November 2, 2015

Hello Family!

Well this week was pretty basic. The biggest events that happened this week were a Halloween party that we the missionaries did here, and also the baptismal interview that Victor Yuca had and passed. But other than that, nothing big has happened. 

As for our investigators, there isn’t really much new that has been going on with them. With Sister Luz Marina and her husband, we tried to make a marriage date with them but we were only able to have them commit to talk about it but hopefully our visit at least helped them be a little more encouraged to do it. Also, we are still planning on putting a date with 2 girls we are teaching. For their parents work, we won’t be able to do much with them for a bit but we are at least working on getting permission for them to be baptized. The 2 are really good friends and want to be baptized and they are coming to a lot of activities in the ward as well as attending but we’ll see what happens with them.

For this next month, we are hoping to be able to have at least 1 baptism and maybe 2 rescues. One is almost definite who is a lady from a family we are teaching called the Yauri family and she has a calling, attendance, and her interview but she just lacks the lessons. It’s just a little hard to teach the family though because they normally only have time once a week but they are really nice and always give us food or candy bars whenever we visit them. With the rest of the family, it will take a little longer to rescue them because one of the daughters and her partner aren’t married but they are living together but they are both members and pretty active at church. The parents, however, are working or traveling a lot and so it’s a little different for them.

But as far as everything else, nothing much has been going on. On Thursday, we had a Halloween party that I thought was going to be a disaster but in the end worked out pretty well. What happened was that one of the elders here was traveling and so we weren’t able to do things as fast as we wanted because we were just a trio for a few days. The elder got back around the middle of the day but was sick and so they weren’t really able to do much. My comp. and I were left in the chapel trying to get everything ready in time when a small lightning storm passed through the city but it was just enough to make the power go out and so we were left in a dark chapel trying to get things ready still in the dark. The bishop told us that the power shouldn’t be out for long which is why we kept working. However, the power was still out at the time that we said the activity would start and nobody had come and we were still getting things ready. I was feeling really stressed at this point that the activity wouldn’t happen and we had gone through a lot of trouble for nothing. However, at about 6:45 - 6:50 P.M., the power finally came back on and we were able to finish preparing everything and people started to come. In all, we had about 30 people attend the activity (which is good for here) and the activity was a success. So that would also be my greatest triumph and trial for this week.

Also the grossest thing that happened this week also had to do with our activity. For a starting game and to be a little halloweeny, we made a big bowl of noodles and just put a bunch of different things in it, also a ton of different kinds of fruit. In the end, the thing smelled like someone ate a fruit salad and then threw it up. We had 2 teams and each had to choose a representative to play and they had to find little eyeballs that we made and put in there but they were blindfolded so they had no idea what they were feeling. It was petty dang gross. At the end of the game, one of the kids that was playing wiped his hands all over my arms. Sadly though, I forgot to take a picture of it.

But that’s about it for this week. But I also have heard of pisco but not that many people drink it here (from what I’ve seen at least). Normally, they just drink beer. The most popular one here is called Cusqueña which actually has a really cool design to the bottle and the cap is a picture of machu picchu. Also today, we are spending the whole day with our pensionista to make a type of bread called bizcochos, which is a type of bread that is traditional to make in the first week of November but this is also the only time they make it the entire year. It reminds me a lot of angel cake because it’s fluffy and sweet but it’s still not as good as angel cake. Also as for the transfers, I am going to end my mission here in Espinar so I’m pretty excited for that. But I love you all very much and I’ll talk to you next week.

Elder Halverson