All is Well

So yeah. Opening an area is not exactly the funnest thing in the world. I´m still in Arequipa but I´m now in Puerta Verde in the Center Stake (Estaca Central) and basically I´m in one of the richest areas here. Most of the houses have intercoms and there are several gated communities. The members fortunately are willing to help out so hopefully we can pump them for references. Our Mission Leader is the bomb so yeah we are gonna just go to work

Monday since I didn´t have a comp, or an area, or a pension or anything lol so I chilled with my old zone until they figured out what do do with me. Haha. Tuesday was spent in trio all day and Wednesday I went to go get my newbie. There they informed me that I still didn´t have a room or anything so my comp and I went the assitants to find one. We searched for like 3 hours and couldn´t find anything within our price range. blah. So we went and chilled in the mission house until we figured out what to do. It was great! ate good food, played ping pong, played with his 4 year old son but I´m pretty sure my comp was very confused. After that we just decided to go to one of the rooms that was a little more expensive than what we wanted but cheap enough that it was alright. They aren´t members so now we are teaching them and wow they are awesome, they have a lot of questions but they are awesome.

Anyways by the time we got everything into the room ( we showed up with 8 elders plus the prez) it was about 8:30 at night and by the time we got everything into the room it was about 9:15. And then the president takes us all out to eat lol, at 9:30 at night hahaha, we got back to the room at about 10:20 and we unpacked stuff and put it into place until 11:30 or so. Totally breaking rules left and right but we had the president with us so I think it was alright. lol

So other than that we´ve just been trying to figure out where we are and where the members are and what not.

Elder Lowe called me and said that 2 of the kids we had been teaching got baptized on saturday one kid (bruno) we just barely met like 3 weeks ago and the other was Fabricio that just need to come to church and he would be good to go. and they should have a couple more coming up. Just gotta do the same here now

Love ya!

Elder Patrik Connole

Baptisms & Blessings

Elder Lowe's b-day, with Pension.
The sign
Oh yes! hehehe
Elder Connole, Liz, Elder Lowe
American Cake

I am thankful for,,,baptisms, good companions, the spirit being with me, any and all packages or letters that I recieve, anything that is remotely american, go karts, rock climbing, Predicad Mi Evangelio, el Libro de Mormon, escogidos, salchipapas, arroz verde, lomo saltado, family, and just being here on the mission

Anyways man what a crazy week. Wed, thurs, fri I was at a leadership training meeting from 8 am to 4 pm. Talk about spirtual and information overload! Anyways they told me that I am going to train again (a Latino) and that I am going to go re-open an area. I wasn´t very happy to hear that at first because I would have liked staying here in Villa Hermosa over Christmas and because we have a ton of upcoming baptisms this week and the next and the next. And now I have to go start from scratch. But im alright now because I realize that this is part of God´s plan and he has people preparing to meet me there and I will get to apply everything I just learned at the training thing right from the start. Right now I don´t have a comp because he wont get here until wed. heck I don´t even have a room or anything. so Im just waiting for the assistants to call me and tell me what to do. right now im still with elder lowe and his new comp so we are in a trio...So i don´t know what i´ll be doing for the next couple days..

But we did have a baptism on saturday of Liz! woo! We literally saw miracles happen with her. At first like 4 weeks ago her dad didn´t even want to give her permission to go to church (she is 17) but after praying and fasting he changed his mind completely. Then after she passed her interview on thursday he didn´t want to sign the baptismal record...more prayer...saturday morning we went up early to see if we could talk her dad into signing the darn thing and turns out that Liz had gotten him to sign it! So we looked at it and...he signed the wrong one! so we said a prayer and went to fill the font. Came back and it was all good.

