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 🔱