This will be my last letter in the CCM, which is crazy to think about. Time has flown and I hope I'm somewhat ready for the field.
So last Saturday we went street contacting again, this time with my normal companion, Elder Tanner. The area was a lot harder this time around compared to last time, and by that I mean no one would listen to us. We got dropped off in a pretty busy part of the city. There were tons of little clothing shops, lined up one after the other on several blocks in our area. It made it hard because it was pretty loud and busy and no one had time to listen to us. Eventually we decided to go to the other side of our area, which was more residential and less busy. We had a few good conversations with people but still struggled a lot. The people in the city are really good at ignoring. Like when you're passing someone on the street and say hola or Como estas they'll either just completely ignore you or they'll wait till they're pretty much past you to respond so then you can't stop them. So anyway we hadn't had much success at all by the time Ciesta hit, which isn't good because it gets really hard to find people during ciesta. It's crazy how the entire place just shuts down right in the middle of the day. When we went back to the crazy busy shopping area again it was like a ghost town. All the shops were closed and they all lower down these garage door-looking things and lock them up so the entire place now looked like abandoned warehouses. The streets are pretty much empty so it was hard to find anyone. Despite this our best experiences happened during ciesta.
We came across this one teenage kid sitting on the side of the street, I think he was waiting for a bus. He had a crazy nose piercing and looked like the kind of kid you didn't want to talk to so we thought he would just ignore us. But we got talking and turned out he was a really nice kid and was willing to listen to us, even with our bad spanish. We found out he had a friend that was Mormon so he knew a little bit about us. We talked about a bunch of things, can't remember a lot of it. We explained about the book of mormon and gave him one and challenged him to read 3 Nefi 11. He then told us his friend had already given him a BoM so he gave it back, but he said he would read it when he got home. We also gave him one of our pamphlets (That's probably not even close to how you spell it, I struggle to spell stuff in english now) about the Restoration and wrote down the address to the nearest church.
Quite a while later, we were starting to feel pretty worn out. Everyone we had tried to talk to in about the past 45 minutes had either ignored us or flat out refused to talk. We just kept walking though, and I was kind of zoned out trying to think of a way to get someone to talk to us. I almost didn't even notice this guy that walked right buy us. Luckily he stopped us and asked us something. I wasn't quite sure what he said, but we were glad to have someone to talk to. This was the first time someone had started a conversation with us. This guy turned out to be really awesome, like a golden investigator. He was from Peru and had just recently moved to Buenos Aires. He had an uncle that was Mormon, and he had learned a lot about our church from him. He was very patient with us luckily because there was a few times that we had no idea what he was saying. He had stopped us because he had a question but it took us quite a while to figure out what he was asking. We were finally able to figure out he really wanted to go to our church but didn't know where any of them were in Buenos Aires. Luckily we had the address of the nearest church with us so we wrote it down for him and he was very thankful. We also found out that he had read some of the book of mormon with his uncle and he said he loved reading it, but he didn't have a BoM now that he was living here. So we gave him our BoM we had with us and he was even more thankful. One of our district goals that our teacher set for us was to invite people to be baptized, so I asked him if he would commit to being baptized. He said he would like to, once he goes to church and reads more from the book of mormon. We wrote down his contact info too for missionaries that actually serve in that area.
When we were waiting for the bus, we went into a store and bought a Coke. It was the most refreshing Coke I've ever had in my life, although that's not really saying much because I've never really liked it. I've heard that we might be drinking it a lot in the field since our drinking water isn't that clean.
So the first floor bathroom has finally been finished remodeling. Before, every Elder was using the bathroom on the second floor (my floor) and it was crazy crowded. Sometimes there was a line of about 15 people for the showers. Last week Presidente came in and saw how bad it was and decided to change things up. So we had to all wake up earlier at 6:15, and people in shedule A would shower then, and people in schedule B(me) would shower at 6:45. It kinda worked, but it was still crowded. Well anyway, the other bathroom opened up and we thought that would solve all the problems. Except for now, anytime someone is showering downstairs, there is no water pressure upstairs. If you put it to ice cold, then there's enough pressure for water to actually come out, but if you try to turn it a little bit warm, the pressure completely dies and only drips come out. Needless to say, us on the second floor have been taking some cold showers.
It's crazy to think I'll be leaving this place on Tuesday. I still feel like I don't know much spanish, but hopefully I can figure it out on the way. I don't know when I'll get to write next, it might be a week and a half because I think P days are on Monday in the field. I'm sure I'll have a lot to say by then. I hope Amanda feels better and you have a great week.
-Elder Shelton
No comments:
Post a Comment