We have 3 baptism dates!!! Wooo Hooo. Such a great start to
a letter. This week was Semana Santa.
It’s a huge celebration all week for the death of Christ and His resurrection.
It’s bigger than Christmas! And it’s
about the hottest week of every year. I
thought it was a joke that it could get hotter here but I was dead wrong. It was ridiculously hot. Every day there was
something they call “brumo” where the earth gets so hot that the heat rises
from the ground and the air is like vapor hazy. It almost looked like the sun
was being kind of blocked by the clouds but it was just weird heat stuff. And EVERYONE was gone to the beach or pueblos
from Thursday to Sunday. On Friday we
felt like we were walking through a ghost town from a movie. There was no one walking the streets, not
even any cars! Pretty crazy. I sweat a
lot anyway so you can imagine how much I was sweating this week. The real joke
was on us when we didn’t have any water for a couple of days, and we had just
drained the pila to clean it so we didn’t shower from Wednesday to Friday. That
showed us for trying to clean our house!
Luckily for us practically all of our investigators don’t
know how to swim so they were all home this week! Everyone gets vacation from work for Semana
Santa, so we had a ton of lessons! We
put two fechas with a members two kids, ages 11 and 13 for this Saturday. So
great. But probably one of the coolest things that’s happened on my mission
went down on Sunday. We ran around all morning trying to get people to go to
church and went to the capilla empty handed. Even one guy that usually comes
with us was gone, which was a serious bummer.
As we walked to church a Hermana stopped us and said that she had given
a neighbor a Book of Mormon and that he wanted to go to church. The hardest challenge with all investigators
is getting them to church so we took off running to his house. We found him but
he was washing clothes so he said he’d meet us there later. We walked to the church a little disappointed
because here “I’ll meet you there” means “Not a chance on earth I’m going to
that church”. We were sitting in priesthood half an hour later, when the
hearmans friend walks through the door and sits next to us! We were shocked! And then a few minutes
later, another random old man comes in and he sits down! We tried all week to
get people to come to church and didn’t get one. But Heavenly Father got five
people there! Two we’ve never seen before and three old investigators. It was
awesome! The members neighbor loved every minute of it! He read my Book of
Mormon during sacrament and would look up every once in a while when he focused
on a verse he liked. He even wanted to take my Book of Mormon home! He had his
own from the ward member but tried to take mine. It was so great! So then we
had an activity at the temple grounds at 4pm, so we invited him. ALL WEEK we’ve
been inviting people, passing by every day to verify that they’d come to this
activity, and who was the only person that came? That investigator. He left
sacrament meeting only after shaking every person’s hand, all 75 of them. The
activity was amazing. It was with the whole mission, minus the
pueblos. It talked about Christ and
recently baptized people gave their testimonies. After we walked around the
temple and took photos. We sat down to talk with this investigator. He
expressed a great desire to follow Christ and wanted to be a member of the
church. We told him that his goal was to make it inside those temple doors to
draw closer to God. It was an amazing spiritual experience. We put a baptismal
date for the 17th of May, right there in front of the temple. Best day ever!
We saw a kids arm get pretty hurt by a big dog. We knocked on a door and stood there waiting for an answer. A little further down the road a kid was yelling right by a fence, a dog had him by the shirt. It took us a second to figure out what was going on, when we finally figured it out, I looked at my companion, looked back at the dog, and realized it had the kid by the shoulder! I took off running, shouting and clapping at the dog. It finally let go. The kid staggered and fell back with a big gaping wound in his shoulder. It was terrible. If we hadn’t taken so long to react we could have helped that kid more. It was a little hard for a while after that.
I’m not going to end on that, we found a new family! A couple, and THEY’RE MARRIED!! That’s as golden as a family
gets around here. We’re excited to have
them!
Love you,
Elder Cook
