News From Nicaragua: I LOVE BLUEFIELDS!!!!!!!

Great to be back in Bluefields!

Familia y Amigos,

This week was honestly one of the best weeks of my whole mission. I loved it. It started really well and didn’t end the best but it was still awesome. I’ll let you know about it.

Anyway on Tuesday we got up super early for the trip to Bluefields. I didn’t miss that trip at all. Your legs fall asleep like halfway through because the bus seats aren’t comfortable and then it is a boat on choppy water, while sitting on a wooden bench. But we got there pretty early, like at 11, so that was nice and we got to work. The first day I worked with Bluefields 2 with Elder Page and Elder Peñalba, which wasn’t my area, but I still knew it pretty well. We visited the Branch President who greeted me with a big hug, and a couple other people who I knew from the area. It was super awesome. It honestly felt like being home, just because I was there for so long. Bluefields was still hot, but it had cooled down a little and the weather was perfect. Things went well with those elders and in the night we got some of my favorite batidos (smoothies) so that was cool.

On Wednesday it was even better. I got to work in Bluefields 1 with Elder Bradbeer and Elder Rushton. We started out the morning going and visiting a couple of my converts. We visited Ayoleth, who took us super long to baptize because of her marriage papers. We have a book with all of the converts, and it says she isn’t active so I wanted to see what was going on. Well turns out the missionaries didn’t even know who she was, they said they see her in church every week but just didn’t really know who she was. That was awesome. We went and visited Curt, who is active, has a calling, and goes every week in his white shirt and tie. Asi es!! We went and visited a couple of members, and when one of them saw me they said "mi gran amigo!" (my good friend) It was so great to see the fruits of my labor, and that was probably why it made it the best week of my mission so far. I ate some pan de coco and some picos, and we went to Noche De Hermanamiento (Fellowship night) where we saw some more members and said hi. The elders there are working hard and are going to be baptizing 2 of my old investigators this week, so that made me happy too. I even got to do the interview for one of them, which was cool.

On Thursday we got up and left at like 9 and got back at 4. For those of you that didn’t know our house here in Juigalpa was really bad, it was super tiny and to pray on our knees in our study room we all had to get up on our chairs. We were a little fed up with the house so we kind of started looking for a new one. A member here, a returned missionary just said to us, you don’t really have any time to look for one so just ask the Lord for a house and He`ll give you it. So that’s what I decided to do. I prayed and asked the Lord for a new house, something kind of silly. I asked last week on like Thursday. So right after I got to Bluefields, a member called me out of the blue and told me that he saw a house that he thought would be really good for us. He didn’t know at all that we were looking for a new house, but the new one is great. We ended up moving on Thursday which took up the whole day, but it was good to finally get out of the bad house. The family that found the house for us recently got sealed in the temple and just went inactive, but they went to church this week which was awesome too.

Then on Friday I just worked in the area, normal. It was the only day all week that I worked in the area, so I’m sure you can imagine how things went with bringing investigators to general conference.

On Saturday and Sunday we had conference. It went good, but it was a little hard to focus. The problem with watching conference in Spanish is that you can still hear the English in the background so it is a little hard to focus. My favorite talk was probably the first one of Priesthood session, by Elder Neil L Anderson on faith. I need to have more faith so that we can complete with all of the things we need to do here, trying to get our goal of 2300 baptisms. I hope that all of you were able to receive personal revelation also, and that you learned something from conference.

That about does it for my week, it was awesome and here are a couple pictures. I love you all, have a great week!

Elder Hanson