2013-09-30 ...he’d better be an amazing missionary if he’s gonna marry my sister.

Hey Everyone,

This was a pretty good week.  

pique macho with la familia Flores: french fries with sausage, beef, onions, tomatoes, eggs and covered in mayo and ketchup

A lack of obedience here in the mission is something that really surprised me.  I figured pretty much everyone would be almost completely obedient.  I’ve found that that’s not true at all.  The majority don’t even seem interested in trying to be obedient.

 

Right now I have 3 favorite investigators in Alamos.

 

One is Jeam Pierre.  He’s 13 and has 3 older siblings who were all baptized about 4 years ago.  The parents live in Spain and haven’t been back for like 8 years.  The oldest brother is currently serving a mission so he just lives with the other 2 siblings, Jessit and Selene who are pretty active in the church. Jeam Pierre is autistic and doesn’t really like to talk to people so he never listened to the missionaries or got baptized.  When we went to visit his siblings this past week I sat down beside him and after like 15 minutes of just me talking he finally started to talk a little.  We came and helped them clean up their house the next day and taught Jeam Pierre a lesson.  My companion took a picture of me trying to teach him.  He didn’t say much that day.  He’s kind of hard to teach but I can’t stop thinking about him so I figure we’ll have some kind of success with him.

 

2nd is Salome Delgadillo.  She’s a little old lady who has already had all of the lessons and has visited the church a lot.  She just can’t remember hardly anything though.  I think she’ll be baptized soon if we can just help her remember how to pray.

"my breakfast set up.  I fry an egg and the family we live with makes bread so I make a fried egg and mayo sandwich.  We use the iron board to cook on and pamphlets to level it out."

3rd is Maria Antesana.  She’s a mom who we taught for the first time last week.  This week we asked her if she had prayed and she said she had and had gotten an answer that all that we’d taught about Joseph Smith is true. She doesn’t want to join the church though because her husband doesn’t want to talk to us and she doesn’t want to upset him.  Hopefully we can find a way to talk to the husband.

 

On Wednesday, my old companion called me to tell me that Jose had asked that I baptize him.  He is one of the friends that Jhonny brought to church and introduced us to.  He’s a really great kid and his dad came to the baptism and said that he’d visit church on Sunday too.  Evelin also finally got baptized.  I’ve been visiting her and her mom since I arrived in Cochabamba. Her mom, Maria, also told me at the baptism that she’s planning on getting married in December so she can get baptized too.  It was great to see a lot of people from the ward at the baptism. Jhonny’s mom came and we got to talk about what she was thinking about for baptism.  She told me she has a date for this coming month but still hasn’t gotten an answer to her prayers about if the church is true. Jhonny bore his testimony in the baptism and just about made me cry.  If everyone worked half as hard as he did in spreading the gospel there is no way we could keep up with all of the appointments we would have.

Today Angela, sister of Paola and Fernando, told me she’s going to get baptized on  October 12th.

 

Arthur called me to tell me the bishop finally interviewed him to be a ward missionary.  Elder Mero and I felt more strongly about him than anyone else when we submitted names to the bishop almost 3 months ago.  It’s good that he finally got called.  He told me today that he talked to the bishop and is planning on leaving as soon as he’s 18 to serve a mission.  He also told me that he’s going to be a better missionary than me and that when he come back he’s going to marry Liz.  I told him he’d better be an amazing missionary if he’s gonna marry my sister. Somehow that’s not even a weird thing to say here.

Elder Howlett with his new brother

Love you all hope you have a great week.

 

Love,

Elder Howlett

 

P.S. 1Samuel 17:45-47

 

P.P.S.  I’ll start from now on to give names of who I get letters from.  I did get a handwritten one from Adri this past week and it was awesome.  Thanks a ton Adri!  The mail here is a joke.  It is slow and unreliable.  Generally, letters take about a month and a half to get here.  Also, DearElder does NOT put a date on automatically, so it would be nice for me if you date what you send through DearElder.com.
 

The Flores family stopped by to surprise me one morning this week.  It was pretty great.  They all came with Juan Pablo.  He's a trufi driver who I used to visit too.  They dropped off my clothes and it made my day that they all came by.