Week 74 A Banana of Peaches!!!

Well this week was ok, I guess. Well, nothing too interesting but here you go:

Monday: Our branch president invited us to his family night and he was going to get a non member friend of his to go but it was raining a ton and so it ended up just being us with the branch presidents wife and their 2 daughters. But yeah it was good. I love being with our branch president the guy is a stud.

Tuesday: I got to go on an intercambio with Elder Vaca from Bolivia. It was ok, I guess, kind of. He's really good friends with my ex comp Elder Lopez and yeah lets just leave it at that... (but Elder Vaca does cook good and made some spicy Bolivian food (I havent had spicy food in soooo long!)

Wed: Basically all of our plans fell through and Elder Fairbanks and I proselyted the whole day basically and we didnt find anyone who was interested. Pretty awesome, right?? :)

Thursday: Same thing as wednesday except for the fact that we met with Janet in the evening (we're trying so hard to get her and Federico to get married but neither of them are very excited to do it). We celebrated Thanksgiving by buying 2 pizzas (1 was called the "German pizza" and the other the "Mexican pizza") About the most American style Thanksgiving you can get, right?

Friday: So again all of our plans fell through (yeah I dont know how it was possible, 3 days in a row haha). We again went out with a huge determination to find somebody, even just one person who would listen to us cause the past 2 days we found nobody. We knocked and we knocked and we knocked and then this last door, nothing. haha. We were out for like 2 hours talking with everybody and then I knocked this one door and this little kid came running to the window and was smiling and stuff and I was like "this is it! A family!" and then this older lady opened the door and was like "nah, nah I dont want anything" and I tried to talk to her to get to know her and I started explaining who we were and I started to tell her about our message and she slammed the door in my face as I was talking to her. Rude!! So we kept going and I was like "that lady was so rude! But I bet after a contact like that that the next person is going to listen to us", and the next person did!! So the next door we knocked this older guy opened the door and said "no, no, no I dont believe in God, let me get somebody who does". haha, so the guy told us to wait and then about 10 seconds later this younger woman of about 30 yr old named Gimena came outside and listened to us and we gave her a Book of Mormon and she was pretty cool and were going to see if we can meet with her again this week. Later at night we met with Juan Rodriguez! We talked about family history and temple work, and ate toast with blueberry jam!!! yay!

Saturday: We had a pretty good lesson with Flavia in the morning, she's doing really good but she was a little sick. Later, as with the past days, all of our lessons fell through again, hahaha...........huh. So we set out to find more people to teach. We knocked a ton of doors and after about an hour we had found nobody! Then we knocked this one door that had a blind dog and this old lady came out and said "I cant believe you guys made me get up and have to go outside just for this! What a waste of time!!!" (ohhh, im sorry.... I was just trying to bless your life with a message that will change your life). haha sorry some times it makes me mad haha. So we went knocking doors for another hour and nobody wanted to listen to us. We had an appointment set with Gloria (a recent convert) at 6 pm and it was 5:50 pm so we started making our way to her house knocking doors and talking with everybody and I told Elder Fairbanks "I am going to find 1 person before I go to Gloria's house" and so it was exactly 6 pm and we were 1 block away and I knocked this one house like 5 times and nobody came so I told Elder Fairbanks "ok, just 1 more door before we go to her house" so at the end of like 2 1/2 hours of proselyting we knocked 1 more door determined to find somebody. I saw this house with the door opened and I went and clapped the house (thats how they do it here) and I could see the figure of a man in the very back of the house and I could tell they were cleaning the house and washing the floor so I thought to myself "crap, theyre busy right now" but the guy walked out of the house and came to the gate and shook our hands and he let us in his house!!!!!!!!!! His name was Fabian and he was 34 yr old and he was married!!!! legally!!!!! And he had two sons and his wife it turns out is a less active and they live a block from the church!!!!!! Finally!!!!! He was super cool and we took down his phone number and we are going to try to meet with him again (he has a busy schedule so he couldnt give us a specific return date) but he was awesome and it was a huge miracle!!! (but then the lesson didnt go through with Gloria, of course........☺)

Sunday: Flavia couldnt come to church. She was sick and couldnt sleep all night. But its ok she's going to come next week for sure. She's awesome, she's totally getting baptized (once she gets married). Federico went to church (but he's not doing so well cause he likes the church and wants to get baptized but he's not sure if he wants to get married. Him and Janet arent very committed to getting married but they dont want to split up either. Uhhhhh..... Juan Rodriguez came to church and is doing good! He comes in a white shirt and tie now! In the afternoon Elder Fairbanks and I went on splits with our branch president and his brother in order to visit a bunch of people in a shorter amount of time. Our branch president doesnt want me to leave, haha. 

