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

Teaching Families

Eating at his pension's restaurant.

Patrik, Marco & Elder Chaca
Patrik & Marco right after baptism. (Obviously the date stamp is inaccurate.)

I got your package and $5 from mormor today, plus some dearelders. I was talking with another gringo the other day and he said that its better to send stuff in envelopes when ever possible because they go through customs better. so yeah. thanks for the blessing note.

So we had our last president´s interview with pres. davis this week. because they are done this thursday, and will be heading back to the states.

We´ve been teaching some kids of the ages 9-12 lately, 6 of them. 3 of them are all ready to be baptized but their paretns won´t give us permission...sound familiar??? This time however we have just started teachign the parents and I think that we will be able to eventually baptized the whole family :) (btw its really weird to teach them the law of chastity.)

We´ve also just started teaching the ¨husband¨ of one of the recents converts from last transfer. Husband is in parenthesis because they were never married, just living together for 5 years. Unfortunately that is quite the norm here, even amongst some of the members. Its a lot tougher to get married here, yoiu have to get your blood tested and all sorts of weird stuff like that...idk, so people just don´t do it. plus its tough to get a divorce so all of it is just easier to live together.

We had the opportunity to listen to a general authority this week in stake conference. Elder Mestre of one of the quorums of the seventy from Venezuela spoke to the stake this week. They had a special priesthood session, adult session, recent convert/investigator session and the general session in a huge Institute of Religion. Anyways they were all really good meetings, He talked a lot about the families and how they are so important in God´s plan for our salvation. Its so true, when I went on splits with on of the assistents to the president, (E. Villacis) he told me that finding, teaching and baptizing families should always be my focus and I totally agree, within the family is a built in support system and God wans whole families not just some individuals to return unto him.

The other thing the Elder Mestre talked about was the importance of the Temple and I can´t help but think how lucky we are in the States to have a temple so close to us. Especially in the west. How far is the temple from where we are living now? I´m sure it is waaaaaaaaayyyyy less time than what it is from here. Its a good 14-16 hour bus ride to Lima from here so its a lot tougher to get to the temple.

It was also kinda funny, in the adult session Elder Mestre used a phrase that I´m pretty sure that only the 4 Americans in the room understood. He was talking about Missionary work and how everyone should help out, and that we can´t just say that ¨todo esta peachy¨ ( everthing´s just peachy¨ I had to explain what peachy meant to my companion and why I was laughing lol.

Today we have an appointment with Marco´s family, so I´m pretty exctied for that, hopefully we can see the whole familiy dressed in white, just waiting to go to the Temple. And we are working with another part-member family that only the one son is a member (Franko) who is preparing to go on a mission. The parents go to church basically every week and are awesome when we teach them until we ask them when can we baptize them, and then they tell us, that they are going to wait until Franko goes on his mission. ARGH!

Anyways I love you all, and I would send you some more pics, but my dang camera needs new batteries and I haven´t been able to buy some good ones. Its tough to find duracells or energizers here. I´m thinking about, when I´m able to get some money of buying batteries with a charger. that´d be smart.

Elder Patrik Connole

A Baptism

Above, Patrik with President & Sister Davis before they head back home.
Patrik with Elder Chaca.
At the plaza in Arequipa.

Hey do you think you could send me a copy of what you wrote down from when Pres. Richardson set me apart?

This week was a very spirtual week, I witnessed several miracles and several answers to prayers. On Monday, we had a lesson planned with Marco Antonio but when we got there, he wasn´t there. So after debating for a bit E. Chaca and I decided to offer up a prayer. We prayed individually and we both got a distinct impression that we needed to stay put. Within 5 minutes Marco arrived and we were able to teach him. It was amazing.

Over the next couple days we taught him the rest of the lessons, and got him ready to be baptized. Saturday was the day of the baptism. We cleaned the baptismal font, started the filling process, went to our morning appointments, ate lunch and got to the chapel once again at about 115 or so. 200 is the baptism, after getting everything set up, we threw the disc around until about 220, when members started arriving. about 230 everyone was there except for Marco. So my companion took off with a member to go find him. About 300 my companion arrives...with MARCO!!! Yay!

Anyways first off they had some talks and what not, and the whole time i´m thinking, wow. Heavenly Father sure has put a lot of trust in a 20 year old kid to baptize and fulfill this covenant with the Lord so that he can live eternally in the presence of God. I really have the authority to do this...wow!

