BUENAS! 19 Oct 2011
How is everyone!? How is home and Casey and snow and the mountains?! I’m really missing them right now. But ya, Dad, missionaries do "walk with angels” I guess. We taught Delvi, one of our investigators who has a baptismal date set for the 29th, and his dog is a beast. It attacks everyone! We didn't know that, so we went walking right past it and I petted it and the dog just sat there and let me pet it. It didn’t do anything really, but then when the member that was with us walked past it, it about killed him! Ha funny stuff.
We've had some trouble inviting people to be baptized in our zone so they set a new goal and we are inviting like 2 or 3 people a day, which is good but to me it seems a little insignificant ... tu sabes (you know). But, we do it and some are awesome and some are just..ehh. Frank from New York is my favorite and speaks English. He told us that he wanted to be baptized by the right authority! But he is going to back to New York on November 3rd, so we are going to try and hand him over to missionaries there.
My companion doesn’t play sports and it is funny as ever! We went over to the church to wait for a member that was meeting us there to go help with an appointment. The seminary class was at the church playing basketball. They tossed my companion the ball -he is afraid to shoot because he knows he can’t, really! – so he points to the hoop , lines himself up and kicks the ball all the way over the fence onto the property of the Baptist church that is right next door. I laughed so hard. But, the members here are getting better. We are working with the younger priesthood holders helping them learn. They like going with us when we teach, which a surprise to me is because I didn’t really want to go with the missionaries when I was their age - sadly. They always pray for us and bare their testimonies, it’s pretty great.
Spanish is frustrating, but what here isn’t sometimes ha. I know I’ve only been studying it for a little over 2 months now, I guess I just need to be patient but I want it NOW! It sucks because I know what I want to say in English during the lesson so I try to say it in Spanish and it just sounds terrible and I get stuck and ah…. I can contact like no ones business but that’s because we do it so many times a day – I know it will come, I understand more and can speak more than when I came to the island haha but that aint sayin much – just sayin.
I sent my shirts to get sown and have been waiting and waiting and haven’t gotten them back! So I have been washing the two shirts that I kept, every other day in our little lavadora (washing machine) that just spins the clothes in soapy water then I have to rinse and hang up my clothes outside my window to dry! So, hopefully I will get the other ones back soon and the lady isn’t cheating me ha.
Okay I have to tell yall about the food here, even though everything the exact same, it is the greatest food ever. My favorite thing is spaghetti and fritas which are fried platanos (plantain bananas –bland and starchy) dipped in ketchup! Que sabroso! ooo so good.
We just went to the Sam’s Club of Santiago and got our bulk items so we can save a little money, then we ate and now we are at the internet café doing our e-mails. So, not too much going on, but it’s good. We get around in little cars they call rutas. It’s kind of like an early 90’s Honda Civic that they stuff 8 people into. That was really fun today with all of our groceries!
To be honest though, this week has been pretty standard. I guess that I’m already settling into missionary life. Studying, I have found is the key to missionary work. My comp and I study together and practice what we are going to teach and how we are going to say it and we actually put it into practice! It’s kind of like making a game plan and then going out and playing. I have also found that we gain a lot of confidence from this and learn to react to each other’s queues. For example, we invited Fernandez to be baptized four times in one lesson and it was great, we just didn't take no for an answer. ha
But I hope that all is well in Provo and in Utah, so many missionaries here are from Utah and Arizona so I can talk to most of them about my time in both places!
Tell Ryan Francom good luck! He’ll do great – just have patience and be obedient (hey, that's what I’m learning!)
But, okay love yall !
ELDER GRINER
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