The baptism went great, E. Lowe did it and I did the confirmation on sunday. sunday was nuts we had 12 investigators plus a couple less actives we´ve been working with go to church in all we had 146 people at church! a record! We had 15 people in our Gospel Principles class and its just going so good. I hope E. Lowe´s new comp is grateful for the 5 baptisms he will be having this week. Gah! 5! That is almost as many as I have had in my whole mission! But you know it its alright Im gonna just go to work and i´ll be having some baptisms in the next couple weeks or so.

Good News and Bad News (But Actually a Blessing)

Karlo

Walter
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Christmas items that would be very useful umm...socks are a bit of a need... several of them have holes. a deck of cards for boring pdays haha, ties are always a good option.The only things you shouldnt send would be perishable items or anything that would cost a lot. The packages have to be under $100 (i would suggest leaving it well under $100) because otherwise I have to pay like $80 in taxes just to get it....yah you´d be better off sending two small packages than one big one becuase big ones take forever to get here. My comp just got a halloween package that was fairly large about a week ago. So smaller is defintely better, and if you just say on the little declarations thing that its gifts or missionary supplies it gets through a lot better. And if you you put all around the package "Regalos" (gifts) it also should get through better I´m running low on contact solution but I have been looking for it here because I know it would be kinda hard to send off. If you are gonna send me a Christmas package I would suggest sending it off as soon as you can if you want me to get it on time becaus the office will be swamped around christmas becuase every elder is gonna get something and they can only receive a certain amount of packages at a time because of the dumb local laws here.

This saturday we one for sure for sure baptism and 1 other young girl that could get baptized. The fore sure bbaptism is a reference from the EQP, his wife´s cousin and they are all just way pumped with everything that we are doing for them. Her name is Liz she´s 17, loves to sing (we are gonna buy her a motab cd) and she is probably the maturest 17 year old that I have ever met. When we first met her we thought she was older than us haha. Anyways she got permission from her dad and everything so we are excited

The other is 20 year old Sandra who about 3 weeks ago just decided to come to church and then came the next week but she didn´t come yesterday so we have to find her and see what happened

Our apt flooded this week. Peru has a very bad habit of randomly shutting off the water and electricity all over the city. anyways they shut it off all day and apparently the pressure built up so much in our tubes that our poor broken sink just exploded. Unfortunately we were out proselyting so we came home to a river flowing out of our room. So that took about 2 or 3 hours to clean up but we have decided it was a blessing in disguise because our room is now very clean haha.

We also got called devils this week by a 7th day adventist. well kinda. he called the BOM diabolical so pretty close.

I´m gonna attempt to send pics. My camera has decided to stop working so I´m borrowing elder lowe´s

Love ya

Elder Connole

Swede in Peru! :)

So this week we should be having 2 baptisms. One of the kids we were gonna baptize this week didnt show up to church so we have to wait until next week.

Man we are sooooo busy all the time, like we are literally running from apt to apt and dont have any time to contact people. but we are teaching a whole bunch so that is the good part.

And the other bad part is that because we are doing so much stuff and the weeks are passing by so fast I cant even remember what we did all week. And at nights I hardly even have time to journal so its tough to remember anything at all.

Thursday was my companions birthday so he got a bunch of gifts and stuff, but nobody threw eggs or flour at him all week...boring haha. But friday we got together as a zone to celebrate and we ordered pizza delivery. The darn pizza took 2 hours to get to the house and by that time we were starving, like all of us and so we shoved the pizza down as fast as we could and rushed off to our apts. The only reason why we even stuck around for so long was because one of the American elders mom had sent him root beer extract and so we made that. It tasted sooooooo good! Its really sad that root beer doesnt exist hereand just to be able to try it after so long was awesome. (btw if you find root beer extract and send it to me I will be extremely happy)

Saturday we went with a member couple to go visit on of their friends and wow, what a factory product catholic she turned out to be. We tried explaining her about the importance of prophets but she was just like "but prophets are men, why do we need to depend on men when we have God?" And she was a very very firm believer in the orginal sin. The member couple has like a 4 month old boy and so we asked her if she believed that this tiny little gift from God had sins, and she was very firm in her opinion that he most certaintly did. Most people when we use that example agree that very young children dont have the capacity to sin. Ugh, heck we couldnt even get her to commit to pray about our message. All in all it was not a very fun expierence. I really hope that the members that we went with dont get discouraged and not want to present us to other friends of theirs. We told them that no effort is wasted and that it doesnt matter want the result is the important part is to open your mouth and preach the restored gospel.

