Hey everyone!
We ate with the English ward.
Lunes - wow, what a day. We woke up, did our normal studying,
cleaning, and shopping, then we had a zone activity! We spent some
time filling up water balloons and then headed to a field behind one
of the church buildings. We were there for like six hours. Water
balloon fights, soccer games, various competitions between the
districts, etc etc. it was a blast! Some of the water balloons had
food dye in it, so I had a blue leg for like 2 days afterward :). By
the time it was over and we had taken two sets of elders home it was
like 8:30 and we still had to plan for the next day...haha oh well.
Tuesday - In the morning we helped a nice Catholic family move out of
the apartments we live in. It was funny because she kept saying things
like "you know I've had Books of Mormon in my house for years" or "I'm
surprised you missionaries haven't tried to talk to me before, we've
lived in Utah for a long time!" It almost seemed like she was asking
the English elders to teach her :) After the move we ate lunch with
the elders who were helping with us and then went to a lesson with a
less active sister who has been coming back to church. Her name is
Griselda...she came from really really hard circumstances and is
trying to recover and get back on her feet. She is great to teach
because she seems to understand that the Gospel of Jesus Christ will
help her, she just needs help learning and applying it. Later we had a
meeting with the district leaders to train them on having effective
district meetings and stuff like that. We had two lessons cancel on us
so we did a lot of contacting and visits. That night we had a lesson
with John, a younger guy from Venezuela. He's hilarious. He is really
sincere about learning about the church but has been off and on doing
the things he needs to to find out for himself if it's true. He always
says "black power!" with his fist raised up in the air even though
he's not African American at all. Too funny
Wednesday - After studies we made cookies for the bishop and some
other ward leaders to thank them for feeding us and helping us teach.
We also cut the lawn of the Carbonell family...I can't remember if
I've mentioned them in the past or not but they're awesome. It's a
mom, her two daughters and their kids. They feed us a lot, and all
three of them cook some bomb Ecuadorian food...it's the best :)
Tatiana (one of the daughters) always makes lemonade for us, but we
always tease her because it's more like straight lemon juice than
lemonade! Super tart. :) After that we went to dinner, did some
contacting, and then had a lesson with a brand new reference we got
from the bishopric. Her name is María and we had been trying to
contact her for a while. Well we finally got ahold of her and she's
really prepared and wants to learn so much! We're going to invite her
to be baptized tonight.
Thursday - we did a baptismal interview for some Spanish elders in our
Zone right after an early lunch and then did our weekly planning. It
was a pretty uneventful morning/afternoon. After that was finished we
went to try and contact a couple people without much luck and then
headed to dinner. We had a lesson with the Doblado family after dinner
that went really well. They're a family that just recently arrived
here from Honduras. Their story of how they crossed the border into
the United States is pretty crazy! That's one of the fun parts about
serving Spanish is hearing all sorts of crazy stories. But the only
one in that family that's really progressing is the oldest daughter,
Maryuri. After that we went to visit a less active family to share a
quick lesson with them and invite them to church. The last lesson of
the night was with a new family that we just found, Adrián and Erica.
We're really hopefully for them. They have two kids that are really
noisy and restless, so the lessons can be fun :)
Friday - we went to two different district meetings and then ate lunch
with the second district. After that we had another lesson with
Griselda, did some finding/contacting and taught some English to one
of the Doblado kids, had a Book of Mormon reading lesson with the Ader
family and then dinner. After that we had a lesson with Lorena who
just got baptized on Saturday, then with Danny who also just got
baptized. Nothing really out of the ordinary to say about them...they
were both really happy after their baptism.
Saturday - Saturday morning elder Clyde and I did the translation for
a stake baptism! It was fun :) it was hard though because at first the
speakers spoke for super long before they gave us a break to
translate. After that we had a meeting with Elders Alvarez and Abel
and our sister training leaders to plan some upcoming trainings we've
got. Right after that we had to run and deliver a baptismal form for
an interview that we did, after which we spent some time updating
progress records (ughh) for Sunday. For the rest of the night we did
some contacting and had a lesson with some recent converts from
Colombia, the Cafiero family. They were living in a pretty small
apartment, and now their whole extended family (also recently
baptized) just came and moved in with them. So as we've been doing our
work we've been taking pictures and getting flyers from all the for
sale houses we've seen to give to them.
Love you all!
Elder Baxter
