Week 69: MERRY CHRISTMAS 🎄:)

GEY HUYS!!

What the heck is up people?? Don't forget to watch the video below.

We had a bomb district meeting last Tuesday! Our district leader really knows how to put a solid district meeting together.. the Spirit is always so strong and the Elders always love it. (I'm the district leader... hehe). No, but really it was good. We talked a lot about obedience and how many more blessings are waiting for us when we are obedient, it was really good! :) We also met with an investigator named Juan, he's way weird. Great guy. Super nice just a little weird, ya feel? He invited us to come out to his cabin thing in the middle of nowhere and to like talk to the nuns that are out there and do some "missionary activity". I don't know man! I was just like, "Hmm...nuns and Mormons... weird combo." We talked about the Book of Mormon with him. He's read it 2 times all the way through. He just reads because he doesn't have too much else to do. He's a good guy. :)

We got bailed on a couple more times this week so that was greeeeatttt! 🙄 People in Fuen are just hard to be honest. I've only been here 5 weeks and we've been bailed on more than I have my whole mission! But on the bright side, we have a lot of potential to have a really. really good week next week! We called a ton of people and set up a bunch of citas with them so we're stokedddd. Also, coming up next week, we have the talent show and guess who's singing? 😏 Yeahhhh buddy! I am. One of the sisters in my zone calls me freaking out last week. "ELDER HAMMOND! You have to sing with me at the talent show!" I'm like I don't sing, but count me in. So needless to say she did the typical girl thing and goes all out. She freakin' choreographs a whole dance routine and we are singing White Christmas by Michael Bublé and Shania Twain. We're gonna kill it. There will be a video of it. Soooo just prepare yourselves! Hahaha. We just got done practicing it with Hermana Burrell and honestly it's so dope.. Video to come next week! :)

Friday night was doooope. We had the Christmas dinner with our whole ward!! There were soooo many people there! Holy crap! I hated it because it was like, "Hey! Oh! There's food! Let's go! But let's NEVER come to church on Sundays"!! Yeah! No. When I say I hated it, I lied because I actually loved it! :) It was awesome and helpful. One lady brought like 5 friends and one of them apparently is interested in learning more. We are going to start meeting with her! We also met a lot of people that we don't know and got to know a couple of them more! It was awesome. The Elders sang in the choir. We killed it, duh! I had a solo. Hahaha! Ahh man! Let's just say I think Blake Shelton would have turned his chair around for me! 😎

Our plans for Christmas, you ask? Well... some members that we don't see very often invited us over on Saturday night. Then President invited us over for Christmas brunch right after sacrament! THEN I GET TO TALK TO MY FAMILY!!! HAHAHAHAHA! YESSSSSSS! UGH! 😍😍😍 I'm stoked!

I hope ALL OF YOU have a GREAT CHRISTMAS!!! My last one in Spain. I was thinking about that during the Christmas dinner while watching all the kids re-enact the nativity scene and it was such a cool feeling knowing I was blessed by the Lord to be able to serve in Spain for two years of my life and get to know the people I've met. It's been so awesome and I'm gonna live it up these next 6 months! Time is running out! So many more people to teach about the Gospel! 😩 HAVE A GREAT WEEK AND MERRY CHRISTMAS!! 🎄🎁 ❄️☃️😊

Much love.
White Christmas Dreamin',
Elder Tanner B. Hammond
AKA..Barbara and Tammy (see video below)

My Christmas sweater with bells on it!

Week 68: #ILUMINAelMUNDO

Heyyyyy guyyyyys!

Ladies and gentlemen guess who? That's right! It's me! Mr E. Tanner Hammond again. I'm gonna give you a warning before you read this email.. our week suckeddd. We had SUCH a good week planned out! Then Sunday rolled around, got bailed on by 2 different people. Monday, 2 more. Tuesday, 3 more. Wednesday, another one. Thursday, nothing set. Friday, 1 more. Saturday was decent then Sunday, yesterday we had a good one. That's my week so yeah see ya guys later have a good week!

Joking? Chill guys. Soooo yeah! Bad week but let's look at the bright side and I'll tell you about a couple of highlights! :)

Okay! So to start off the week on Tuesday, I SAW MY BOY ELDER LAYTON FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A YEAR!!! Oh my gosh! It was so awesome! He was here in Fuen because he had consejo and I walked into the mission office and I see his companion and then out of nowhere Layton comes flying thru the door pushing anything that gets in his way out of the way and just straight up jumps on me!!  It was the best hug I've had since I saw my other boy Elder Beckstrom last December.

