March 10, 2014

All,

Happy day, I'm so glad that life is going so well for y'all, and I pray that this trend will continue.

some have asked about my schedule - My schedule is generally wake up, morning routine in PMG, followed by 2-4 hours of advertising for LAE, and then visiting our less active members and investigators until dinner and then continuing after. Although on tuesdays and thursdays we go to LAE at 4:30 and stay there until the end of the day

We really like our new apartment. It is easy to clean with all hard floors. All I do is sweep all the dirt outside. It's really easy, and yes it is a relatively nice area, although it's still fairly poor, it is in inglewood.

For my part all is well, and we are just continuing in the same basic pattern that we have been doing, although we are also putting a greater emphasis on visiting less actives at the moment, as Elder Egbert feels strongly that we should put time into the placencia and Munoz family. So that's what we're doing. The problem is that the placencia family is not a very wholesome environment, as the area the live in was a red zone a while back (you don't go into a red zone after 5 pm, period) So that's not a great thing to know. And it shows, as it's rather ghetto. But the work will go forward. What's more disconcerting is that the whole barrio smells of weed, so I wouldn't be surprised if that were a problem here. The environment is so oppressive, although that might have just been the boxing that was on TV. I don't understand the appeal of watching 2 guys try and beat each other up. But, whatever floats your boat.

In contrast to that, we have the muñoz family, who welcomed us with open arms. Their casa (house) was clean, and welcoming, and they asked us how we were doing. It was so refreshing. After chatting for a while, we were asked by the hombre (man) of the house, Hyrum, asked us for a blessing, and the core of the blessing was an invitation for him to come back to church as he has great blessings and work to do with regard to the church, my gut call is that he will come back, a wonderful thought if I ever saw one.

Aside from that the big events this week were:

1) Going to the birthday party of Hna (sister) Eastman, (see photo she's the tall one). One of the members is rather well of and loves missionaries, particularly Hna (sister) Eastman as she found him a while back. So to show his appreciation for her, he rented a tacero, and hosted a party. It was great, as I ate 16 tacos, and was well satisfied. The bathroom caught fire, so as we were leaving the sirens were coming. That was also incredibly amusing. As a side bar, don't ever bite the cake like the Latinos tell you to, as they'll stick your head in the cake. and you'll look funny, enter the picture of the cake covered hna (sister).

 

 

The missionaries in the ward. The event was the birthday party of the taller hna. The people are the following from left to right: myself, elder murray, nelson amacher, marin,schwalger (in the back), boyd, haro, hollingshead, egbert, hna hart, and eastman (whose party it was).

 

2) Going to the VC (visitors center) with Hna (sister) Diaz, who is having a really hard life right now, as her husband doesn't want to change, and she does, so there's a real disconnect there, one that we really can't do anything about, please pray for her, she needs all the help she can get.

3) visiting with Flor Arita- an uber-less active, we visited her to see what's up, and her daughter, Jessica joined in the conversation. It turned out that Jessica had been asked several rather probing questions by her daughter, Hazel, about what happens when we die. The really sad thing is that she had no real answers for her daughter, and she just sat there crying with her daughter for a while. It really made me grateful that we are blessed with a specific knowledge of exactly what happens when we die.

4) To wrap up, last night we went and visited some formers, Henry and Norma Cxxxxx, and were flabbergasted by the fact that their knowledge mirrored what we teach and made it a whole lot easier to teach. the catch they're not married. But it'll all work out.

Anyway, that's the week

Be well All,

C