Highlights of my week:
We contacted a Salt Lake referral out in Wellington on Saturday. It was a 70-year-old man and his 91-year-old mother who had spent the last month living with their Mormon relatives in Utah and Idaho – I guess his cousin and her nephew. He is the one who sculpted the statues of Jesse Knight at the MTC and at one of the high schools in Salt Lake. Crazy the random people you meet. They seem pretty promising, especially the Mom. She is very sincere, and they both want to start coming to church. It might be a while though because they are out of town a ton. Hopefully they make it sometime this month or early next month but their schedule is crazy. They would be very good too.
But anyway, Fidel (another one of our investigators) invited us to his daughter’s quinceañera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincinera) on Saturday, so we got some way good food there. Oh, and they also gave us a little pepper which I knew was going to be hot, but which we were obligated to take a bite out of. Just a small one, but everyone was looking at us so I figured it’d be kind of bad. I had no Idea. It was sooooooooooooo hot. My mouth was so on fire I couldn’t even understand how on fire it was. That was ridiculous! Thank goodness that they had some horchata (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horchata) there to calm the mouth until we got home and were able to subdue the pain with milk and bread, though it still burned a little after that.
Since he served in El Salvador, Tim asked what we do during the day here in America. Things are definitely slower during the day. Albino is almost always home, so we see him up a couple times a week. We also go to the hospital here in town a couple times a week to visit a member and her roommate who is kind of an investigator and whose grandson is a less active member. Sister Soto works at the hospital so we try to catch her too so we can set up times to visit their family. Other than that there are a lot of member visits and less active visits. There are a lot of old people here, so that helps, The ward is very cool. They are back and forth on feeding us, but this month is way good. Not quite like in Reno who I hear have people cross out each others’ names on the dinner calendar for a spot, but we do well still.
We also had zone meeting last Tuesday (meeting not conference because President Black doesn’t come, just us and the zone leaders). There are about 25 of us in the zone overall. It was pretty fun to meet all of the other missionaries around. Way better than our 4-person district meetings. We talked about Zion a little bit and made good solid Lord of the Rings references to teach it. It was fun. We talked about how in Zion the people are of one heart and of one mind (http://scriptures.lds.org/en/moses/7/18#18) and they are the pure in heart (http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/97/21#21). It was very good. They referenced a part in the Two Towers where Legalas is talking to Aragorn (yes I can easily name everybody in Lord of the Rings off the top of my head in case you were wondering) and says that they are all going to die and that the battle for Healms Deep is pointless. Everybody stops and stares and we used that to talk about when one person is negative it really brings down the whole group. Definitely fun.
