Atascada

September 20, 2010

Ahoy there family,

This week has been rough, the process of whipping my companion into shape goes slowly. I have to drag him out of bed and out the door everyday. It's been rough, with not a few instances of gnashing of teeth. Though I did get my bike back on Friday so we were no longer on foot which has helped a lot. Other than that not much is going on. Though I think the work is starting to pick up, have some people who we are going to try and set some baptismal dates with this week. We've found some cool new investigators as well. One such person was a media referral we got through the phone and at first we thought it was a joke because he had some crazy name that we weren't entirely sure how to pronounce. We concluded that it must be someone with some indigenous Mayan name or something. Well we found the guy and he's an old man from Colombia but his parents or grandparents immigrated to Colombia from India, hence his bizarre name. He said we could call him 'Salim'. He's way cool though, keenly interested in the Book of Mormon, we gave one to him, talked about it a bit and set up a return appointment for saturday. I hope it goes well.

We also have a possible source of new families to teach. In this one apartment complex there is this Dominican Family in our ward and we go over every now and then to check on Travis, a 12 year old recent convert. The family consists of a single mother and 4 or 5 kids, I'm not sure how many, ranging from ages 4-14. So every time we are over there, the apartment is just full of the kids and they're friends just coming and going. Now Travis has an incredibly short attention span so most of our new member lessons with him are these cool little games and object lessons. The past couple times all of the kids friends have sat in on the lesson and have been amazed by the stupid little magic tricks we do to demonstrate gospel principles. In fact some of the older children, who are 10, 11, 12, etc. Showed up to the Fiesta de Patrias we had a couple weeks ago and have been asking their parents if they could go to church with this family. And they have, we've had a couple of these kids friends come with them to church the past couple weeks, it's amazing. I never would have guessed that children of such young age would even have the slightest interest in the church. What we're banking on is to start teaching these kids' families if we can get this family to start inviting their friends over for our little visits. It will be sweet. The problem is that we are almost out of ideas for stupid little games and magic tricks. From my time in the mission I've learned a few from my many companions, we have about 5 really cool little tricks/games that demonstrate gospel principles really well. But we're almost out of them. So I need ideas, in fact I've seen some book called "The Missionaries' little Book of Object Lessons" that some missionary had. So I was wondering if you all could find that book, or something like it, some little book full of cool little things you can do with common household items and send it to me, 'twould be much appreciated. Also send some postage stamps with it if you could. I'm completely out.

And, uh... Yeah. That's just about all I got to say this week. This area is really boring, all suburbs, and nothing really epic or crazy happens. Oh and mom I've started working on some letters, but as I said I need stamps if they are to go anywhere anytime soon. Oh and I got the package, turns out it did arrive on the 3rd it's just that the apartment office didn't notify me or the little package slip they put in our mail was lost or something but I got it. Thanks, it was really sweet. Okay I'm done now, I hope you all recover and have a good week. Peace out...

-- Elder Rice