It's not easy, but it's definitely worth it. Love you all!

Hermana Chelsie Faulk