Busy Conference Week

It's October! September just flew by, and all things considered it was a good month. This week was kind of hectic though.

Sunday we saw a bunch of miracles, undoubtedly resulting from our dedicating more time in the area. We had one of our most positive investigators, julieta, finally get over her biggest challenge (coming to church), because she goes and visits her daughters everyweekend in Masaya which is several hours away. This Sunday however she made the sacrifice and we all lit up when we saw her walk into church. Also the dad of a big family that we contacted last Friday, showed up to church on his own! And was super interested in the whole thing. We also had two members bring non member friends with them, so we got lots of surprise visitors along with the ones we brought ourselves. All in all it was a nice Sunday and awesome to see the additional blessings added on top that we received for our diligence in the week. The sucky thing is after such an awesome week and a ton of new investigators at church we had a ton of stuff come up this week and struggled to find decent time to work in our area and visit all the people that came on sunday.

Monday we were in the office until very late because Elder Ramirez had to teach Elder Galo everything he possibly could about being records secretary because he was leaving Tuesday.

Tuesday we had consejo de líderes, which is always nice to hang out with all my friends. This time we had basically my entire Somoto district there so we all took a picture together. Elder Castro, Diaz, Galo, Méndez, and Reinoso.  It was cool being with all of them for the last time because my dad (trainer) in the mission, Elder Castro, is leaving at the end of this transfer among with a whole hoard of other awesome Zls. After consejo we had to go drop off Elder Ramirez at the bus station with all his luggage, but due to traffic it took about two and a half hours to do that and get to the office. Elder Galo had to get a bunch of forms ready for the interviews on Wednesday, so that took up the rest of our night.

Wednesday was setting up to be a normal day, and even though I was booked with end of the month stuff, we were planning on getting to the area at 4pm, but plans were changed because there was an earthquake in León! Here in Managua we got a decent little shake, but nothing too strong, it just lasted a good little while and since we were in a giant office building we felt the movement pretty strongly. But over in momotombo it was the strongest and the walls of the house the missionaries were living in got cracked all the way around, so they had to move out immediately. Which basically meant we no longer had much hope of spending much time in our area because we had to help them out. We ended up getting about 2 hours of time in the area.

Thursday we were finally able to get to our area at 4 and we got a ton of bendiciones, or blessings, which is how we refer to contacts that are presented to us by members. Alma, who is a super pilas young woman went with us and our ward mission leader to meet two of her friends. The first one wasn't home and the second one was working and didn't have time to talk. Despite starting off not so well, we asked her if she knew anyone else that we could visit and she agreed to take us to one other family who ended up being decently positive and accepted a book of Mormon. From there she she recommended a house to buy donuts from, so we went to buy donuts and started talking to the lady who sells donuts and she turned out to be super positive and even insisted on giving us her number so we could set up a time when she wasn't working. She also accepted a book of Mormon. Then a friend of hers showed up, so we also talked to him and set up a day to go visit him in his house as well. Then Alma had to go to seminary, so we thanked her for her help and continued to our appointment with julieta. After julieta a man on a motorcycle pulled over to talk to us and totally took us by surprise by saying he was a member from Rubén Darío, but he has family in our area who aren't members and just live a block away, so he told us he would go ahead and when we passed we could go act like we were passing by chance and say hi to him and then he would introduce us to his family. Sounded like a good plan to us, so long story short we meet Jorge and kennith who seem interested in talking to us and we have an appointment to meet with them next week and left them with a part of the book of Mormon to read. The blessings didn't stop there because later in the night while our Zls were doing a baptismal interview, we went out to invite David Perez, who came to church for the first time last week, to conference this weekend and on the way back we passed by a member named Martha who offered us Jamaica and tacos and then proceeded to introduce us to two family members and two friends that we visiting her and aren't members. Then to finish off the night perfectly, Sinai passed her interview and is all set for her baptism. All in all it was a great day and honestly felt like God was compensating us for the fact that we haven't had any time to work in our area.

Friday we had our interviews with president which went really well. Interviews are a little different in the office because we are in constant communication with president so theres not a whole lot to be discussed. President ended up finishing the interviews early so he decided to accompany us for Sinai's baptismal service. The baptism went really and we are hopeful that she can be the key in reactivating her mom and helping her dad join the church. I don't know if how much I've talked about Sinai in my emails, because pdays always sneak up on me and I just write what ever comes to mind (this pday being an exception because it got postponed due to conference). But anyways she was actually investigating the church when I first got to the Maximo and for my first 2 weeks she was pretty positive, but then things got complicated because her boyfriend is super evangelical and   wouldn't let her go and so she wasn't going to church and stopped progressing. So we dropped her for a few weeks and then picked things up again and she has been super awesome now and has even been going to seminary most days. She'll be an awesome addition to the ward and like I said will hopefully help her family along the path.

Saturday was just a lot of alternating between being in conference and inviting/bringing people to conference. Which of course meant pday was out of the question, but weeks go by so quickly it'll be no time at all before our next pday. Conference was awesome though and today we added up the weekly numbers and as a mission we were able to bring 669 investigators to conference! A nice testimony that the work is hastening and the words of the prophet are reaching the ears of new people every 6 months. 

All in all it's been a good week and I'm looking forward to the meeting we have tomorrow for all trainers and trainees which add up to 96 missionaries, which is about half the mission! And someone has to buy food for them all, oh wait that's me.. That'll be fun. 

Until next week!

Elder Hamson

Here´s a few photos. The first two are photos of one of the stranger fruits that I have eaten here called licha or mamón chino. The third photo is of Sinai´s baptism.