Good news everyone! My comp is sick, how is that good news you may be asking yourself? Now I actually have a bit of time to write a letter. Yay!
First of all, I am in a new area called Conception, where I am still serving as the district leader. Like Almirante or Boquete the distance of my area is huge. I can take an hour-long bus ride and still be on the inside of my area. However, for the first time, I have an area that touches the borders of Costa Rica. I have been joking about sending my companion over to see what they have. In this area, we have two branches, one of which we can see right in front of our house and the other is about a twenty-minute walk.
Here we are having trouble finding nuveos people to teach. All the mission programs we have done in other areas to bring success have fallen short here. Normally when we contact by doing cosechas and we come back with around on average three families that we can visit during the week. Here we find specific people that we ask for and they reject us. I have been trying other programs and other forms of contacting people, but we are not finding really any success here. This week, I got to a point where I just felt burnt out, stressed and just frustrated. Normally as a missionary as you have these days you just go home to the family. In every area you find that one family who loves the missionaries. You become best friends with them and they adopt you. You comfortably call them Mom and Dad instead of Brother and Sister. If you show up uninvited at 8:00 PM they are excited to see you there. They want to see how the work is going and they want to hear about your day as you then take a mental break. The family that we have here has been having family problems and it is not a safe environment to be in right now. So, as we have been doing everything we can… we are hoping for a new family to adopt us. I think I’ll make flyers and start handing them out at church.
Upside, Elder Bivings has been training me on how to be a leader. I haven’t had anyone who had done that before and I am really learning quite a bit. I am very appreciative of that. We got called to a surprise division after a conference with our leaders. At first, I wasn't pleased because it only takes one-minute to per warn us via a phone call or two minutes through text message. I would also need to travel and I don’t like wearing the same sweaty clothes two days in a row and not having anything to eat. What ended up happening was that an area at the last moment needed a baptismal interview and I was able to go on divisions again with my favorite companion Elder Cotonon. That five minutes changed everything. From feeling tired to rolling on the floor laughing. It just made me forget about all the stress and re-motivated me. I don’t know what it is about that man other than we just click well together. That was a HUGE blessing. As well, Elder Bivings came back and talked to us more about how difficult our area was which was good to know and understand with what we were already experiencing.
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| Elder Cotonon and I |
What else happened this week? Well, we accidentally flooded the house. The water went out for an hour or so and while I was trying to wash clothes. As we left, we both thought the faucets were turned off, but we came home to a fun disaster. This week, Elder Mendez, my companion has insisted that he knows magic. He has tried at least eight magic tricks on me and has only been successful with one of them. Thank you for this, because it has been hilarious!
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It was called a Monster Burger. It was the biggest burger I have ever eaten. We were just dead and so we were craving burgers and asked around who had the biggest burgers. Did it cost a lot? Yes, but it was 100% worth it and made everything better. WHAT A MIRACLE!!! And no his one magic trick was not downing this meal.
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