Another week in the mission!

Hello to everyone,

I will start this week by just telling everyone how the week has been.
Then I will try and get to answering some of the questions that have been asked the past couple of weeks. This is week number two of writing from my new email, isn´t that exciting? Oh, and nobody here felt the earthquake at all, we just heard about it from some of the members who watch the news. And yeah, my companion was a little bit worried, but President gave permission for all of the Chilean Elders to call home for ten minutes to make sure that everything is alright. His family is alright, luckily from what we have heard Santiago wasn´t hurt that badly. A few buildings here and there.

Let´s see, moving on, last pday, like I said we went and played soccer for a few hours, and that was pretty much the highlight of pday. Now, let´s move on to Tuesday, which was a very rainy day, but normal. We found some new investigators, and went to the doctor again. My companion is having new medical problems, something called irritable colon. No idea what it is, but he has it. Tuesday, a really normal day.

Now, Wednesday is when it starts to get exciting. We had our District meeting in the morning. Then we had a set of splits with the assistants to President, Elders Lezcano and Plazier. From what they said, it is a really, really rare occurrence that the assistants make their way down to Goya, being that it is a little bit far from everything else in the mission. We had the splits in the evening to Thursday morning. I went with Elder Plazier, who is also from Utah, and a really big BYU fan. We had fun sharing thoughts about BYU sports, mixed in with all of the other stuff that goes on in missionary work. I can honestly say it was one of the best days of missionary work that I have had in my mission. We found a group of really good new investigators and put two on baptismal dates, as well as having a family home evening night with the Branch President. It was really cool. And that pretty much sums up Wednesday.

Thursday was an interesting day. We spent the whole morning doing a service project in the house of one of the members. We were cutting the grass. It may sound like something simple, but it's not really. The mowers here are little electric ones, that you can´t use very much or the motor burns. Worse, the grass was really, really high. So we got to work cutting the grass with machetes. For almost three hours. Then the member got home and asked why we weren´t using her weedwacker... which we didn´t know existed. it was one of the worst moments of my mission. With the weedwacker we finished what we had started in like 20 minutes. Sad day. To make matters worse, I got really sunburned. Actually, my neck is still in the peeling process as we speak this moment. Friday and Saturday were also days that were pretty normal, just going out and teaching the investigators.

That brings us to Sunday, a pretty good day. We had some investigators in church, and... I got to talk again. Yay!! My theme was faith in Christ. Later in the afternoon we had a District priesthood meeting with President Marin, first counselor in the mission presidency. Then Sunday night I got to work on the branch finances again, and here we are today, Pday. We had interviews today with President del Castillo. They went really well, short, but well. He was pretty happy with our zone. We have more baptismal dates than Zone Goya has had in recent times. Anywho, right now I´m writing my email, and then we are going to go play ping pong for a little while before finishing out Pday with some other fun stuff. Hmm, I think that sums up my week nicely.

To answer some of the questions that mom asked me. Transfers are the 10th of this month. While I don´t know which of us will be transferred, one of us will. As for the baptisms, we should be having one this Saturday. The girl couldn´t get married last week, so we are working really hard to get this week for sure. Apart from that the investigators are all good. Just trying to get them to have a testimony of the Book of Mormon. The branch is doing pretty good, going back to the basics of everything. Our president seems to be doing a little bit better. It´s helping that his son is becoming an active member again. Oh, and yes, I am staying really healthy, just a little bit sunburned is all. And because of a lack of our allowance due to another problem in Salt Lake, I have been eating alot of rice, and noodles. I´m learning to cook a little bit better. hahaha!! :):) And finally sorry Ryan, I´m still working on finding wild animals. I did have the misfortune of watching a man kill two of his goats... if that counts. Haha. Well, I´m out of time, I have to run. Adios!!

Love you and miss you all,
Matthew