Monday, September 5, 2011

Week 82:

Dear Family,

This week was interesting, because I was so sure that I was going to stay in Merliot, because I have only had one change here, but now I am in another Area... yeas so suprise Transfers. I have mixed feelings about thise changes, because I really liked that area... and I was gonna be able to attend church at the temple, but now I am in Usulutan 2 Branch. This is an area with some crazy history of a couple things that happened at the start of this year with the branch president. Now it doesn´t have a branch president, It only has the first councilor in the district presidency presiding the meetings. Its really unorganized. The sacrament meeting was pretty normal, and the gospel principles too, but the priesthood class was pretty rediculous. This is a pretty country place, and the people dont all really understand what is going on. They didnt have anyone assigned to teach the class, and the person assigned to preside the quorom was like trying to find someone who would teach the class, but everyone was saying no. So I volunteered that we could talk a little bit about the Missionary work ( ;P ), And we tried to help them get a little organized. I allready went through a lot of this in Gotera, so I drew a calendar on the board and asked the quorom presider?.. to assign the following weeks so that we would have the classes assigned, and after that we somehow got on the never-ending topic of home teaching (Which basically doesn´t exist here in El Salvador) and set some goals to get the attendance back up to where it was before the branch president incidents (It was at 190....now its at about 140) But yeah its a little crazy haha.

We have allready seen a couple miracles here in this area as well. My new companion is named Elder Oliva, and he was one of the poeple that came in the same group as me to El Salvador. He has a month less for the MTC, but this is his second change as leader, so hes still learning some of the basic stuff, but he is a good Elder. We get along well. The first day we had some references, and instantly we found 3 future converts for this month or the start of next month. One of them really kinda left an impression. A woman who had been living in the United states, got deported because she couldn´t renew her passport, and she told us that she wanted us to come visit her brother, because she had known the church in the USA. When we got there her brother had left to work.....but we found her Aunt and her niece. This woman is very well educated in the bible, but she is obviously wasting that knowledge in the Pentacostal church that shes going too ( and she knows it) And we had a really good lesson with her teaching about true prophets and dispensations, and the nature of God. the interesting thing is that she understands EVERYTHING, and makes the prefect questions for us to teach the next principle. We started talking to her about how there arent any cooincidences in the missionary work, and that we were here for a reason, and she told us that she knew that was true. She said that the very morning of the day we came to visit her she had had a dream that someone had come to her house to teach her a message about God, and she didn´t want to listen. She had been trying to get her niece (The member) to go with her to the pentacostal church, but she wouldnt go, and when her niece invited her to church she left to avoid having to go. But then the very day that she recieved a dream about us, we showed up. And the grand-daughter named Diana said that she felt something strange while we were talking about that. It was really cool, and they asked us if we could come the next day to teach them. The next appointment was pretty intense too. I think I have heard gospel doctrine classes less in-depth that what we taught her about the priesthood, priesthood keys, the prophetic line, apostles and apostleship, etc. And she volunteered herself to go to church on sunday, and went with her grand-daughter. So she is all set up to learn about the apostasy in-depth. but yeah we had two other girls go to church who are ready to get baptised too.

Anyways its a new experience, because its like a bigger, half-city, hotter version of Gotera.
One cool thing is that this place is full of tarantulas. I have seen about 5 in the last few days. AND we found on in our house and had to figure out how to kill it (they are big....) We settled on burning it...

Anyways I hope you all are doing good. Danny study hard, Sam keep going to church, stay out of trouble, and I was thinking maybe you should take an aptitude test to see what kind of prefessions you would be good at? Teresa your companion looks like a boy. Anyways,
Till next time,
Love,
Elder DeVictoria.




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