January 3, 2011

Hey! Is it 2011 already!! I can´t believe it. I don´t know where all the time has gone.

I can´t believe how many babies I keep hearing about! It´s almost like every week I hear about another baby. I´m not going to know anyone when I get home!

Well, while you´ve all been freezing up there, weather has been generally hot during the day and only a little nippy at night. My comp is "dieing from the cold" And I´m loving not having to deal with any snow. I may have missed the snow for Christmas, but it wasn´t really even Christmas, just another work day... and I kind of liked it that way. Something about just being tranquilo the whole time was just kind of nice.

This week has been kind of interesting. With the holidays, the only thing people are thinking about here are Tamales :P, buying fireworks, and getting drunk. That being said, we had a few thing happen that were kind of interesting. First of all, we had an activity in the church so that Serjio could get acquainted with some of the other jovenes in the ward. We went to pick him up but he said he was feeling a little sick and couldn´t come. We told him he was still invited if he changed his mind, and went to prepare. The plan was to watch the Testaments and eat pizza and banana bread. :) The amazing thing is Serjio ended up coming and even brought his friend. The whole time Serjio (our investigator) was explaining stuff that he knew from reading in the Book of Mormon to his friend who we hadn´t even met yet. His fecha boutismal is for the 8th, this Saturday, but we haven´t been able to squeeze a cita with him since we put the fecha, until tonight, so we have a lot of work to do to make sure he´s ready for it. Despite whether or not he gets baptized this week, I´m sure he will eventually get baptized, because he´s sincere and is doing what we tell him to.

The other thing that happened this week was kind of interesting. We were going about buying material for banana bread to make and give out to some members for the holidays, when a lady asked what we were going to make with all the flour, oil, and sugar we were buying. She happened to be someone my comp already knew. Her son has just left for his mission, but she isn´t a member, she´s Catholic. We talked about her son being in the CCM and I could feel her concern because she had no idea what her son was doing. So, we told her that we had some photos of the CCM that we could show her some day if she´d like. We left it at that. Saturday, we were going about "contacting" which really means having nothing to do, so aimlessly looking for someone who will listen to us. Not even any of the references we had would talk to us. So... we talked about it and decided to go back home to analyze what we were doing wrong. We studied how to find people to teach for an hour and then talked about it. During my study, this same lady (her name is Irma) came to my mind. I suggested it to my companion and we ended up doing that, that night. We showed her pictures on my DVD player and talked about what her son was doing. She seemed even more desperate because her son hasn´t been able to get his e-mail up and running yet, so he couldn´t e-mail them. After that, we decided to show the movie "Finding Faith in Christ". After watching that, we bore our testimonies, (us and her children who are members) and then we told her that she was always invited to church on Sundays. To our excitement, she came, and the members were so receiving and took the time to go to her and talk to her and befriend her. It was awesome. So we´ll have to see how this next week goes with her.

Things are going well here. I love you all and I miss you very much. I´ll talk to you next week. In the mean time, try not to freeze :)

Love,

Elder Landon James Crapo