Well, once again I was fighting a whole bunch of informes today, so my energy’s a little low… And I guess my last email never made it to you guys, and I even made the zone leaders mad at me for not sending everything on time… But yeah, whatever! This week’s been pretty good, but I’m needing a break.
Supposedly we’re going to go look for some ruins in our zone later today, so we’ll see how that goes and I’ll probably send some cool pictures next week (It kind of depends on how cool the ruins really are…).
First, I guess I should let you know what all the changes were around here since we had cambios last Tuesday. Basically, almost everything is exactly the same: I’m still with my son, Elder Pereira, and I’m still district leader (This makes cambio #9 as DL! I’ve been DL for 48 weeks! Well, whatever! I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it, but that also means that I have even less time in my day to do things, so I guess my journal will forever be stuck in August of 2016!). In my district we’ve still got Elder Gallardo, Elder Montan, and Hermana Salazar. The only change is that Hermana Ascanta went down the road a little bit to another area to be a Sister Training Leader, so Hermana Mendoza is the new addition. Other than that… nothing. So I’m happy because it lets us be together for another six weeks and they’re all awesome people!
Now, this week’s miracle: On Thursday morning we were planning our day and we realized that, for some reason, my companion had written that at 6:00 we had a cita with a couple named Ericka and Javier. I hadn’t written it because we didn’t set a cita with them (we had looked for them earlier in the week but we hadn’t managed to find them), but either way he’d written something down about visiting them.
Well, the truth was that we had citas at 6:00 and at 7:00 that were both in the same part of our area, while Eicka and Javier live in another part. Normally it goes against my logical side to go to another part to work when we have to return afterwards, but I thought, “Yeah, why not?” This work isn’t really about logic — it’s a little more spiritual- and faith-based! So we called them to set the cita… and they didn’t answer. We decided to plan a visit to them at 6:30 anyway and started our day.
Around 3:00 we got a call from them, but when we answered, the call immediately ended. A little while later, they called us again, but with the same result (And no, we weren’t accidentally pressing the wrong button! I may have problems with technology after 19 months without using anything more than a dumbphone, but I’m not that bad! The call was literally a second and then it dropped.) Finally I remembered to call them and when I did it didn’t work, but we tried again and finally managed to set a cita (Again, I wasn’t really sure why, but we did!).
So 6:30 came around and we headed off to their house… But we got there and one of their family members, Pablo, came out and told us that they weren’t home. (Well, that’s kind of disrespectful! Maybe I would care more, but I’ve come to understand that life happens and they can’t always plan for everything, so the citas fall through because of something or other.). So I asked myself, “Now what?” and decided to ask Pablo if he wanted to listen to our message… And he accepted without hesitation! So we taught him! Our Heavenly Father really sent us to find him, because if it wasn’t for the random dropped phone calls during the day we would have forgotten to set the cita, and if we hadn’t connected with them and set the cita we probably wouldn’t have gone!
And, to finish, a few photos from this week:
My companion and I got our packages this week:
… We got a lot of chocolate!
As I’ve mentioned before, due to the lack of tools we sometimes have to be a little creative when it comes to cooking food. We don’t have a pot and our lunch fell through, so we made pasta in my electric frying pan!:
It actually turned out pretty well:
…So we’re all good here! “See” you all next week!
— Elder Schroeder