Buenos Dias a todos!
Well, once again, it's been an eventful week! We've definitely found a lot of new people to teach and the area's doing a whole lot better than it was before. We actually finally got to teach this family that we've been trying to teach since December or January, which was pretty cool. They came to the Christmas lights, but we kept on setting up all these lessons that they would have to cancel for legitimate reasons. It was pretty ridiculous. We never gave up though, and kept setting them up until we got one this last week. There's a mom with 2 daughters (8 and 22 years old), and they don't have a whole lot of religious background. They were way interested as we taught about the restoration, prayer, and how the gospel blesses families. One thing that's tough to deal with as a missionary is people's work schedules though. The economy is getting worse and worse down here, and jobs are more and more scarce. People are doing everything they can just to work and live and have a job, and employers are taking advantage of it to make them work all kinds of crazy hours. It's super rare to find people that don't work on Sunday and can go to church. That seems to be the biggest obstacle here, that really prevents people from progressing in the gospel.
Milta Millan is still doing really well! Her boyfriend Ricardo is still way interested and we're planning on taking them to the Visitor's Center tomorrow. We're still not 100% sure what we're going to do with them in terms of where they're going to go to church and everything, but she's solid and will do well wherever she goes. It's difficult sometimes because Sarah (the member that she watches over) often has to go to the hospital, and the lessons and church can't always happen.
Yesterday was an especially eventful day - early in the morning we got a call from Brother Bull (he actually served in this ward a couple years ago and then came back and married a recent convert and has been living here) who's moving to Texas so we got to help him move his stuff real fast. He had to leave within the hour. It's crazy how many people around here who move in and out literally put it off till the last second and they would not be able to do it if we didn't show up. We went to our spanish correlation and then went to the Hansen's house (a family in the Dobson Ward) to practice a song that we sang in sacrament meeting in the spanish ward. All of the missionaries except me got assigned to speak during sacrament (they said they've heard enough from me) and we offered to sing, so we did the EFY medley and translated it into spanish! Since just Elder Lindquist and I sang it, we had to translate "As Sisters in Zion" a little differently. The good thing is it's a whole lot easier in spanish to translate and change things like that, so it actually sounded super good! Elder Lindquist is the only companion I've had that can really sing with me and the spanish wards absolutely love it! I think that's probably all they're going to remember me for. That or the fact that I eat a lot, as I talked about in last week's email :D We practiced that and then went to our Dobson Ward correlation and found out that we have another new Ward Mission Leader since the McKendrick's are moving. This will be our 3rd ward mission leader in like 2 months. The good news is that our new WML is Brother Rappleye! His brother served with me in Yuma, and he's awesome. Bro. Rappleye always comes out with us to lessons and is a perfect fellowship. He's also way straight-forward and gets things done, so we're really looking forward to some good things happening in Dobson Ward. We haven't hardly been able to teach any people in that ward because we simply don't have any investigators there and it's a lot more difficult to find through your own efforts in english. Plus, we're teaching a LOT of people in spanish now and we're plenty busy. So hopefully we can get a lot of excitement and member involvement and see some cool things happen. We actually found out the night before that we were also doing a fireside for the youth! We totally didn't know, but we did this fireside on helping the youth do missionary work, and talked about things we wish we knew before the mission. It was actually super fun and interactive and I wouldn't mind doing it again. It's fun being a missionary, because there's so many talks and firesides and lessons that you do on the fly. You never know what you're going to be asked to do next. At this fireside though, a couple of the youth came up to us and said they have friends who are legitimately interested in the church and we talked about what the next step would be and how we could meet them. I wish I could have been more like that when I was younger. It's pretty cool to see the influence they have.
So Karen and Itzel, who we first taught last Sunday, did end up coming to church and it was awesome. I called her right before and she said that she just woke up - she said my companion told her he would call her to make sure she woke up on time (we were on exchanges that day) and he didn't. Next thing I know she walked through the doors right in front of me and was laughing. They loved church and Karen was so happy that Itzel had such strong desires to come to church and learn about God. We haven't decided on a baptismal date yet, but it will probably be at some point in May.
We met with a family who knew members (the dad is co-workers with one and asked him about doing a memorial service type of thing for his mother-in-law), and finally got to have a lesson with them. It was interesting because we dedicated the grave from over here and prayed for her and the family, and we taught them all about the Plan of Salvation. The mom who had just lost her mom, was way interested, even though the dad wasn't terribly, and we hope we'll be able to meet with them again soon. It was interesting because there are so many aspects to the Plan of Salvation, but somehow we were able to teach it way thoroughly, along with a little about the restoration and everything else we did, in under an hour.
We taught more families than I've taught in a long time, even though only a fraction of our planned lessons went through. April's been a rough month for the zone baptism-wise but we're feeling a MIRACLE MAY! So expect big things :)
Gracias por su apoyo y todo lo que hacen!
~ Elder Carlson
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