April 4, 2011
Hello Family.
This week was rather slow, really boring, Conference was a good end to it, though we mostly just poked and jeered at each other, mostly to the missionaries who have little time left, whenever one of the many talks about 'GO GET MARRIED NOW' came up, which seemed to be like almost every other talk. Luckily I wasn't the oldest missionary in my district, there are two who go home like a month before me so they received the brunt of our jeers.
Actually the week wasn't too bad because I spent most of it on exchanges. The one thing I like about being in leadership is that you can go on exchanges with other elders pretty much whenever you want. It's pretty fun, it's kind of like a vacation, you get a vacation from your area and your companion, and when in another area you have 0 responsibility to call the shots. It's great. Far too many times on my mission on exchanges when I've stayed in my own area it'll be a day where we will have absolutely nothing to do and you have to say, 'well, I guess we'll go tract or something'. When you're in someone else's area you just to sit back and have them take you around everywhere. So that was fun, most of this week was spent on exchanges.
Other than that....... Not too much has happened. We have only one real investigator at the moment, named Carlos. He's a Catrracho in his 60's or 70's now. The members that live next store to him drag him to church every week and we get to teach him about twice a week, but he won't even touch the Book of Mormon, or eat anything that has the meat of an animal with cloven hooves. He just clutches his little Bible to his chest every time we try to teach him and will refuse to read anything that's not in it. (He hasn't ever read it). We suspect that he's been in with the Adventists or J-Dubs or some other such sect that clings tenaciously to the bible and has dietary commandments that make our Word of Wisdom look weaksauce. The rest of our time is spent doing retention work, guess how many of our recent converts made it to conference? TWO! That's quite good, I was definately expecting worse, but those two, the most recent ones, Rubiel and Tomas, only made it to the sunday morning session. Actually that's pretty much the only one that the members made it to. Often I realized that I took for granted the fact that in Utah you can watch it on TV without needing cable and listen to it on the radio. It's not the same out here, if you have you cable your fine but if you want it in another language that's a whole different story. I don't remember what we did last year to get it to work at some member's house that had cable but basically it's easier for the hispanic members to simply go to the chapel.
Speaking of which... Guess who showed up on saturday morning to set everything up? No one.... We had been told a week before that the satellite box was now functioning. Of course we were the first people to show up and we got it all to function this time, except that the speakers were burned out in the chapel or something was wrong because the sound quality was horrible and you could barely understand anything through the static. The spanish broadcast was to be played in the chapel and english in the Relief Society room. The sound was fine in the other rooms for the english and on the TVs but not in the chapel. We could not figure it out but we came up with an alternate solution, we brought a TV into the chapel, had it going on there as well as the projector screen in the chapel, killed the chapel's audio and turned up the volume all the way on the TV, and it worked well enough.
So that was this week, the transfer also ended, Conference was a good way to end the transfer. Transfer calls came and nothing has changed really, I'm still going to be here with Elder Green. But there were very few changes made. Everyone speculates that President Hansen is trying to freeze everything as best he can, change as little as possible to make it easier for the new mission President who comes in June. I also realized that it will be pretty lame to have my final departing interview with the new president, someone I don't even know, I'd really prefer to have that with President Hansen, he's been a great mission president, I'm going to miss him a lot.
Okay I'm done. I hope you all have a good week, peace out.
--Elder Arroz
