The week itself wasn't super eventful,
but I went on exchanges with someone in my district named Elder Barnes.
He's pretty cool, and he's in the same group as me time-wise. It's nice
to be able to work with a whole bunch of different people and see how
others work, sometimes you can get stuck in a rut and not end up doing
what the person really needs. Right after that exchange, we had district
meeting and I went on exchange with one of my Zone Leaders, Elder
Sannar. He's another really cool guy, and I learned a lot on how to work
with the members from that exchange. We didn't get to tract much on
that exchange, but I still think that it helped. We also got to help
prepare one of the youth in our ward get ready for the mission and teach
him a little bit on how to teach the Restoration. It's kind of funny,
because he only speaks Spanish and is probably going to have to learn
English on his mission. He struggles with that the most. It is also
interesting to reflect back on the beginning of my mission in the MTC
and realize that I struggled as much as he did teaching. Actually, I
struggled a lot more because my Spanish was truly terrible. Which also
makes me think about how much I've improved there. In the MTC, if we
diverted from the very carefully planned and written out lesson that we
had, I would be completely lost and my companion (who, funnily enough,
is also my companion out here right now) would take over thhe lesson
entirely and I would sit there trying to keep up, and generally failing
at even that. But yesterday, we were talking to the brother-in-law of
one of our investigators and he was shocked to find out that I was even
American. Apparantly, he had thought that I was from Spain. This is
despite the fact that I don't have a Spanish accent at all, I've been
told that mine resembles just a mix of people from Mexico, Puerto Rico,
and Chile. Which all have very distinct forms of Spanish, so mostly if
someone doesn't assume that I'm American, they're just way confused
about where I might be from. It's just crazy to think that I've been
able to reach this point with Spanish so fast, I know that it's only
with the Lord's help that I've been able to do this. I took five years
of German in school, and I wasn't ever even close to where I am in
Spanish. It would always take me a second to switch between English and
German mentally, but I can switch between English and Spanish literally
without thinking. I sometimes find myself thinking in Spanish even! This
is just so incredible to me because I don't even have the chance to be
fully immersed, but the Lord gives us what we need to help the people we
talk to. I'm excited to see what might happen in the next year.
For other random things in the week, we had interviews on Wednesday
for the first time with President Holland. He assured us that they were
very different this time than what they were normally going to be, and
then proceeded to talk to us for the whole time about our families. It
was a get to know you type thing, but it was still kind of strange.
It'll take while until I'm as comfortable with him as I was with
President James. Still, I look forwards to the opportunity. And another
random cool thing, we got to talk with one of our investigators for the
4th time today. That's pretty rare out here, they're very rarely there
for their return appointments. We're just trying to get him ready and
willing to go to church. We know he likes having us around, partly
because we don't badmouth the other churches. We can tell he likes
having us around because he made us carne asada and hot dogs, and tried
to get us to eat a lot of it. And then invited us to go fishing with him
and his brother in law (same one as before) so that he could make us
catfish. We had to politely decline, we're pretty sure it's not allowed.
We're not 100% sure, but it doesn't hurt not going just to be safe.
Well, I think that's about it for the week. I know that I'll remember something huge soon, but for now that's all.
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