Week 60: New Old Friends in Malaga (Lots of Pictures this Week)

Good day to you all :) Well, this week was definitely not your normal week... if anything it was the complete opposite of a normal week. I traveled to and from Malaga from Thursday to Saturday. 😩 The bus ride was bad news. It was 8 hours. I wanted to die. But yeah so anyways here's ma week. 💯

Alrighty sooo Tuesday I don't really remember a single thing so let's jump on down to Wednesday because Wednesday was a gooooood day. :) Well, first of all it was a holiday that pretty much only Mormons celebrate. It was basically a day where you celebrate your country. That morning we had a good lesson with our investigator Erika and we talked about the Plan on Salvation with her. She's really good and interested but the only problem is is that she's moving NYC in a couple weeks to live with her husband. (Good excuse to call Beau since his Spanish seems to be improving more than his Creole 😜). So we can't really do anything with her other than teach her. I feel that will totally be baptized but it's just bad timing right now. After that we were planning on going to our pueblo Fuente Álamo to have a cita with our boy Juan but the bus decided not to freakin' come so that was stupid. So instead we went and passed by a ton of people. That night, all three wards had an activity for the holiday and everyone had to bring like a typical plate from your country and it was like a buffet. It it was cool. We didn't bring anything because of our missionary budget and nothing is American here other than me so that's cool. I wore my Utes shirt. Everyone loved it and I also wore my American flag socks 🇺🇸. We hung out there and I showed everyone my dance moves then after that we went and had a lesson with another investigator named Cristian! He's from Columbia. I may or may not have talked about him before. We had a bomb lesson with him. We read in 2 Nephi 31 about Christ's example and then after we invited him to be baptized and he accepted for the 12th of November. :) He was like, "Wow! I wasn't expecting that at all!" I said, "Hey dude! I'm just here to help you find salvation and whether you want that or not is up to you!" 😜 All in all it was a good day and a lot of different foods. 😋

Thursday morning we had a really, really good zone meeting. Our new ZL is Elder Padilla and he's literally known in the mission for being a stud. He baptizes everything that breathes. He's been here for two weeks and they baptized someone last Saturday. He's freaking insane but he gave a good workshop to the zone about setting personal goals every day and it was way good. As the meeting was coming to a close, one of the sisters and I had to leave becuase we had to catch our bus to Malaga. It was so weird because it was just me and her. I basically had to do splits with an hermana it was so weird. But we caught our bus, then around 10 @ night we got to Malaga and we stayed with the Elders there and it was fun. The next day we went down Fuengirola and did our residency. We have a senior couple and the man is obsessed with shaving so I asked him to teach me "the true order of the shave" and so he did that and my face was softer than Downy Soft and a baby's butt combined. 😛 Incredible! He put this after shave on and hoooollllyyyyyyy wowzers felt like I jumped off of Mount Everest and landed straight on the Eiffel Tower face first. It hurt so bad. But hey, I got a nice clean "real" shave haha. After that we just did our residency and that was that.

We came back to Murcia on Friday night and stayed the night there with some other Elders then Saturday morning I came back to Cartagena. :)

Saturday morning we had a ward activity where basically we all get together in different parts of the city and we contact people. I went to Fuente Alamo with our 1st Counselor and oh my gosh we racked up like 30 future investigators and set up three return citas for this week! This guy's a contacting machine. It was so dope! It's so much easier to talk to people when you're just normal and older than 22! And you actually speak the language that helps too haha. It was a great morning! After we all met back at the church and had some quality paella. :) That night we had a lesson with some less actives in our ward and talked about God's will and how he has a plan for everyone and sometimes we don't understand why things happen in our life but at the end of the day we just gotta trust that he knows what's best and go with the flow. :) Sunday was a good day we ate with Pepe and Trini as usual and as usual ate a ton of food. Then we went to church and did numbers after with the ZLs. :) Sooooo yeppers there's my week for you all. :)

I hope you all have yourselves a wonderful week and you'll be hearing from me in 7 more. 😘 I love you all and if you need anything hit me up because I'm always here to serve. :)

Much love.
Like a sprained ankle,
T Ham
😎😈🇺🇸💯

PS - This week Tanner got to meet a family that Garet was very close with on his mission. The first area Tanner served in was Malaga and he met a family and a family friend named Maria and Rosalia. Through the recent wonders of Facebook and other social media, Garet has been able to reconnect with this family that he loved so much and a family that took such good care of him on his mission. Well, Tanner was able to actually go to Malaga this week and we contacted Maria on Facebook and she was able to meet him while he was at the bus station on Malaga. It was a wonderful reunion and such a tender mercy for us to see him with people that loved Garet and took such good care of him. She posted 16 photos of him talked with them and posing with them. She said that he is so happy and that he looks just like Garet and acts just like him. She said that he had great stories of success on his mission. She sent him home with 2 bags of homemade food. She took her whole day and served him as well as us by spending a few minutes with him. We are very grateful for her friendship and love. Some of the photos look like duplicates, but the comments from Maria are different.

We are all so excited waiting for our nephew to arrive.

Rosalia asked how we would recognize him. I told him that I have seen him in pictures and I will recognize him and he looks just like his Dad.

Look at that smile, we're gonna gobble him up with kisses!
(of course we didn't though)

Our American nephew is so handsome and likeable.

Garet we need you over here!

Don't let these pictures fool ya, the truth is, in person we are all much skinnier, younger and handsome.

The time was too short. Thankfully he gets to come back next month.

As quickly as we got to know him, we had to say goodbye.
I believe the other missionary ahead of him served here but we were gave all our attention to the missionary who hadn't served here.