Good sized explosions on the road...

So Levi tells me that the Utes won. What a terrible start to the year… And, Lauren´s driving? Ha, that´s funny. How things have changed...

New Year´s eve was interesting. We had dinner at a member´s house and then headed back to the house. It gets kinda crazy around here because all the kids around here make these kind of homemade bombs out of soda bottles and who knows what else and throw them at each other and at passers by. Every two minutes or so, during Dec. 31st, we would hear and see many good sized explosions on the road. All the kids think it´s hilarious when the adults yell at them and women chase the kids away from their houses trying to smack them with a broom.

It rained a lot on the 31st here, so there weren´t too many opportunities to see any cool fireworks. New Year´s day was a bit difficult to find people as everyone who wasn´t drunk asleep in their houses were asleep and drunk on the road, which are two hard teaching situations.

We did manage to find a nice family to teach. Their Catholic, and the dad said that he´d like to visit our church but always has a meeting Sunday morning. Oh, which reminds me, I had a good experience with developing patience. The Catholic family that we´re teaching has a family friend, a 15-year old guy by the name of M. who is visiting from another city and is staying just 4 houses down from them. He seemed really interested in the message and said that he´d come to church with us on Sunday. When I called him Saturday night to remind him about church, he said that unfortunately he had to go back to his city and had left Campo Grande, but that he would be back on Wednesday. We were a bit disappointed, but said we´d see him on Wednesday then. About a half-hour later we went to visit the family´s house to remind everybody else, and when we got there the guy was sitting there hanging out with them! (He must think that this American is pretty dumb, eh?) The look on his face when we showed up there was great, but me and Elder R. exercised patience and resisted the urge to burn the guy and instead we didn´t address it and just invited everybody to church. And, you know what? He ended up going to church and had a good experience. Controlling emotions works! (As a funny side note, the lesson in the new members class was about the Final Judgement, and how liars get a place in the Telestial Kingdom. We´ll work with him to be more honest next time)

Welp, I think that´s all from this side of the equator. Luckily this week has cooled down and I actually had to use my blanket for the first time since I got in this city. There´s hope yet…heh.

-Me