Week 34: 🤗🤗🤗

Well well well,

Guess who?! Yep, me. Again. :) This week coming up is more than likely my last full week here in Almería. Which I'm pretty sad about, but at the same time I'm ready for change! If I stay it will be for another 5 weeks, but I'll get a new comp. I'm expecting to leave, but I won't know until this Saturday! So I'll keep you guys posted for sure. :) Here's my week for ya. :)

Tuesday: Sad day. Remember our investigator Juan? The homie from the Church of Philly? We went to his house that night to see if he was home to have a lesson with him, but when we got there he told us that his pastor said he couldn't meet with us anymore. :( He didn’t really know why, but I'm pretty sure it was because in our last lesson with him we told Juan that his church, including his pastor, doesn't have the priesthood or authority to act in God’s name. He was pretty bummed about it. So we shared a scripture with him and invited him to know whether or not the things we have taught him are true. We told him we are always here if he needs us, and to let us know if we can help him with anything.

Wednesday: Not a whole lot happened on Wednesday. If it did, I can’t remember at all haha. I know that we had English classes and we talked about jinxing someone when you say the same word at the same time. And how
you yell “jinx" and count to 10 and if the person you jinx doesn't say stop they have to get you a soda or something. I guess if they talk before they get your soda, you can punch them. So they did it and one of our students started counting and then the one who wasn't counting just started punching him! Hahahahaha! I was laughing so hard. He's like “I just have to need to punch him?! When can I hit him??" It was funny haha!

Thursday: On Thursday we had an FHE with the Falcones family!! You guys probs don't remember them, but they're the less active family who we wanted to meet with forever and then finally we had a lesson with them about a month ago. This was our second time meeting with them and we had a really good lesson with them about the Plan of Salvation. We have this puzzle that we use to explain it. We undid the puzzle, and basically had them teach us about it! It was really good. We started youngest to oldest and whatever piece of the puzzle you put in, you had to explain it to everyone else. :) We only made it half way thru because that family looooves to talk. But it was way good talk about everything and so it was really successful!

Friday: That morning, we had district meeting, but only with 2/3 of our district. The other elders still haven't left their piso since like general conference (Saturday session). 😳 So we had district meeting, without our district leader. :) That night we had our weekly noche de hogar (FHE) with our ward in the church!!! We found out we get a LOT more people to come if we do them on Friday nights. Elder Berry and I taught a little lesson about the Atonement. How neat is the Atonement? Pretty freakin neat. We had about a 30 minute lesson/discussion with everyone about that and it went really well. After, we played the game "never have I ever" but instead of counting on
your fingers, we played it like musical chairs. So if you haven't done what they say, you have to stand up and run to a different seat. It was pretty funny. There's a kid named Pablo who is our ward mission leader’s son (picture attached below with him) but every time he went up, he would say something way bizarre like "never have I ever ridden a shark" or my personal favorite "never have I ever been fat and eaten fat food to get fatter!" It was a good time! :)

Saturday: Saturday morning, there was a kid in our ward who got baptized! His name is Derek, his parents are less active and have been for a while. Here in Almería, literally everyone is somehow related. Like not kidding at all. Some how, some way, everyone has a relation to everyone. Whether it's brother in laws, or 2nd cousins twice removed due to a divorce between mom and dad who had a dog who's kids had kids and then the owner of them had a friend who has the same cousin as the ward clerk. I still don't understand lol. But anyway, Derek's 2nd uncle is the bishop so the bishop baptized him :) it was cool cuz about a month or two ago I got to teach him a lesson and he's only 8 years old, but he's got a bright future. He comes to church every week with his grandma and he told me he goes to bed every night listening to the scriptures. :) He reminds me of Reece so I obviously love the kid. We went to some farm that they (everyone) owns and ate there after. That night we played volleyball with the ward and Enofre, Rafa and Enofre’s brother Francisco. After that, we were walking home, and we walked past this gu.. I'm not a big street contacter, because in Almería it doesn't work, but I felt impressed to talk to this guy. I talked to him and he was way interested! His name is Cecilio, we gave him a Book of Mormon, got his address and set something up for this week when we can pass by! So weird how that works cuz honestly we never contact people in the streets here and I don't know why I felt the need to talk to him.

Sunday: There is a lady who hasn’t been attending church very much lately that lives in the hermanas area, and she asked if we could come give her a blessing yesterday so we did. I’ve never met her before yesterday, but I've heard stories about her and from what I had heard, I was so scared. Elder Rex gave her a blessing once and she got mad cuz she said it was too short. Yikes! I was terrified to give her one, but luckily a member came with us so he gave it. She was pretty weird, and the whole time we were there it was kinda awkward. She thinks the whole ward here isn't friendly and that's why she doesn't come to church. Besides that the church is way far so that doesn't help, hopefully she starts coming again!

Hopefully all of you enjoyed your week, and have another fantastic week this upcoming week. I miss and love you all. My tip of the week for all of you this week is to avoid sticking air fresheners in fans. It doesn't do much :) Paz afuera!!!

Love,
T Ham :)