Monday, May 23, 2011

Jamie's Letter May 23, 2011

Hi Mom :)
How are you? I'm doing great. Richie is going to Mongolia??? What?!?! While I'm not completely sure, I have a suspicion that Mongolian is a tad bit different than Spanish...or English. He'll be awesome!

To answer your questions-
-We live in a nice room above some nice Catholic people. We have 2 bed frames with mattresses and a mattress on the floor that Hna Cruz uses. (We fought for the mattress on the floor, and she won).
-We do have warmer water. All of the rooms that the missionaries use have an electric shower head water heater thingamajigger. (Not quite sure how to translate that work into Spanish :) Anywho, this also means that if we touch the shower head while we're showering, we get a little shock...I may or may not be talking from experience. But yes, we have warm water!
-Yep, we still have a pensionista (the hermana that fixes our food). Everyone in the mission has one, and if I'm not mistaken, all the missionaries in Peru do as well. They are slowly trying to get rid of that. Right now the ZL's make breakfast and dinner for themselves, which is something that I would like. But whatever.
-I haven't heard from Hna Lopez since I left for Lima (I called her the night before to get the number of the AP's, but I only talked to her for 3 minutes). I want to meet up with her in Chiclayo one of these Mondays to have ice cream, but we'll see if that happens. I've heard through the grapevine that she's doing okay though.

This week has been good. We're still adjusting to working in a trio. It's a lot harder than being in a trio in the MTC, I think. But it's good. I feel like sometimes I'm a lot of the strength in our companionship, yet I have SO many things that I need to work on. We're still working, too, on improving our teaching. A lot of the people we've taught in this past week, we've talked about faith, repentance, and baptism, but not a whole lot about the restoration, which I think is key. There are a gajillion churches, and they all talk about these things. We need to explain why our Church is different. And that's something we're working on. But I'm learning a lot from my companions too. They're great.

We had 2 baptisms this week-Alicia and Jessica. They're friends, and I guess they just randomly decided to check out the church one day, and they really liked what they heard. So the missionaries met with them, and they agreed to be baptized. And then there were some problems to overcome, but I'm not quite sure what they were...anywho, then we came along and baptized them! Now if we could just keep finding people to be baptized...

We've been praying and fasting a lot that we could find the people here in La Cria that are ready for the Gospel. I'm used to teaching Catholic people that don't have a whole lot of knowledge about the church, so when we have people that have talked to the missionaries in the past, and know who we are, it kind of throws us off. In our zone meeting last week though we talked about Alma 8, where he went to preach to the...I-can't-remember-ites, and the first time it didn't work. So he left, but the Lord told him to return, which he did, but he did it a different way. So that's what I'm doing right now. I'm looking for the "other way" into this city. I think it has a lot to do with referrals from the members.

On my list of things that I wish I had from the US:
-Scrapbooking tape-it's just perfect for everything. And refill or two.
-Bug Repellent-the mosquitos in my new area are nasty. Seriously. My legs are horrifically ugly, even when I do use repellent.
-Fun stickers
-Anything else that you wish to send a poor American missionary in Peru :)

I'm also attaching pictures on this email too. So here is what they are-
Today we went to Chongoyape-it's about an hour away from La Cria where our DL, Elder Ruiz and his companion, Elder Karl are. This is our district! 3 hermanas and 2 elders. It's fun. Elder Karl is from Farmington, and he entered the MTC the same day as me. Except I didn't meet him until I was here. He went to the CCM after 3 weeks. Oh well. I needed to be in the MTC for 9 weeks, and I'm so glad I that I was. I can see how the Lord has prepared me to be here in Peru through that experience. Anywho-P-Day. We went exploring, and these were some cool pictures that we took (the first and second one).
The third picture is a picture of us before the baptisms.

Well, I'm gonna call this a letter. I know the Gospel is true! I love you!!
Hna Williams

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