Monday, May 17, 2010

Week 5: Every Day Is Exactly The Same (Nine Inch Nails)

Editor Note: I hope you appreciate my putting the roach pictures on this post. It was all I could do just to edit and post them! Blech!

Hola Familia,
Well this week went by faaaast. I don´t know whyh but the P-days just seem to melt into each other, one day it is Pday, you go to bed and work for a day and then it seems like its allready P-day again. I guess its just because the work is prety repetitive. The people change, and the locations change, but the lessons are basically the same, and we use a lot of the same scriptures every day. It is kinda hard for us to find new investigators. We have knocked probably about 40% of all the houses in our area already, and we have knocked almost all of the houses in ilopango. The houses are built a lot more dense here than they are in the states, they are more like just one solid block of houses with shared walls, but there is still a range of nice-ness in the houses. The worst ones are made of just a couple 2x4´s with that curvy corrugated steel stuff nailed to them. Basically like little shacks. The best ones are still made out of cinderblocks and concrete, but they have false cielings instead of just an open view of the roof, and they have painted walls and sometimes even plastered walls, which is nice. But regardless of what house it is, the people live pretty much the same, they eat a lot of the same foods, they use the same kinds of systems to wash their dishes, and everything. here they have a thing called a Pila I dunno if I´ve mentioned it or not, but you just kinda fill a giant tub and then use the water from it by scooping, instead of using the running water. But yeah its pretty cool.
I tried to take pictures this week, but we really didn´t do very much exciting stuff...I dunno if I talked about this, but Me and the other gringo have been teaching a class of english at the chapel. I dunno how much longer we are going to be doing it, because basiclaly the investigators we hoped would be there have not been coming haha, but if we get new investigators to come we will definitely keep it up. We have an investigator named Rene Iraheta who has a baptismal date, and has been studying the scriptures like crazy, so we are hoping that he wil get baptized on the 22nd of this month. It kinda sucks, becase we find investigators, and we can get them to church a lot of the time, and they will listen to our message, but for some reason or another they just don´t want to get baptized. We have been teaching a hermana Dinora for like 5 weeks, and she still says she hasn´t recieved an answer to her prayers and I don´t think that she has very much faith in the church. Anyways back to regular stuff. Yeah we have been trying everything to get these people in the water lol. I guess one of my letters kinda made it seem like we are all vain and that we have big billboards with how many "baptisms" we get. And thats not at all how it is, I don´t even ask people how many people they have helped into the church. What I meant by competition is that just in our district, we know each others investigators, and so we are allways trying to get everyone to join the church, and we have to do these "lessons to find" which suck really bad, at least for my area, because there are so few houses, and any reference we get while we are doing lessons to find turn out to be in someone elses area, so we can´t count them for our numbers, but we have to report our numbers everyday, and sometimes ours our just chafa because our area is hard to get good refferals in. So yeah we are competitive about how hard we work, but in the end there is actually nothing that we can do to make people get baptized, in the end it is their decisions, and we are only here to bear our testimonies and invite. But we still have to do everyting that we can to get them to actually do it lol. We even have to go around and pick up investigators on sunday to get them to church, Very rarely does someone that we just invite come to church. Partly because we invite everyone. The problem here is not to get people to believe in Jesus or to believe even in what we are teaching, it is to get them to forget all the garbage that they have been fed by their local pastor for the last 30 years. The people are so brainwashed by their own little sect/congregation that they are just like old men stuck in their ways. And their understanding of the bible, is pretty much chafa too. For the most part they believe that We ourselves are the church, because we are part of the "body of christ" and that the denomination or congregation that you attend doesn´t matter as long as you believe in christ. And 95% of the people bought into the greatest lie/apostasy of modern christianity which is that we are saved soley for our faith, and that sinning doesnt matter, nothing that we do in this life matters, as long as we have accepted christ as our savior. But this is the easy way out, this is the cop out, its like dropping out of school and going on welfare because you don´t want to work. But its okay some people see the truth. A big part of it is just contacting as many people as you possibly can, because for every 100 people you talk to, probably 15 will let you in their house to teach, 5 or so will progress, but in the end maybe only 1 or 2 will actually join the church, so we have to just keep testing everyone, to see who the lord has prepared.
The spanish is a bit better now, I can usually talk okay, to the point where I can say what I want to say, and not have it sound too wierd, but still there are a lot of people who i don´t really understand very well. Some I can understand pretty much perfectly, but others almost nothing sometimes. And it is still hard for me to hear everything, because sometimes if I´m not paying attention real hard I won´t even hear people say anything, and I´ll miss parts of a conversation, but I definitely feel like 4 years of spanish helped a LOT. Teresa, did you actually submit your papers or no?
Anyways I got a picture of the most mutted out dog in ilopango, and I also got a picture of a dog that literally looked like a wookie. And I think that if I ever get a dog its probably gone be either a German Shepherd, A Chow, or a Lab. because those are like the only ones that I like. Chow chows fur is soooooo soft. Hermana Reina, the lady we baptized has 3 black chows and 2 are puppies and they are super cute. But yeah. These are the picutes I took this week. there migght have been more, but these stupid computers don´t recognize all of your folders on your camara, so some of the pictures on your card dont show up. One is a picture of a fruit I tried called Mammones, they are kinda like lichee, but they don´t taste anything like them. There are a couple from inside the house of hermana Reina, One of a friggin huge flying cockroach that showed up during of ouf our lessons, it was about the size of hmmmm well it was about 3-4 inches long. Then theres one of a cage of iguanas, and the biggest one is litteraly like 4 feet long if you include the tail, and they said its like 10 years old. There was a mime.... A picture of one of our english classes, weekly planning, and a picture of a huge valley which was a pretty cool view.
Anyways hope everything is good, we arent playing soccer today, so im hoping to look for a present for Danny. Hope everything is good, The house looks good, but your picture quality is garbage i think. That is just sad mom about walmart.... Tell Michelle, Alaina, Courtney, Kanani and Kaimona congrats. And thats about it, peace.
much love, Elder DeVictoria.















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