Family and Friends,
How is everything going at home? It has been
a pretty good time here in Nicaragua. It has cooled down a little bit
this week (doesn’t mean I’m still not super hot) but it is still super humid
and it has rained almost every night. The rain is super hard and it kind
of stinks during lessons because you can’t hear anything. Everyone has
tin roofs so the rain is just super loud. It is especially hard when it’s
a different language that you don’t know perfectly. But all is well and I’m
having a good time!
I know you were worried about what I am eating but
we eat meals 2 times a day, only on some days we only eat one. I found
some Cap’n Crunch at the store and bought it to eat for breakfast. I’m
super stoked. We mostly eat chicken here and there is some gross food but
I just try to down it.
You were also wondering about where I live and if
there are any bugs or animals that sneak in. There are a million ants in our
house which kind of sucks and I have a ton of bug bites on my ankles from them
but its all going good. There is also this cat in our house that likes to
poop so we have to clean that up sometimes.
I’ll tell you a little bit more about what I have
to do every day. We have this thing called the standards of
excellence. They are goals that we are supposed to meet everyday as a
mission, and that is what we pretty much try to do everyday. Anyways we
are supposed to teach about 7 lessons, have 12 contacts per person (a contact
consists of sharing a gospel principle and an invitation) and bring 6 people to
church every week. We have been doing pretty well with this but it is
hard to get 48 contacts with 4 people. The language is coming along super
well! I have a lot to learn but am able to teach which is good.
Anyway this week was pretty good. Not much
happened Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. We had zone conference on
Friday, which was super great. In my last email I think I said that our
zone was the worst number wise, and we are trying to raise it. My zone is
super tough. Everyone here goes to a church, so we mostly teach the
restoration. The people aren’t very accepting, but that is super relative
because I know how hard some other missions are. Real life is definitely
hard. So it was pretty much just a pep talk to encourage us to find people to
get baptized. It was super great to meet the whole zone and do practices
and stuff.
Everyday we worked on our baptism
prospects for Saturday, but not all of the baptisms worked out and bunch of
them fell through so we just pretty much worked with Ana and Gregoria. We
are working on a bunch of people, and try to place about 3 baptismal dates
every day.
Just a little bio, Ana has been listening to the
missionaries for 7 years. She told us that "she doesn’t have an
answer" but with 7 years of missionary lessons you would think she
did. She has a daughter on a mission and a younger daughter who is
baptized. This type of person we call a jarron azul (blue jar) in our mission,
because they show us a movie on the first day about a blue jar, and how the
person in the movie did everything they could to get the jar, never giving
up. That is how all the missionaries have worked with Ana, never giving
up.
Gregoria is a super nice lady who does our
laundry. She is super quiet and before us supposedly didn’t want anything
to do with the church. Missionaries had been working with her for a while
too. Her problem was that she wasn’t married so we had to get that all
done.
My first day here we placed dates on both of them
for the 25, and were super determined to baptize them. On Friday they
both had their interviews. Gregoria was easy because she wanted to get
baptized, but Ana was pretty hard. She was in the interview for 2 hours,
and one of our APs was doing the interview. He was doing everything to
resolve her doubts and finally she decided to get baptized. Our AP said
she was the biggest jarron azul in his whole mission.
Anyway, both of them ended up getting baptized on
Saturday. I got to baptize Gregoria, which was super awesome. We
were all super happy because she got married right before her baptism. We
baptized Ana later in the day. It was awesome.
Mom, we have a piano here but it is electronic and
doesn’t work so everything is acapella. It stinks, not going to lie.
Everything is going super well here and I hope
everyone has a great week! This email was super scatterbrained,
sorry. Love you all!
Elder Hanson
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| Last day at the CCM with my teachers |
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| Gregoria's Baptism (Elder Kleiner, Elder Hernandez, Her husband, Gregoria, Me, Elder Collado) |
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| Streets of Jinotepe - Watch out for the "sleeping" dogs! |
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| Elder Kleiner, Elder Collado, Elder Hernandez, Me |
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| Streets of Jinotepe from our house |
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| Gregoria's baptism |
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| Me and the Cap'n! |
