Monday, April 17, 2017

El Rodeo: The best area in the mission!

Helloooo everybody!

So here I am in my new area, El Rodeo! My first day here, I thought it would be good to go meet the branch president. He´s a fairly new president, and his family and he are SUPER nice. As we left his house, he said something like, "Nice to meet you Elder, and welcome to the best area!". He was SO right!!!

This area is so amazing! We are having so much success already. We are doing a lot of our work in an aldea called Santa Ana. There are so many humble, amazing people there! We are currently teaching a family there. The mom and two of the children are going to get baptized this Saturday! The mom is named Aracely, and the children are named Cynthia and Lisa. I only met them briefly, but they seem super great! I´m so excited for their baptisms on Saturday. We´re working with the father Efrain as well, but he has a couple issues that are impeding him from being baptized, so the process for him will have to be a little longer. But we have faith in him as well!

There are also two other children that are going to get baptized this Saturday! Their names are Adriela and Rudy. I don´t know them super well yet either, but I did meet them and they are super sweet! Adriela is fourteen or fifteen, and Rudy is ten. We´re also teaching their mom as well, she just has a hard time getting to church. But I´m sure she will also be baptized soon as well!

And last but not least, we are teaching Victoria and Esperanza! They are twins who are about fourteen years old. They were references from a young woman in the ward. They are super sweet and really smart! They read just about every pamphlet or chapter of the Book of Mormon we leave with them. They will also be being baptized this Saturday!

I want to tell a short story about these twins, just to demonstrate how much the branch supports the missionaries here. We had a small problem because although they wanted to be baptized, their dad wanted them to wait at least six months before doing so that they were really sure and committed about the decision they´re making. It made sense what he said, but we knew that waiting so long wasn´t necessary. We tried briefly to convince him otherwise, but without success. We brought up this issue in branch council yesterday, and that same night our branch president, the branch mission leader, the young women´s president, and the secretary of the young women´s presidency came with us to visit the entire family. We talked to the family for a while, and they presented perfectly the reasons why it would be good for the dad to give permission for his daughters to be baptized. Long story short, the twins have permission from both parents to be baptized this Saturday, and the parents now also have a great impression of the church and plan to investigate it more in the future.

So that´s my awesome area! The members are great and super supportive of the missionaries. They´re almost always willing to accompany us to appointments, and they give a good amount of references! Honestly our biggest problem right now is having enough time to visit all of the people we are teaching and to contact all the of the references the members have given us. The best problem I´ve had in my mission!

My new companion is super great! His name is Elder Hernández and he´s actually from Panamá. We get along well, and I can tell we´re going to have a lot of unity in our teaching as we get to know each other more!

I also really enjoy being district leader! I had my first district meeting as district leader this week, and it went pretty well! I like being able to help out other missionaries. I´ll get to do at least one exchange this week, so that´ll be fun!

So that´s that! I´m loving my new area! And I love you all!

-Elder Thomas

With Elder Hernandez

No comments:

Post a Comment