Challenge of the Week? Thinking in English!

The first paragraph will probably not make any sense to most people, so an explanation is in order. We are getting ready to send E. Connole's younger brother off to college and are trying to find all the stuff that should have been left over to send with him. Unfortunately we aren't having much luck! I was very pleased to find that the one box we did manage to uncover had the Swedish cheese cutter in it. Swedish cheese cutters, you must understand, are not easy to come by (unless you are in Sweden) and thus highly coveted. He understands he would have been in deep water had he lost that one! LOL

Um...think I left another box in Kris´s room´s closet. Man I can´t think in english any more. Of course I kept the cheese cutter, thats a vital life line, that really everyone should have. My pension I´m sure would love to get one.

We lost like 44 missionaries or so to the Cuzco mission. This week we are getting 24 and losing 12. We´ll keep increasing until we have a 150 or so missionaries in the mish once again.

Yes I did get pictures :). This last week I´ve been eating 2 lunches because our district leader was getting training so we had his comp, Elder Sanchez with us. So we ate at our pension then his. It was pretty cool.

I didn´t resell some of the texts because, A) some of them it was their last year of use and the classes got new texts, B) some they only took back a certain amount and I arrived too late. So yeah.

So my zone leader has been pretty crappy about getting us letters, and they are same for this new transfer. but we have a new district leader who is my new comp. so it should be better, Elder Aguilar. His parents are mexican but he was born in Cali. So he speaks both languages fluently. So far he seems pretty cool.

I´m sad to hear Kunz and Rogers are having a tough time. Puno and Juliaca have always been tough areas, they are a lot colder and there aren´t too many members.

We should be having a couple baptisms here pretty quick. We have a part member family that is more asctive than half the members. but they have been wanting to wait until their son comes back from his mission (and has yet to recieve his call) I´ll keep you updated obviously.

Saturday was the baptism, E. Chaca and I went on splits so that he could talk we the investigator a little more about the baptism and i went to fill the font and get everything ready. When I got back they told me that she doesn´t want to be baptized yet. She wants to wait until her boyfriend gets baptized too. They both have dates for the 14th of next month so we´ll see.

Santiago another possiblity has yet to be able to change his work or schedule to get sundays off. so until he can fix that he will be stuck in limbo.

The new president is pretty crazy. He has some really big plans for the future, starting now, like 10 baptisms minimum every month, 90 contacts a day, stuff like that. Right now we are doing 1 or 2 baptisms, and about 20 contactacts a day. So if we can get to this goal it´d be awesome.

Love ya!

Elder Patrik Connole

p.s. Keep me updated on Jessica & Andre if you can.

For some reason, I can't get the picture he sent to upload today. I will try it again next week!

Baptism Possibilities, Rapper, Changes and Instant Oatmeal

Jessica is the 16 year old girl that we were teaching in Moquegua that we couldn´t baptize because her father wouldn´t let her. For mothers day she and her little brother did a really cool dance and I asked for a copy of the movie they took. She speaks english pretty fluently so you can talk with her all you want.

Does Dad know a Brian Arnold who works for Swing Golf? Apparently he was a companion to my new president, If so that would be kinda cool!

This week was crazy. We had interviews with the new president and a multizone meeting. President Fernandez is awesome, I can´t wait to seee how the mission is going to change, he has a great vision to change how the mission Peru Arequipa is viewed. He also made pdays longer! Which is why you are receiving this so late today. We went to some cool waterfalls as a disctrict and I´ll send you pictures next week. Oh next week is transfers so I´ll be getting a new comp. because Elder Chaca is going home. Crazy how fast this transfer has gone by. Like seriously.

We had some kinda funny experiences this week. We were outside of the church talking to a member on saturday and this decked out sports car, blasting rap music passed by. But lo and behold there was 50 year old man driving this thing all by himself. Oh man we laughed so hard.

We are planning 3 baptisms this week. I know right? 1 is Santiago who only needs to get his work changed so that he can have sundays off. He has been working his butt off too to be able to do it. The other are a couple single moms. Veronica and Mari. Veronica is fairly excited to be baptized, but she hasn´t been praying and we need to teach her the plan of salvation. Mari we have a tough time teaching because we have to do it with her neighbor, who is a member, but the three year old son is so wild and crazy. But Mari is also quite excited to get baptized, but we havn´t taught her very much. So she is a bit iffy.

We have been working really hard these last couple weeks so that E. Chaca can have some baptisms in his last week. Walking around a lot, but it has been a lot of fun.

Oh and we totally enjoyed the instant oatmeal! E. Chaca loved it and we are going to enjoy some more tomorrow.

Anyways yeah thats what has been going on. A lot of changes, and a lot of hard work. But really i´ve really been enjoying myself here in Selva Alegre

I love you

Elder Patrik Connole

Mission to Split, etc.

Yeah I can´t believe i´m a week short of 1/4 way done too...its gone by so fast and honestly its because i´m always busy. My companion E. Chaca goes home in 2 weeks! craziness!

So this husband, Santiago is progressing extremely well, the only problem is that he is having troubles getting his off day changed from thursday to sunday so that he can come to church. Once he gets that fixed we´ll be able to baptize him. So that is pretty awesome!

We have another family who is seriously considering waiting until their son gets back from his mission before they get baptized. But at least they want to be baptized. They are basically members just not baptized. So we´ve been meeting with them once a week or so to try to grow a desire to be baptized a little bit faster than that. I´m really not sure why anyone would want to procrastinate their baptism if they really knew how important it is in their lives.

We had a whole family, minus the father who is never home, come to church on sunday! well they came to sacrament meeting anyways. But they really liked it!

We also found an investigator who is l ike 35 years old or so, and has been listening to the missionaries off and on since he was 15. He has ton of wordly knowledge about the church, has spent a lot of time researching the church on the internet and has found a lot of ´how to combat the mormon missionaries´ type websites. He has a lot of good beliefs that line up with the church´s, and a few cooky ones as well. But we wrote down his questions and we are trying to answer them the best we can.

Tomorrow the mission splits and we lose E. Kunz and idk about E. Rogers to the mission Cuzco. So kinda sad. This friday we also have another multizone meeting for the new president and probably an interview with him. If you could get any info about E. Rogers for me that´d be awesome!

Love you

Elder Patrik Connole