Anyways. Oh I almost forgot. On Saturday we went to buy fruit from a fruit stand and Elder Fairbanks instead of asking for a kilo of peaches he said "give me a banana of peaches" hahaha! I about died! The guy working the fruit stand had the most confused look on his face, haha. 

So yeah thats about it for the week. Well I hope you are all doing good! Have a good week!!

1. Yeah I dont know what this is. Elder Fairbanks was trying to draw a car and it turned into a smiley face

2. I took this while we were studying. Can you see my trunky calender? haha.

Week 73 Absolutely amazing, dopest week ever!!

Well this week was pretty dang good. It was actually a great fetching week to be honest. I mean, we had a baptism on Thursday and there aint nothing better than that I think, haha. 

So yeah the week basically went like dis:

Monday: Last lesson with Juan Rodriguez before his baptism. We just reviewed the baptismal interview questions with him. He gave us bread and liquid cheese called requesón (its sooo good, im addicted to this stuff)

Tuesday: We basically dropped Adrian (he was the investigator that cancelled his baptism the day it was supposed to happen like 2 months ago). He stopped progressing and doesnt keep his commitments anymore so were kinda done with him. At night we were with our branch mission leader preparing the program for Juan's baptism. 

Wed: We had a sick lesson with Mary (I told yall about her last week) and she is so cool! We taught her a lot about the restoration and all of her beliefs about God and everything are so similar to ours. She is really cool! Later at night Juan had his baptismal interview and passed!!

Thursday: We had a multi zone conference with the zones of Durazno, Las Piedras, and Norte. It was a really good conference and we told more about #lighttheworld / #iluminaelmundo. It was a great conference and im so excited for Xmas! Also the sister missionaries from my group are leaving at the end of this transfer!! Its soo crazy! One of them was at the conference and so she gave her testimony with the other two missionaries that are going home next month. It was just soo weird that in a month i'll have the time of a sister missionary who's finished the mission! After the conference we had the fill the baptismal font and get the church building ready for Juan's baptism, and clean the cultural hall where we were all eating after the conference so we were in the church the entire day on Thursday from morning til night. Juan's baptism was awesome!!!!!! He didnt have a white shirt and we didnt have clothes here big enough for him so I ran to our house (which is actually just next door) and I grabbed my biggest white shirt and he tried to put it on and it almost fit but his belly almost popped the buttons off so we had to ask a member from the branch to lend him his white shirt to get baptized in, haha. But 4 of our investigators went!!!! Flavia, her "future" husband (they arent married, for now) and their daughter Alena and also Diego went (he is the husband of a recent convert here named Gloria). The service was soooo good and the spirit was just soo strong and a lot of members went too which was soo great!!!

Friday: not much happened. We were super pumped and ready to go out and baptized the world and we were like "were gonna find like 20 new investigators today!". We found 0 but it didnt change our attitude haha. 

Saturday: We had a service project with Giovanna (one of the branch counselors) and we were helping this family to build the walls to this house they are trying to do. So I got to lay brick and cinderblocks and cement and we spent a few hours making walls and stuff. 

Sunday: Juan asked me to confirm him so I confirmed him in sacrament meeting. It was the first time ive ever done that and it was a huge honor to be able to do that for him. At the end of sacrament meeting I was surprised to see Maria (my first convert from Maldonado, my first area) standing there in the doorway to leave!!!!!!! I about cried cause I hadnt seen her in an entire year!! Turns out she was here Saturday night for a party and she knew Elder Alvarez was here in Florida so she decided to stop by before leaving to say hi to him. But she didnt know that we were both serving here in the same place and that our branches met in the same building and he told her that and she was like "no way!! Elder Welker is here too! Where???!!!!!" and so she waited for our sacrament meeting to end to say hi to me. It was such a cool experience and she is going to get endowed in a month and Elder Alvarez and I are going to go with her to the temple. 

It was such a great week!!!!! Im just sooo happy right now! Our investigators are all doing super well and we have 6 people that could potentially get baptized in a month or two (the only problem is getting them married because in about 2-3 weeks the place to get married at civily will be closed and we'll have to wait til February.

But everything is going fantastic here! Love you guys! Have a great week and a great Thanksgiving! 

-Elder Welker

Juan is really short but also a little chunky, haha.

-Elder Welker

Week 72 Second Multi Mission Conference!!!!

So on this past wednesday we had the multi mission conference with Bishop Davies! It was the second time on my mission that we had a conference with the West mission. It was cool and it was also our change day so we did changes after the conference was over. 

