Week #94 - Pre-Presidential Visit (Santiago)

Hola familia y amigos!

Well this week was full of water and the changes were this week, which didn’t really affect our district that much. Just one sister came into our district, Hna Vicente from Nicaragua and she is leaving with me in August. The district seems really good, and the zone seems awesome as well. This week was pretty good, I felt like it went pretty long and I tried to keep as little contact with my branch president as possible because I just don’t want problems.

This week we worked pretty hard to try and find new people to teach and make sure everything is good for this month. Our ZL's are very supportive, which is great. One is Elder Webb who leaves this change. He is from Show Low, so if you want to send me a last package, his dad goes to the valley every week and he can bring it for me at the change meeting (they are coming to pick Elder Webb up). The other ZL is Elder Ordoñez from Tegus, and we have a really good feeling that this month will be great with success.

Lorena is ready to go with her baptism and we challenged her neighbor Ondina and she wants to as well. We have some families that are progressing, like Ondina's son, Carlos, and his girlfriend Fanny, but they will be tougher because they have to get married first. We also have Mari and Felix, however this week they had a lot of problems and it’s going to be tough to fix them. Our cook told us about it because they saw a lot of what happened. Apparently Felix's brother, Dennis (who is a less active member) owes them money for something, and they want him to pay them back. Felix works at a brick making place right next door to his mom and one day last week he was a bit drunk and Dennis came and they got into an argument and Dennis started beating Felix up. They called Mari who was at our cook’s house, and when she arrived they started getting her too. Then the parents of the brothers came and joined in on beating up their own son, Felix. One of our neighbors came running down in his underwear to help Felix and was able to get everyone off. If he hadn’t shown up Felix could be dead. Felix came out of it with a smashed up face and Mari has bruises and cuts. We saw her yesterday and she was a wreck! It was really sad to see that but we fasted for them this week and we plan on visiting them later this week.

This week we met a candidate for the presidency of Honduras. He is part of the national party and apparently is good friends with Ruth. We got to shake his hand and talk to him, it was pretty funny! Well this week I had something nice happen to me during my personal study. I was still a bit frustrated about being left in this area but I was reading my way through the Book of Mormon and I was in Alma chapter 8, where Alma goes to Ammonihah and gets rejected by the people, but then is told to go back and ultimately has success. I felt like the Lord was trying to tell me that I just need to go a little farther and everything will be alright, so I hope I can pull through and have success here. Thanks for everything and I hope everyone has a great week!

Elder Neher