We were finally both healthy this week so we were able to actually work without dying, so that’s good news! Anyways, I guess I’ll just get right to it. After P-day ended last Monday, we went to Hermana Magda’s house for FHE and to celebrate the birthday of her daughter Madeline. She gave us cake which was like way gross and runny, but apparently that’s how cake is here. Not a fan haha. Tuesday we had district meeting and afterwards, thestake president of the area bought our zone, Progreso Sur, pizza. He is the stake president over the stake that is covered by the Progreso Norte and Progreso Sur zones, so which ever zone has more baptisms each month, he buys them pizza. And that was us! So that was pretty sweet. After that, we went on and continued with our day. We went to the house of the guiper and the crazy old man to teach, but they weren’t there. It turns out that our ward mission leader is like building a house right near there (super random), so we stopped and talked with him for a bit. When I say house, I mean like a little tiny cement room, like the size of a living room, that is going to be a house. It’s pretty crazy how small some houses are here. After that, we went to another appointment with this couple we have been working with. They went to the temple open house and talked about how great it was, but still aren’t sure about the church. SO many people here have that problem. They go to the temple open house and come back and say “I have never felt like that in my life. You could tell there was something different about it. Buuttttt…I don’t want anything to do with it.” It is SO frustrating haha. Anyways, so we are just working with them and it seems to be going pretty well. The weirdest thing happened though. We were sitting in their front yard talking to them and their daughter comes speeding in on her bike, skids to a stop and says “(Inser tneighbors name here that I don’t know) just died!!” Cut to our investigators TAKING off towards these people’s house and us just sitting there like ummm this is interesting. So we start following them down the street and we get to the house of the lady and there are like 20 people outside of it just sobbing their eyes out. Zura and I look at each other like “What in the world is going on?!” People are running in to the house crying. People are running out of the house crying. People are running around the house crying. Basically, everyone was either running, crying, or running and crying. It was mayhem. And we were just standing there with no idea what to do hahaha. A few minutes later, a member from our ward randomly comes out of the house (we didn’t know he was in there) and explains the situation. Apparently, some lady had like a heart attack or something but didn’t die. But while the mayhem was going on, she passed out, so everyone assumed she was dead. So all is well. She is alive. So that’s good! The rest of the day, every.single.one. of our appointments fell through. Do you know how annoying it is when you walk 20 minutes through the jungle to get to someone’s house and they aren’t even there? Let me tell you, it is pretty annoying haha. On to Wednesday. We have been teaching this lady Maria Isabel and her two granddaughters Yolanis and Reina. Here is a little background on them. Maria Isabel is the mom of a lady who got baptized a couple months ago, but is inactive now unfortunately. She and her granddaughters were a reference from another member, so we have been teaching them. They are all SUPER cool and we set Saturday as a baptismal date for them, but more on that later. The younger granddaughter, Yolanis, is like RIDICULOUSLY smart. We teach her a principal and then ask questions to make sure she understood it, and she says things back to us that are like wayyyy spiritual and insightful. Its crazy haha. They are all awesome, but ill get to more on that when I talk about Saturday. After another lesson with them, we went to visit Hermana Marta, one of our recent converts. She was one of the people baptized my first week here. She is the one with the super big stomach in the group picture I sent that first week. I don’t know if you can tell, but shes like way swollen because she has like diabetes or something, im not exactly sure. But anyways, we went to visit her and she was just laying in bed, when usually shes outside sitting in this chair that she is ALWAYS in. Apparently, the night before she had just been in HORRIBLE pain from the swelling. She cant walk or anything, so she just sits around all day.
