Week 17: Very dirty, disrespectful, loud, mood swinging people

11-28-2016

Monday: Today was a fun P-Day. This morning we went to the Dominican Republic Olympic Center. It has every type of sport field or arena. We played soccer for a couple hours with our district. I am so out of shape already. We walk on average about 7 miles a day and that doesn't do anything for me. All the Elders where dying after 10 minutes of playing! After that though we went to the mall for lunch. We went home and got our things and changed for email. After email we just went back to the house and chilled until our appointments that night.

Tuesday: We had a solid day! Well kind of. Tuesdays are usually always good because its always full. In the morning we wanted to go and print some pictures off for our agendas (planners). We walked around for 3 hours because the first guy took an hour and he didn't even have the right paper in the end. We then went across town and my USB with the photos got blocked at the last place so I couldn't print mine off. Not going to lie, I was not a happy missionary. It's okay though, I learned from the experience. After that hassle we went to a lunch at a members then went to work. We had some good lesson today. We have a really promising new investigator. We were fed dinner too! Getting fed here is really rare. The people are too poor. We were so full today we had to drop some lessons at the end of the day because we ran out of time! Fun, learningful (I just made that word up) day! 

Wednesday: Pretty good day of missionary work! This morning I studied a lot of Spanish and made my new agenda for next transfer. Elder Nieves had a meeting and he didn't get back until 3:30 so that kind of sucked but I am getting used to it. Once we left we were late to a lot of our appointments and 4 of them fell through. We stopped by Maridania's and taught her the law of chastity. She said she knows the church is true but doesn't want to get baptized quite yet because her family is half and half with her decision. Half says "yes! Do it! It's a church! They're all good!" and the other is strong Catholics. Her date was for the 3rd of December but we are going to have to move it. We had 4 other good lessons after that to end the day!

Thursday: Thanksgiving! My favorite one is the field so far! We made homemade burgers and fritos! Fritos are like french fries that I think are better. After our lunch we went out to work! We had a member leave with us but it took her forever to get ready and the first appointment fell through so we went to Caridad's house with her. She also had a baptism date for the 3rd of December. She also knows the church is true but she still has problems with coffee. She still is drinking so we have to push her baptism a week or so. That also sucks but as long as she is truly converted, I'm fine. The baptism can wait until she is fully ready. After that we had a ward council. It actually went very good to be honest. Oh I forgot to write that the church has been robbed again and that is the 4 time in the past 2 months and also Caridad has been robbed 3 times in the past two months. Some other missionaries got robbed today. This time of year gets pretty gnarly. We have now been 3 days without power. Supposedly the guy turned it back on but it wasn't working. The reason why we didn't have power was supposedly we didn't pay rent but that was a lie. We told the guy and he said whoops sorry and he would turn it back on. It wasn't happening so Elder Nieves and I went looking around. We found a big wall of volt meter to show how much power is going in. We found that ours wasn't getting any then I look lower and found a ton of big switches. There was only one that was off so I flipped that puppy on and we got power again! The fridges where super wet and all the food went bad but we have power again now! 

Friday: Today we took the missionaries in the CCM out. I took a pretty cool guy. He is from Utah of coarse. His Spanish was so so but that is to be expected. Like always when we have splits, the citas always fall through! Out of the planned 5, 1 actually happened. That was okay because that left us a lot of time to contact. We talked with 2 really good families that I think are really going to progress. After we dropped the CCM missionaries off we went to our last appointment for the day. We get there and the neighbor said they aren't there because the wife is in labor. That's the best excuse to not have a lesson.

Saturday: Saturday was pretty good also. We went and taught a lot of less actives to remind them to come to church. After that we went to the chapel because we had English class to teach. That went really well. When I got here the class was only 1 person for my whole 1st transfer. I brought up the idea to change the time, so we did and we are now getting more and more people every time! Today, we had 20 people! After the class, we had the activity and that went really well also!

Sunday: Had a another good Sunday on the mission! We didn't have to many people show up to church today but it was still good. We finally got a new ward mission leader that I like! The old one was less active. Awkward... We are getting the ward missionaries more prepared. After church we had a very good lunch at the Bishops house. We then went to Caridads house. She hasn't gone to church enough and is still drinking coffee so she cant get baptized next week. We moved it to the 17th of December. We have 3 planned baptisms for that day and I think they are going to happen. Caridad said she is dropping coffee this instant and we told her she need to go to church every week if she wants to be baptized. She accepted and took it very well! I hope she can do it! Please pray for her! After her we walked a long was to an appointment that fell through then walked all the way back to one that fell through. That sucked but then we went to a member and she fed us dinner and we had a good talk with her. After her we went to a less actives and had a good talk with her. We updated the area book then called it a day!

This week has been one of the fastest. I would say that the thing I am learning most is how to live with very dirty, disrespectful, loud, mood swinging people. It is quite the challenge but I know it will be worth it in the long run. We had some very good lessons this week and just overall a solid week of work!