I can't believe it's already P-day again! The weeks feel incredibly short in the office. Probably because we don't have enough time to do any of the things that we have to get done. And things are actually about to get more busy because this transfer is already running to an end which means we have to get everything ready for the 24 new missionaries and the 16 missionaries that are leaving. Also there is an Finance audit coming up so I have to make sure everything is ready, which is going to be a lot of work because I inherited quite a few problems.
Monday I remember basically nothing.
Tuesday was Leadership council which is always fun because I get to see my Panamanian brothers Elder Castro and Elder Diaz who are both ZLs now. Unfortunately for me the day was rather complicated because Ramirez had to stay in the meeting running the power points, while I had to go pay for and bring the lunch that Hermana Poncio had planned, from a place I had never been to. Addresses don't exist here, so I was just told what the house looks like and the general area where it was and then it was up to me and Fernandes to go explore Managua. It actually didn't end up being to hard to find it though and I did get to know pretty well the layout of that part of Managua. Tuesday night I went out to work with Ramirez and Fernandez in trio which went pretty well. We have an investigator right now named Eric who came out of nowhere and is incredible. He is a friend of Alenka who was baptized last week, and before her baptism she started to invite him to church and since then he has come to every activity and church meeting that we have invited him to without fail. He is an inspiration in the way that he completely changed his life around. He has been a well known bolo for many years and has stolen to support his drinking habits and been in and out of Jail, but we got to know him through Alenka and he immediately took to the church and the teachings and from one day to the next completely stopped drinking and has shown up to every church activity that we have had and yesterday he got baptized! But I'll get to that later.
Monday I remember basically nothing.
Tuesday was Leadership council which is always fun because I get to see my Panamanian brothers Elder Castro and Elder Diaz who are both ZLs now. Unfortunately for me the day was rather complicated because Ramirez had to stay in the meeting running the power points, while I had to go pay for and bring the lunch that Hermana Poncio had planned, from a place I had never been to. Addresses don't exist here, so I was just told what the house looks like and the general area where it was and then it was up to me and Fernandes to go explore Managua. It actually didn't end up being to hard to find it though and I did get to know pretty well the layout of that part of Managua. Tuesday night I went out to work with Ramirez and Fernandez in trio which went pretty well. We have an investigator right now named Eric who came out of nowhere and is incredible. He is a friend of Alenka who was baptized last week, and before her baptism she started to invite him to church and since then he has come to every activity and church meeting that we have invited him to without fail. He is an inspiration in the way that he completely changed his life around. He has been a well known bolo for many years and has stolen to support his drinking habits and been in and out of Jail, but we got to know him through Alenka and he immediately took to the church and the teachings and from one day to the next completely stopped drinking and has shown up to every church activity that we have had and yesterday he got baptized! But I'll get to that later.
Wednesday I had to go to church HQ in Nicaragua with Neilson to talk to the Financial adviser about the upcoming audit, which basically left me with a lot more homework, but also was really good, because now I have a much better idea of what the procedures are and what I can and cannot do in my position. Wednesday night I worked with Ramirez because we've started rotating companions every week between the five of us that are in the office. We've hit kind of a rough patch in the area because a bunch of the investigators we have found are not progressing, so right now we only have a handful of investigators that are really positive. So in the night we basically just did a fair amount of contacting with not too much success.
Thursday we had a bunch of errands to take care of all morning in the office, but nothing very exciting. In the evening we had our ward Noche de hermanamientos which went really well and afterward we had a last lesson with Eric and then the Zls came over for his interview. Then we had a little bit of time in the night to work, but we were feeling pretty down with our contacting luck and had been rejected most of the day, or people weren't home, so the last 30 min we decided to apply a piece of advice that president had shared with us, where instead of doing a normal contact just go up to a house and ask them if they'd mind if we said a quick prayer with their family kneeling down together and then just leave without any questions asked. We tried it with the next family that we saw sitting outside on their porch. When we approached them they were pretty quick to tell us that they are catholic and we already well set with their religion. We told them we just would like to pray with them, so they let us in and we had a kneeling prayer with the whole family. Then as we were leaving one of them said "solo tengo una duda" "de que consiste su religion", which we happily answered and from there they asked five or so more questions and we ended up teaching a full lesson and giving a book of Mormon to one of them who was particularly curious about what the book talked about and she agreed to read it and pray about it. It was pretty cool to see how instead of trying to gain their confidence with our words we just had a short prayer with them and let the spirit do the work.
Friday we had Erics Baptism. It has been way cool to see how happy he is about this change he has had in his life and how happy his family is as well that he has turned his life around.
Until Next time,
Elder Hamson
Pictured below: Erics baptism (hermano Chepito baptized him). A picture from Hermana Poncios surprise birthday visit last week, (I'm taking the picture). Some typical food at a members house (a mountain of rice and a little bit of meat). Monday nights in the office. 34 fans packed into thhe truck. The truck is already top heavy as it is, plus the delivery guys didn't do a very good job strapping it all on, so I drove very slowly.
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