We offered to give her a blessing and she accepted, so we did that while she way laying in bed which was kind of interesting. Afterwards, she wanted to sit up and talk with us, but she like couldn’t do it on her own. We and her husband had to help her up and get her situated because she like physically couldn’t do it. After we got her up, she just started sobbing asking why God would let this happen to her and a bunch of other stuff. It was suuuper sad. Im glad Zura was there to handle it because I don’t exactly have enough Spanish to comfort her with something like that yet haha. We calmed her down and told her we would come back again to check up on her. Moving on. Thursday. Thursday was kind of interesting because we woke up and the power was off. Really, its not like we have computers or phones to charge, so not having power wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but it is. We each have personal fans and we couldn’t use them so it was SO hot. We asked our neighbor if he had power, and he said no and that he had heard on the radio yesterday that they were going to turn the power off until 6. With no explanation. Who does that? Not cool. We had plans that day to go visit a member who is wayyy far away from us, so we were happy to leave the house and head over there. We made it to the members house and visited with them for a little bit, and then the husband took us to a family near by that we are going to start teaching. This guy has a son who joined a church and went on a mission, but he has never done anything to learn about the church. So we’ll see where that goes. As we were leaving, we saw these 2 geese, which was really weird to see. I always see chickens and roosters, but this was a first. As we were walking by and I was marveling at their majestic beauty, this demon goose bows its head really low, starts honking really violently, and begins chasing me.Talk about random. I didn’t do anything to provoke it other than compliment its divine nature, and it started chasing me. But it wasn’t like a legit chase, it kind of just waddled behind me trying to threaten me. It was really weird. I was doing a little fast walk away as it was “chasing” me and just kept telling Elder Zura “Im being chased by a goose! Im being chased by a goose! I have something good to write home about for today.” Haha. I also found out that the word “goose” is an inherently funny word. Goose. Try it out. Goose. English class was that night too. I seriously love teaching it. It is so funny listening to people try to speak English, because I get an insight as to what I sound like when I speak Spanish to them haha. We have like 3 new investigators from it, 2 of which are probably getting baptized by the end of the month. So it was a success! On to Saturday. We baptized Maria Isabel and Yolanis Saturday! Yolanis chose me to baptize her, so that was pretty cool. Reina, the other granddaughter, didn’t get baptized because she said she wasn’t ready like at the last minute, so we will see what happens with her. But the other two did and it was awesome. Elder Zura baptized Maria Isabel, which was almost a catastrophe haha. She is kind of a bigger lady, so Elder Zura wanted me in the font on the other side of her to help her back up if he couldn’t do it himself. So we get in and do the baptism, but right as Elder Zura is like dipping her back in to the water she lets go of his arm that she is supposed to hold on to that she can help pull herself back up, and leaves all the work to me and Elder Zura. She turned in to like dead weight and we both had to use all our strength to prop her back up because she just went limp. It was so crazy hahaha. We somehow got it and it all worked out, but it was definitely an interesting experience haha. That night we went and visited a man named Melvin. He has been meeting with missionaries for months but always gets dropped because he wont commit to anything. Elder Zura and I recently started teaching him again and we decided to commit him to be baptized. I explained my conversion story and then asked him if he would be baptized, and he said yes! We were both shocked because he never has before. This doesn’t mean he will for sure go through with it, but there is a good chance. When he heard that I was a convert, his face like lit up and he was like “really? How did you know you wanted to be baptized?” So its cool that after all this time he has finally committed to it. That was pretty much it for Saturday. On to Sunday. After Church, we went to visit Hermana Marta again. While we were there, like 6 sisters from the ward showed up with hymn books to sing to her and asked us to join. NO ONE here can sing. Seriously. So it was kind of rough with them, but we did it haha. It was funny because we sang Nearer My God to Thee and they all just stopped so they could listen to Zura and me. They thought we were just soooo good. It was funny haha. We went to go have a lesson with Mileidi, the guiper from last week, but she wasn’t there. Only her crazy old man dad. So we just talked with him for a bit, and he was crazy as ever. He calls us Elder Flacco and Elder Gordito. Which is just Elder Skinny and Elder Fat. So rude haha. After that, we were walking to another appointment and walked by the bishops house and saw his wife like peeling corn, I don’t really know how to describe it. She just has like a million pieces of corn, and uses her thumbs to push off all the kernels into a giant bucket. We offered to help, so we did that for like 20 minutes. I found my calling in life. Im SO good at it. I did 2 with one hand in the time it took Zura to do 1 with both hands. It was nuts haha. Not much really happened the rest of the night worth mentioning. However, today (Monday) we got to have lunch at the Mission President’s house because we were Zona Celestial this month! That just means we were the zone with the most baptisms, and Zura and I had the most baptisms in the zone, so that was pretty cool. Anyways, that’s pretty much it for the week. Twas a swell week. Now on to the random stuff. 1. The bishop of my ward is like a pioneer. He was the first person baptized in all of our area. Its pretty crazy actually. 2. I learned the words to the Macarena song. So awesome. Who knew there were actually words? I just mumbled until you scream Macarena haha. 3. The Spanish to English translation is so weird on some things. For example, “Que onda?” means like “whats up?” but it actually means “What wave?” And then allll the kids say “Que pedo?” which is like whats up too, but pedo means fart, so they are saying “what fart?” Its seriously so weird haha. 4. There was one of those lizards that can run on water in our yards.I think that’s what it was. I got a picture of it. For those of you who have seen Land Before Time, tell me it doesn’t look EXACTLY like Ducky from that movie. I swear it does haha. Well, that’s pretty much all I’ve got. This email was pretty sporadic, but I guess they all are actually haha. Stay classy world!
Elder Shuga
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