New Elder and Weekend Miracles

Hello all,

I'm coming to learn that there is no such thing as a normal week in the mission. This week started of rough because Monday the power was out almost the entire day, leaving us only about 30 min to email. Then on Tuesday we had to be in Managua by 8:00 a.m. for capacitación de nuevos, which involved waking up at 1:45 a.m. Tuesday morning to be sure as not to miss the 3:00 a.m. bus for managua, spending a ton of money on travel, and a 4.5 hour bus ride with zero leg room. The best part of the capacitación was the massive all you can eat lunch at a near by restaurant, although the messages and practices of the capacitación were also quite good. Also I'm grateful that I wasn't assigned to managua as my first area because even though it would be convenient for travel purposes, it is way hotter there than it is in Somoto. The ride back was also an adventure because the last bus for Somoto left like 40 min before the capacitación ended, so we had to take the Ocotal bus, which then dropped us off on the side of the road about 20 min from Somoto at around 9:00 p.m., so we then waited for someone who was willing to give us a ride in their pick up and we miraculously mde it back to our house by 9:30.

The new Elder is a mini missionary, who we meet up with in Managua and will only be with us for the remainder of the transfer. We had a couple semi normal days of work wich was a nice break from all the craziness before. Friday I worked with the mini missionary, Elder Meza, because Castro had to interview several of Elder Diaz's investigators. It was a little difficult starting out but we really got into the swing of things towards the end of the day and ended up getting five new baptismal dates set! Then I met up with Castro and we went to share a short message with Mama Nerly, who makes us breakfast and Lunch everyday, lets us use her washing machine on Pdays, and feeds us Sunday dinners all for a very reasonable compensation. Basically she's super awesome and has been an investigator for months, but has trial after trial come up that have kept her from getting baptized: her husband is atheist, her grandaughter is a disaster, her daughter's pastor periodically gives sermons on why not to listen to the Mormons, and since we eat at her restaurant everyday she hears a lot of peoples opinions about mormons all throughout the day. Everything started to fall in line though and she tenatively agreed to get baptized this coming week. After the message Castro and I shared, she gave a touching prayer in which ahe thanked her Heavenly Father for sending us into her life and she loved us like her own children and she promised she would be baptized. All in all a pretty fantastic day.  

Saturday we baptized three youth ages 11, 12, and 13. We are working on baptismal dates for of their respective families as well, but it is common for the kids to be baptized first because they don't have any problems, whereas the adults are always super hesitant about getting married or have some other trial that is keeping them from being baptized. 

On Sunday mission president asked us to send him photos of our sacrament meetings so he could send us funds to purchase a new meeting house if he determined that we needed it. We were nervous about getting enough people and since the people always show up late, when we started our first meeting there were only about 7 or 8 people not including us. Thoughout the meeting however more and more arrived until we were overflowing. The same thing occured in the afternoon meeting, giving us an incredible total church attendance of 55 people! It's incredible to see how quickly we are growing, seeing as my first Sunday here we only had about 28 people total and in 4 weeks we almost doubled the attendance. 

Here are some pictures of the two sacrament meetings and the baptism of Joudi, Lenin and Saydi.

Also here is a panorama view of Somoto.