Elder Smith's Epic Mission Blog: Patas de Pollo

Hey, y'all!!

It's your favorite time of the week, Email time!! And, I was so astounded that dad was the one to write me that I fell off my chair. (Sorry Dad)

First off to answer a few questions!

No, bug repellant does NOTHING. These are SUPER mosquitoes. And SUPER mosquitoes means SUPER itchy.

Yes, our new pensionista still makes all of our food for us. However, we have to do our own laundry in the washing machine upstairs.

Is it cleaner in Villa Alegre? Is it cleaner? Ha! Yes. Yes it is. I guess the richer the people are, the cleaner they're required to be.

Sad to say, but we still don't use bikes. That is the bike of our pensionista's son. No, we're still going on foot.

Christmas Dinner with our Mission

Elder Ortega is from Chile, he's 25 years old, he's allergic to bananas and shellfish. He really likes to talk, which helps me out a bit in the lessons. His favorite color is red, and he is addicted to chocolate. He also suffers from low blood sugar, so he has to eat something about every hour and a half.

Yep, we've got people to teach. The most notable, and probably our closest to baptism is Hector. He's 22, he's coming to church regularly, he has had a few of the lessons too. The only thing he's really missing is going under the water.

Anyway, I've enclosed a photo of the greatest thing ever.

That was a lie, it's a picture of me eating chicken feet! It's pretty gross, and a little bit slimy. It's like a chicken flavored lolly-pop.

So, the notable occurrences of this past week are as follows:

On Monday, we had our P-day, we watched Madagascar 3, played some volleyball and Futbol, and it was pretty fun. Other than that, no pasa nada.

On Tuesday was our district meeting. The rest of the day we spent in lessons.

On Wednesday we had interviews with our mission president, like he does every 3-4 months. So, that took up most of the day. Other than that there was mission correlation and ward council.

Picture of our choir from December with our Mission President and his wife.

Thursday was the same as always. However, about halfway through the day, we had divisions with our district leader. That went until Friday morning.

Friday was the end of divisions. Other than that, not much happened. However, we did find two new investigators from contacting, so that was pretty cool.

Saturday was boring, because we didn't have hardly any lessons.

On Sunday was Sacrament meeting, and some lessons. Pretty ordinary week, right?

One thing that we've been doing recently is we've been working a lot with the ward missionaries, most of which are young men preparing for their missions, so that's been pretty alright. This accomplishes two things. Number one, we have more lessons with members present, and that's always fantastic. Two, we're helping in the preparation of these new missionaries.

It's always really cool to see the light in people's eyes change when talking about the gospel. The other day, we were at the house of one of our investigating families. The lesson we were teaching was the plan of salvation, and the thing with this family is that their dad had passed away. When we told them that they could live together forever with their dad, Their whole expression changed. It was really cool.

It's also interesting to think about how these things that are so well known to us are something completely new to them. I guess that's why we're here, right? To share with these people the things that we have, and they don't.

As always, I'm continually praying for you all, Emily now as well.

Remember that the shortest way between two points is Parkour. Have fun, and keep on keeping on!