The other biggest highlight happened on Saturday morning. We had a cita with two investigators that we had, Gonzalo and Kelsey. I heard her name and I thought, "OK. Definitely not Spanish!" So we get there and go in start talking to Gonzalo and then I saw her and immediately knew she was American. She started talking in Spanish just like a native. It threw me off big time. I asked where they were from and she said Michigan. Then after that we just had an amazing lesson with them. It could be considered the best lesson I've been part of in the past year and a half. Side note to missionaries who teach in English - I envy you. We didn't really talk about anything in particular, we just answered all of the questions and everything that they had which was literally sooooo many questions. Good heck! They asked literally everything. It was incredible! The first half of the lesson was in Spanish, but then about an hour into it, they realized my companion was totally lost and also the questions were becoming insane so we switched to English. 😂 It was awesome. They are very active in their own church so they have a lot of questions and are trying to understand how everything compares, BUT, never say never, right?

Other highlights?  Hmmmm?  Well, my companion didn't get any oats or anything stuck in the back of his throat this week so that's good! :) We had Zone Conference on Friday over in Málaga that was really good. We talked about something that our mission is doing called "The Big List". It's basically a list full of names that's really big. We go around to members and everyone and just ask them for names of their friends but that's it. We don't contact that list but just ask the members that when they see the person with that name they kinda remember about it and we challenge them to try to bring up the gospel and how important it is to them. I'm excited to see how it works! :) After the meeting we went to some Bolivian restaurant and ate some good Bolivian food with the whole zone. It was soooo good.

On Wednesday we had a way cool thing happen. We were tired because we literally walked all day and we were on our way to go home and our phone rang. I answered it and it was one of our investigators Damaris. She's not really an investigator due to the fact she has been and will be investigating the church until she dies. She comes to church every week but she just loves her cigarettes and beer and just doesn't want to change that part of her life. She called and she say, "Heyyyy! I have a niece that wants to be baptized! Haha um like oh well I can help with that! :) We talked for a little bit and she said that her niece was coming to stay with her for a while and she wanted to be closer with God and she wanted to be baptized. So we set up a cita with her for this coming week and hopefully all goes as planned and we can talk with her! I'm not holding my breath though because I guess Damaris has been known to be a little flojo. I'm not sure what that work is in English hahaha. It means like loose or something like that. Sorry, I speak Spanish better than English at this point haha.

CRAZY THING! OH MY GOSH. So Elder Pearce and I were walkin' along walkin' along you know mindin' our own business and from a distance we see a huge group of people and cop cars looking down one of the streets so I'm like oh geez that's not good. We walk up to see what was going on and we were looking and some guy jumped from the 3rd story and fell in the middle of the street and died. 😬😳 It was suuuuper sad. I won't give too much detail. We don't know anything about it or anything, but if I hear anything I'll keep y'all posted. Sad.

That's pretty much my week! Sad because we weren't able to meet with Leonor because she was out of town, but she's still progressing really well and going strong for the 14th. :) We have our Christmas Dinner this Friday night and I'm sooo stoked for that! I'M SO EXCITED FOR THIS CHRISTMAS YOU GUYS. 13 dayyyyys :) Also last Saturday we played soccer with all the chavales from our ward and it was way fun. My team took the title for week one 💯! We are going to start playing every other Saturday so I'm excited for that. AND THERE'S THAM'S WEEK!

I love you all and hope you have a fandabidosie week and you'll be hearing from me in T-7 short quick ones. :)

Much love.
Running out of sign offs,
E. T Ham 🔱

Elder Pearce and me today. He's a good comp!

Elder Layton!  Our reunion!

Coincidence?  Look closely!

Week 67: Oral Surgeon in Training

What's Gucci Players? :)

Another week has come and gone.. can't believe we're in  December! I hope you all are enjoying all the snow back home. Thinking about snowboarding makes me extremely trunky so I do my best to not think about it. 🤔 But hey! I hope you all that go enjoy it! I guess It's a good idea to tell you people about my week! It was a good one that's for sure.

