Week 44

Hey everyone! Hope Fall is treating you right. To be honest, there's only one season here, so I'm continuing to suffer in the heat. It's a good suffering though haha

So, this was one of those weeks where every possible baptism fell off the face of the earth, which kinda bums me out. We were going to baptize Gabby and Mel, two little girls who live with their inactive grandmother and non-member grandfather. But the grandparents keep doing things to prevent them from going to church. I don't know whether it's intentional or unintentional, but it sure is frustrating. One of our other progressing investigators, a 19 year old guy named Edin, moved. Apparently, he still lives in our area, but we haven't found his house and he didn't go to church either. And then there's this girl Lili, a 16-year old girl who was a reference from her cousins and aunt. She cried in the first lesson we had with her because she felt the spirit so strongly. She was ready to get baptized. But then her mom said she can't and that they're moving to San Pedro next week. That's just the ups and downs of missionary work, I suppose. Maybe we planted the seed, and these people will overcome their problems and be baptized sometime in the future. That's what I keep telling myself anyway...

In the cultural highlight/weirdly cool story of the week, I de-grained (the spanish word is desgranar, so I hope "de-grained" actually makes sense haha) corn for the first time this week. As I've said in the past, we kind of live in the middle of nowhere, so there are a lot of people with farms. Recently, there have been some corn harvests, so occasionally we come across people preparing corn (I'm assuming to make corn tortillas, since they're used in about every meal). Anyway, we helped two people this week with taking corn off the cob and putting it in big barrels. I'm not really sure why, but I enjoyed it quite a bit :)

Also, we had a zone conference this past week in the mission office. I'll repeat again- air conditioning might be the best invention of all time. But seriously, it was a really powerful spiritual experience, and I learned a LOT of things that we need to incorporate in our missionary efforts here in San Marcos. Our leaders are also putting a HUGE emphasis on the Book of Mormon, which makes sense because it is the evidence of everything we teach. I like it too because I've gained an even greater love for the Book of Mormon here on the mission. I'm about to finish it for the third time in Spanish too! :)

Que tengan una buena semana! Espero que todo esté super macizo allí en los Estados. And Happy Anniversary to my parents! Congrats on another year!