Week #88 - The "Flu" Fighters (Santiago)

At a local banana plantation

Hola a todos!

Well this week we had changes  and all this week I have been fighting with a terrible flu. Last Sunday night it was bad and Monday was really bad as well, but at least the rest of the week I have been getting better. It’s just been really hard being sick with the crazy amount of heat that there is right now.

So my last comp Elder Perez was really good, he just enjoyed annoying me a lot and that bothered me a bit, but whatever. So my new companion is Elder Baldwin. He has 4 months on his mission. I am his 2nd comp and he is already in his 2nd area. He was only with his first comp for one change which is not normal. He didn’t really get along with his trainer (a Guatemalan) and he didn’t really get trained that well, so I have to help him with Spanish and basically everything else. He is really cool. He is a cop from Las Vegas and has showed me a couple cop moves that hurt! He is really funny and really wants to be a great missionary, he’s just struggling with Spanish, but he has actually been improving these past couple of days. So I am still getting pretty frustrated with my branch president. He just doesn’t seem to understand or accept that I could know more about the church than him, shock! He only has 2 years of being a member and he keeps telling me things that I know are wrong, but he won’t believe me when I try and talk about it. It’s really frustrating and sometimes I want to just let him have it, but I’m dealing with it. :)

We had an awesome moment this week. A member named Gustavo has a family friend named Lorena who wanted us to come over and teach her the gospel. So we went and we started teaching her. She said that she had been thinking about baptism on her own and she was willing to do it, we teach lesson one, and she understood everything and the Spirit was super strong. She accepted to be baptized, we left a copy of the Book of Mormon with her and when we went last night, she had read a lot of it already.  She said it helped answer a lot of doubts that she had had from the Bible. She is awesome! Last night she was crying when we showed her the Jospeh Smith movie, she enjoyed it a lot. We are still having some issues finding people who are ready and willing to listen to the gospel, but we have support from some members, so hopefully this week we can do a really good job of finding and getting more people to teach. 

Today we went to the banana plantations that are around our area and got to see how they are grown, and what they do with them. We saw an alligator and some other stuff, it was really cool. Well I hope that next week will be awesome for everyone. I am not really excited to finish, I want to stay longer! but whatevs, haha!

Hasta pronto!

Elder Neher

New companion Elder Baldwin

Cool grasshopper!