So Leonor is still progressing! We had a lesson like we always do on Friday, and we talked about the Law of Chastity. Luckily not as awkward as normal. She accepted everything and was very open with us. We always bring a member (which is so helpful for me because my companion doesn't speak Spanish very well yet so we usually teach the entire lesson), who is our ward mission leader named Becarlo. We were talking about how it's a requirement to live the Law of Chastity in order to be baptized. She said she really wants to be baptized, but she was scared to talk to her boyfriend about it because he's not religious at all. Becarlo told her that she needs to put her trust in the Lord that He will help her and that since she has the desire to follow Jesus Christ, He will bless her. Then I told her that she also needs to trust her boyfriend and that if he truly loves her, he will support her! It's hard because in Spain nobody gets married. They just live together and say they're a couple but not married so it's always hard in situations like this. But I know the Lord does what is necessary for his children so that they are happy and can follow him. :) We changed Leonor's baptismal date to the 14th of January as well. It was super cute when we were ending the lesson with a prayer, Becarlo was saying the prayer and he was blessing that Leonor would be blessed for her efforts and all this stuff, and her little 9 year old daughter Sara who was baptized about a year ago, goes "and that she will be baptized on January 14th!" Hahaha! It was so funny and cute. :)

The other Elders gave us a reference of a lady who is a begger.  That is was they are called here. Her name is Aurora, and she's from Romania. On Friday morning we had a lesson with her and she doesn't speak very much Spanish, it's all broken and hard to understand. She told us how she wanted us to talk to God and tell him to help her and how she wanted money for her daughter who is in Germany to come to Spain with her family. Her life is a mess and I'm honestly unsure what else she said because it was in Romanian. I gave her a Book of Mormon in Romanian and she's told me she can't read. I told her that maybe her husband could read it to you because you'll be able to find help in this book! So shed asked us if we have a church. I told her yes and so she said she was going to come to church.  We were a little skeptical because she's a begger.  However she has a house and family and all that stuff and she doesn't speak Spanish but we figured it'd be good for her to come. :)

Now Sunday rolls around.. we met with Aurora and walked 30 mins in the pouring rain to the church with her. We get there and she enters and it's really quiet because none of the other members were there yet, so it was cool to see her recognize the Spirit that was there. Then she sits down and she moves to the ground and gets on her knees and says like a 10 minute prayer just in the middle of the foyer.. not gonna lie, preeettty weird. But hey, a prayer is a prayer 🙏🏻😊. She sat with a member who is from Brazil or Portugal, but she doesn't speak any Spanish lol so it was funny because these two people were sitting next to each other in Spain, neither of them speak Spanish, one speaks Portuguese and the other speaks Romanian hahaha! Also, Leonor came and stayed for all three hours! Usually she leaves after sacrament meeting but she stayed again so that was good. The ward loves her and all the relief society is so nice to her so that's helpful. After church, some of the other sisters in the ward were talking to Aurora and they were telling her if she needed help she should talk to the Bishop.  So she asked to talk to the Bishop. I'm not exactly sure what they talked about but  Aurora was crying.  I asked her why she was crying and she said, "I don't know what anybody is saying!"  I told her we would talk to the Bishop and see if we can figure something out.  She thanked us and then we walked her to the bus stop.  We will have to figure out how we can help her.  

Two funny stories to end the email... my companion isn't a super coordinated lad, so we've been working on that together. There are orange trees all over the place here and so we always pick one or two and I throw it behind me in the air and he tries to catch it. Saturday we were on our way to a cita and I grabbed one and threw it to him, he caught it, then he always throws it back over my head and I catch it then throw it back. On the throw back to him, I threw it up and he went to catch it but completely whiffed and it hit him right in the eye and orange juice splattered all over his face and in his eye. Hahaha! Oh my gosh! I laughed so hard because of how it looked, and then I remembered to see if he was ok.  Man! I love him so much! He's hilarious! 😂😂 

My second story is that Saturday, my companion got something stuck like in that back of his throat, we aren't sure what it was.  We think it's like an oat but really we don't know for sure.  He kept trying to get it out ALL day and he was making gross noises and I was about to flip out. So we get back home after working and I'm like, "OK!  I can't take this anymore. Open your mouth!" I spent the next hour and a half trying to fish out an oat that was like stuck up in his tonsils using a dried noodle(s) (had to use multiple. We almost
went through a full bag! LOL) and a flashlight so I could see. It was gross but I couldn't stand him making that awful sound any longer. Best part of the story is that I only got half of it! But... it was enough to get him to stop making that noise! :)

Well! There ya have it! Another week of for Elder T Ham for y'all. I think this week is like week 67 or something. THAT'S SO INSANE!   Gotta live it up out here that's for sure. I miss you all, you're all amazing and I wish you a fantastic week!!

Much Love.
Wildest Dreams,
Elder T. Brady Hammond 🍑💸

The sites of Fuengirola

No caption needed

Look who I found!!!! Long lost Elder Layton!