Tuesday, September 10, 2013

September 9, 2013

Hey everyone, here´s the update for the week (it´s probably more like an update for the month by now, because I´m a slacker at group emailing):
First off, I hope that everyone from my family is alright and learning to love going without power and boiling water and cleaning up fallen trees and dealing with floods and mudslides. That sounds like an adventure for you all. Some of it sounds a little familiar... Mostly just the power outages for long periods of time and filtering water, haha, hopefully the weather gets better there and that there aren´t more enchantments of large green vortexes over our house knocking over trees anymore...
Well, this week has been good, we had changes this week, but me and my companion stay the same. The other Elders in our area had changes though. The elder who´s had a ton of time in this area and basically taught me how to do everything here in the branch left. An elder who was in my MTC district came in his place, which is cool because we already know each other and have gotten right to work. We´ve done a ton of divisions with him this week, so that I can teach him how to do a lot of stuff here in the branch because his companion is still just barely starting out in the mission and is learning spanish more than anything. So that was the big change this week. We´ve had a lot to do for the branch this week too. We did visits on saturday with all 4 elders, but a lot of people said that they weren´t going to come to church this sunday because of another festival that they had in Yuscaran (I´ve come to hate the festivals here in yuscaran, because they´re pointless and always on sundays, and they´ve had like 5 already in the 4 months I´ve been here). So almost all of the members had children in the parade, and it was required that the children would go to the parade, so everyone said that they weren´t going to come. So sunday morning, I had all of the classes prepared and a sacrament talk prepared to give, because nobody would take any assignments because they weren´t going to come. Then, at like 9:30, we have 1 member at church, so we are just waiting for more people to come, when the 2nd counselor to the mission president comes in to our meeting, and of course he comes on the worst day possible to come to one of our meetings. We talked to him for a while, and with him and 1 more member that showed up, we had sunday school, and after we had sacrament meeting, with 7 people in the meeting: 4 elders, the 2nd counselor, and 2 members, while we listened to the noise of the marching bands from the parade right outside. We took the sacrament, and after we finished, President turned to me and asked ´Are you going to give talks this sunday or no?´, and I told him that each of the elders had something prepared to share, but he said that we should just end the meeting early, without any sacrament talks, so I announced that this sunday, we wouldn´t have any talks, and we ended the meeting. So that was the most tiny, pathetic little sacrament meeting that I had seen in my life.
We´ve also had a few meetings that we´ve had to go to and a bunch of errands to run. I ran around Tegus doing a whole bunch of stuff today, and worked more than relaxed - a normal pday for me now, haha. But we got everything done today while we were there in Tegus, and I got everything I needed.
Anyways, it´s been a crazy week, but it´s been good. It´s been hard, because we have no investigators right now, and way too much stuff to do for the branch, but we´ll have to balance our time to go out and contact and teach and preach and work as missionaries do. :D
I hope that everyone´s doing well!!
Love you all!
Elder Ward