But yeah the conference was good and it was cool meeting another general authority. After the conference we went outside and we got lunch and out of nowhere it started to rain really hard and I was the only person there that had an umbrella out of like 170 missionaries because I always leave my umbrella on the side pocket of my backpack so I pulled it out to not get wet and like 10 sister missionaries came running at me like a swarm of bees to get under my umbrella to not get wet and so I just gave them the umbrella just to be nice and so I got wet in my suit like everybody else (not fun, I hate getting wet especially in my suit). 

Anyways its been fun living with Elder Alvarez again. We left the house a mess and so upon returning home with Elder Alvarez we decided to clean the house really nice and there were a ton of big cockroaches everywhere and so we took a bottle of Raid and bug spray and stuff and sprayed a ton underneath the kitchen sink and in like 3 minutes like 20 cockroaches came running out and we killed them all and within the past 5 days weve probably killed like 60 cockroaches that we living in our kitchen. Weve just been killing like 15 every night and then in the morning we'll find a few dead on the ground as well. So yeah its been a blast here!

Well Juan Rodriguez is getting baptized this Thursday! Hes going to tell us tonight who he wants to baptize him. Also Flavia came to church again on Sunday but she also brought her two kids and her husband and they all liked it. We were finally able to put a baptismal date with Flavia for basically the end of this yeah (which is fine because she has to get married anyways) but yeah she is doing fantastic and so is Federico (but we need to talk with his girlfriend about them two getting married or else Federico is never going to get baptized). 

Also the other day something awesome happened. I was walking in the street with Elder Fairbanks and we passed this house that had the front door opened and after passing the door a lady came out from behind us and called out to us as we were walking away and she said she wanted to talk with us so we turned around and went back. She was a middle aged woman named Mary and she started asking me questions about the church's family search website. She said that she had heard that our church had a database that included information on families and on marriages and things like that and she wanted to learn more because she wanted to know how she could use it. I began to explain to her about it and then I asked her if she was in any way religious. She replied "I have a very strong belief in God and I believe that He exists but I dont go to any church because I dont understand why there are like 700 different churches out there!" and so I told her that we could answer he question and so I left her a pamphlet on the Restoration and we scheduled to go back tomorrow on Tuesday. It was such a cool experience and I am hoping sooo bad that she is there tomorrow. 

But yeah its been a good week and its been flying by fast!! 

heres some pics:

1. Elder Hunt, Elder Alvarez, Elder Fairbanks and me eating pizza after killing cockroaches the night after getting home from the conference with Bishop Davies

2. My new agenda cover for this transfer! The side with the quote was from 1 of like 200 inspirational cards that my mom sent me like a year ago. I love you mom!! 

3. my group at the conference with Bishop Davies! We just took a pic with all of the americans and everyone was in the pic except for Elder Hemeyer and Elder Soriano because they had already gotten on the bus and we didnt have time to go get em

Week 71 "Que los dos se queden!"

Ok so this week is transfers again!!!! Its crazy how fast the time goes by now that I have so much more time in the mission. 

Well this past week was pretty awesome! We had a killer lesson with an investigator of ours named Flavia and on Sunday she came to church with her 8 year old daughter Elena. She is super awesome and I hope that we can put a date to get married and then baptized soon. Juan also came to church and if everything goes through good then Elder Fairbanks and I are going to have a baptism next week!!! Federico is also doing really good and he came to church also on Sunday and he is going to get baptized next month (but he also needs to get married and he doesnt have a date yet to do that). 

But anyways we had a pretty successful week and I am just soo glad that I am staying here another transfer!!! Elder Fairbanks is also staying another transfer with me (which was like 99.99999% certain because im training him). Elder Ward is leaving and Elder Alvarez is coming here to be with Elder Hunt!!!! Elder Alvarez was my second companion in the mission and now he is going to live in the same house with us!!! Im really excited and it'll be great having him and Elder Hunt as our ZL's. 

Well on Sunday morning we were having correlation with our Branch President, President Machado, and he asked me "Elder, when are transfers in the mission?" and I told him "we have transfers this wednesday actually" to which he replied "You both have to stay here!" (hence the title of this email) and then he told me "we havent had elders that the members got along with here in a long time, I really hope that you both stay here because we actually get things done here now and I really like you guys" and then he said "if one of you finds out that youre leaving im calling your mission president and requesting that you stay" and then before the end of correlation he asked me "Elder, can we do a family night at my house next Monday? I promise you that I will bring at least one person that is not a member". I have to admit it was pretty dang awesome and it felt really good knowing that the members and especially the Branch president trusted us and saw us as a blessing and not as a burden. 

Well thats it for this week. Crap, I just realized I didnt take any photos this past week. Well, I'll definitely have photos next week because tomorrow is a multi-mission conference with Elder Davies from the Presiding Bishopric and also because Elder Alvarez is coming here so i'll definitely have some photos! 

Well love you guys! Have a good week!!!

-Elder Welker