Then came the the moment of truth. I was very nervous as I got to the steps but as soon as my feet touched the water it was all forgotten...mostly because the water was ice cold but hey.

Anyways we went through with the baptism, Marco felt the spirit super strong, as did the rest of us. He gave a great testimony about how he had made a promise to the Lord that he would bring many souls unto him a few years back, and that now he could actually do it.

He repeated these feelings after being confirmed and ordained to the office of a priest. This past week was one of the most spiritual of my life. Friday we also had a Multi Zone conference, with a lot of tears because it was the last one for President and Sister Davis. And we also had a very powerful lesson with the Branch President´s mother.

All in all it was an amazing week. and now I´m going to send you some pics

Still Immersed

What he looked like after the birthday cake and egg smearing. Nearly the whole district.


Eating guinea pig.

So my my pension is quite aweosome, its the 2nd counselor in the stake presidency and he is a dessert chef. yep. I´m gonna gain some weight this transfer. lol. He´s super tall, like a good couple inches taller than me, and loves basketball. He asked me if I could ask you to send him like video recordings of NBA games, and he said he´d pay to get them, and to ship them here. So idk if you can dow anything about that or not.

My district is entirely Latino other than me, so I won´t be speaking much english for a while. I speak a little bit of it with my companion while he´s trying to learn, its really funny because in english we have a ton of sounds that they can´t pronounce. Like right now he´s trying to learn the er sound, like nerd, and it always comes out like uhhh. its sooo funny.

We found a family this week and had a funny experience. In this family there are the grandparents, 3 aunts and a couple granddaughters. Anyways one of the aunts is super catholic and very loud about it. One of the granddaughters is about 18 and she´s a bit rebelious, as in she wears short shorts, has mulitiple piercings, stuff like that. Anyways we asked them to read the Book of Mormon because it was the Word of God and this lady literally shouts at her niece, ¨You hear that? Listen to these young man, they know the Word!¨Read this book you sinner!¨ Oh it was sooo funny. The poor girl was so embarrassed.

We have a possible baptism this week, I´ll let you know if it goes through or not, his name is Marco Antonio and he´s solid so I´m pretty sure it´ll be good.

It gets cold here at night, so I´ve resorted to wearing my thermals under my white shirt so I don´t freeze.

I´m gonna send you some pics now

Love ya,

Elder Connole

He's Alive!

{I edited out a few personal things here, so if some of this doesn't seem to flow quite right, that is why.}

Hey, I´M ALIVE!!!!

I couldn´t access my myldsmail email for the last bit. They just got it back up and running. {...} So much frustration. Still no baptisms either.

Thanks so much for all the pictures, and the sports updates. {...}

On the bright side I am no longer in Moquegua, I got transferred to Selva Alegre, which is part of Arequipa, its SOOOO much bigger than Moquegua, its ridiculous. Malls everywhere the houses actually look like houses instead of bamboo huts or adobe shacks. My new companion is Elder Chaca from Lima, Peru. Its his last transfer so my new job is to keep him from going trunkie LOL. My district is only 4 elders and 2 sisters. I already knew the sisters because one was in the CCM with me and the other was in Moquegua with me my first transfer. The ride was about 4 hours in a bus from 630 to 1030, but I´m here safe and sound.

Lets see, I don´t have my camera nor my journal which I usually bring, but next week I will. So I don´t remember super well everything that has gone on the last three weeks. HEre are a few highlights that I do remember. For my birthday, I got cake in the face, followed by 6 eggs and probably a pound of flour. I have a picture I´ll send later on that will make you laugh because its pretty ridiculous how messy I am.

Other than my birthday things were pretty normal, we taught lessons, walked a lot, we´ve been having more success bringing people to church, I think we averaged around 5 or 6 the last couple weeks. We just started teaching a guy who is dating, but not living with (which would be totally normal here) an LDS gal in another ward, and wants to be baptized asap, he´s come to church without us doing anything the last 2 weeks as well so we only need to get the lessons taught and baptize him.

{We went for over 3 weeks without any new news either in the mail or via email, so it was so good to hear from him again! From a snail mail letter also received today, we learned that he and his companion have been teaching a couple of teenagers with some success in getting them to church and wanting baptism. Will keep you posted. They also had the opportunity to teach their bishop which he found to be a bit intimidating even though the bishop is only in his 30's... As he says, "I mean it's the bishop, right?!"}