Speakin of which on thursday we will be having an even that we are calling Bocas Abiertas, (translation Open Mouths) which basically consists of us and our ward missionaries teaching the members how to open their mouths and talk with their friends, and how they can help us in missionary work and how they can help us teach while we are with them. Then we will open our mouths and stuff it with food hehe, that will be the fun part

Anyways Im out of time and I will send pictures next of the baptisms!,

Love

Elder Patrik Connole


Nov. 8

So Bocas Abiertas failed miserably, everyone told us that they could make it and that they would be there, but in the end only 2 people showed up on time and about 15 came in total. Ugh. I don´t get it.

But there has been a lot of big news this week, as in 2 baptisms! woo! One was Walter Flores, a 16 year old kid that we met about 3 weeks ago and he gave a dang solid testimony about how he knew how he had just entered onto the path and that it is straight and narrow but with God´s help he will be able to enter into the kingdom of God. Heck it made his nonmember mother cry. I baptized him and it was a very special feeling througout the whole thingHe is way cool and will be one of 2 active priests in the ward.

Oh yeah speaking of which, the ward and the branch we are in charge of just got combined into 1 ward. The stake presidency felt like that this was the best way to help both areas progress and I totally agree. The branch barely had enough worthy priesthood holders to manage and the ward really only had about 40 or 50 people who go to church on a regular basis. So in both the ward and the branch they had like young kids my age running YM and YW, nobody except the Bishop or Branch Prez had counselors, so it was just a big mess. But now we have real leadership and everything is going to work out soooo much better.

The other baptism was Karlo and he actually lives in another area but we got permission from President Fernandez to teach, baptize and confirm him. He is the 'boyfriend' of the branch president´s daughter so we had a really good support system already built in. He got baptized early sunday morning and was confirmed the same day. I was able to confirm him.

And during all these baptisms and ward changes we were fasting so that just made it even more spirtually uplifting and awesome. Elder Lowe and I throughout the whole 24 hours had a very spirtual feeling, very similiar to what you feel while you are in the temple. There was no hunger nor were we even slightly preoccupied for our physical needs the entire time. We were seriously on a whole different level of spirtuality.

Oh yeah on Monday it was kinda funny because we went to go rock climbing again and this dude from Sweden who is here doing volunteer work came in. And so after a bit we started talking and so obviously I was able to share a little bit of my swedish background and some of the phrases I knew, and he told me that he thought for sure when he first saw me that I was a fellw Swede, hahaha I guess I can´t escape my heritage. Anyways so I gave him and his American friend from Michigan, a couple of pamphlets and directed them to www.mormon.org. They hadn´t ever heard of the Church and so they said that they would check it out.

Saturday night we were teaching a mom and daughter and the the daughter, Sandra is really progressing quickly and should be baptized the 20th, anyways we started the lesson at about 8:40 or so and we were planning on teaching until about 9:10 or so so that we could get home before our 9:30 absolute deadline. Unfortunately they had a lot of questions and the member who was with us is quite a chatterbox so at 9:28 we said the prayer and we told the member, ok now we have to run!!!!!!!!!!!!! and so we sprinted the 6 blocks back to the room and got in at like 9:33. oops...

This morning it was pretty cool because the stake president called us up to thank us for the work that we have been doing. I was in the middle of changing so I made E. Lowe answer it and so I´m sure Presidente Hale actually said a lot more but he didn´t actually get it all haha

times up!

Love you!

Elder Patrik Connole