Monday, February 1, 2016

1-18-16 Las Lomitas


So here I am in Las Lomitas, the new area.  Las Lomitas translated means the little ridges, it's actually true there are little hills here the most I've seen in my mission.  They are about 1/2 the size of the hill we live on there in Payson but still they are hills.  Las Lomitas is a cool place.  It's about 5 hours away from anything and 7 hours away from the mission home and 5 hours away from my last area.  It's a farm town but it's pretty cool and bigger than I thought and it has a supermarket.  My companion is Elder Cornell, he's pretty cool, a nice guy.  He's a new missionary, has 2 transfers and he's super excited for the work.  This week we worked really hard.  Being in a new area helped me to be really excited again.  Basically we got here without any one having a set baptismal date but there are a few people we're teaching.  There's a lady that's been to church about 15 times but she's not married.  We went to the place where people get married here and we asked them what they need, so we've started on that. 

We have another investigator named R.    What happened yesterday in church was that there about 4 active families here.  The family M, they are sealed members that moved here from Formosa 5 years ago and they also lived in Texas.  He worked in Texas for 10 years.  I asked him if he knew Sherman Texas where we used to live and he said yes he worked there.  He is the group leader.   We have the meetings at his house.  It's a little room, probably about the size of my old bedroom.  There's no AC and yesterday we had 21 people at church.  There's one family that has 5 kids and there's another family that is super faithful.  The family C.  The husband is a convert of about a year ago and they are planning on going to the temple the end of February to be sealed as a family.  They are super faithful.  They had us over for lunch yesterday.  They fed us noki's, it's like an Italian food.  It's potatoes with this noodle thing with sauce over it.  Then there's the family S.  The family S there is a mom and 2 kids.  1 of her kids is baptized but she has another child that is 11 and he's not baptized.  We invited him to be baptized and he said yes.    He'll be baptized Feb 6.  We just need to teach him everything,he' been to church enough to be baptized.  He's the only person that we have with a baptismal date right now. 

I'll tell you the story of Las Lomitas, the church was here with an active branch about 10 years ago in 2005-2006 it was very small.  There was a family M and they were super faithful and had a church in their back yard.  In 2006 their child got struck by lightning and both of the parents died and the other faithful son in the church moved away.    So there wasn't any leaders here for the church and it was still super young.  Plus I think some of the missionaries weren't being obedient.  We're in the middle of nowhere and so nobody checks on the missionaries for a long time.  Then they took the missionaries out of the area and the church died.  There's probably about 50 members in total on the records but about 25 still are living.  We've been going through the members and working with them.  We had a less active sister come to church with 2 of her daughters and one of them is 8 and a son that is 14 but he's slept in.  We're working with the kids.  We've been looking for some of the member families that haven't been coming.  We actually found a lot of families this week but we need them to start progressing.  So in Las Lomitas the church started up a year ago.  About 8 months ago the missionaries started working here full time so that's cool. 

Funny story, there is a man named S.  Some of the missionaries before us were walking around in the area and S came up to them and introduced himself and said I have the Melchezedic priesthood out of the middle of nowhere.  Turns out he was baptized along time ago.  So we went to visit him.  His wife isn't a member.  In Resistencia I went to this village of mud houses that was suuuuuuper far away, an hour and a half.  Turns out the family that I visited was his sister.  He hasn't talked to his sister for 5 years.  We called the Elders in Resistencia and they gave us her number and we're going to get the number to S.

It's hot here still, really hot here,  there's a lot of work to do.  We've been looking for a church building.  We found one building but it's not done yet and we have to get it approved.  We sent some pictures to President Franco and we'll call him about it.  It would be nice to have a church building because it's kind of like Family Home Evening in a members house.  It's not quit the same, it's a good experience.  This week we'll continue to work and find people.  We have a special meeting Wednesday.  All the missionaries in the whole world attend the meeting.  It's the first time in the history of missionaries that they've done this meeting.  Maybe they'll extend my mission for another year, ya!  Maybe a 3 year mission  or maybe not.

Love you guys, have a great one and I'll talk to you later.


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