Saturday, August 18, 2012

A Glimpse of the Mission Field

Hello Family!  

I hope you all are doing great, because I know that I am doing really good!  It has been a pretty eventful week so far!  The biggest thing was that on monday, we actually went out and went Proselyting!  For Reals!  Me and Elder Welker were put with another Latino missionary, Elder Rodriguez, and we basically got on a bus, went somewhere in the middle of Guatemala City, were handed a book of mormon each and some pamphlets, and then were basically told ¨Have fun!¨ It was a little nerve wracking at first, because everything we
had done so far was pretend and just working on everything, and if we messed up, it didn´t really matter, but this was for real!  Our very first contact was when we were on the bus, and me and Elder Welker started to talk to a guy standing next to us.  It was a little hard to understand him, because im so used to teachers who speak slowly and clearly, but this guy didn´t!  I could still get the gist of what he was saying, but it was hard to pick it all up!  But we did end up giving him a pamphlet and his address, so that we could give it to the MTC to contact him!  But that is pretty much what we did for the whole time!  We met with all kinds of people, people that wanted to hear what we had to say, some that closed the door right in our faces, a family with a bunch of little kids wanting to marvel at us gringos, a teenage boy about Ryan's age who really wanted to know more about our message, and a lot more!  There was even one lady who when she saw us, she said she didn´t want anything to do with us, because we didn´t believe in the bible and we worshipped Joseph Smith!  It is crazy to hear what some people know about the church, and how little they actually do know!  But we ended up doing pretty well to my standards, we gave away all three of our books of mormon, got about 15 addresses to contact them later, and really just got to meet a lot of the real Guatemalan folk!  It was such a neat experience, although not gonna lie, it was a little frustrating because I couldn´t understand most of what they were saying, but I just really need to work on it!  So that was really my first time out in the mission field for real!  It was so much fun!  


on Tuesday we had our first real live devotional with the Area President over Central America, President Martino.  We usually just watch other talks given in the Provo MTC, but this time we got to hear it live!  And it was weird, because usually, other people have to wear headphones to have the talk translated, but not this time!  Us Nortes had to wear the headphones, because it was mainly in Spanish.  But the really cool thing was, I didn´t wear the headphones for about 3/4 of the time, because I could understand him for the most part!  It was so cool to actually know what he was saying in Spanish!  He talked a lot about hard work and obedience, and one thing that he said that I took out of it is that we need to LEARN TO LOVE WORK.  I know that is something Dad would say, so I have kind of been used to it already thank goodness!  But he was a really good speaker!  

We went to the temple again on Thursday at 630 in the morning, so I was a little tired, but still was so cool to go to the Temple again in Guatemala!  I don´t think i could ever get old of the temple!  After we went to the temple, the distribution center is right next to it, so a bunch of us went and looked around.  One quick thing, they say for whoever is going to Quetzaltenenago, like me, will more than likely have to learn Quiche, which is a dilect there.  When i was in the distribution center, I thought i might as well ask if they had a Book of Mormon in Quiche.  Sadly they didn´t, but they had one in Quetchi, which is what my compainon will be speaking, so he bought it! We Were looking at it, and he said it best when he said it looked like a lawn mower ran over the last half of the dictionary and they just put it together in some random order!  It is really so cool to look at though!  

So I´ve been told by you guys that I should include some more ordinary stuff so here we go!  We get back to our residence at 9:30 getting ready for bed 1030, but a group of us hurry and get ready in about 5 minutes and we tell stories.  The best ones are the crazy girlfriend stories, and it seems like most everyone has at least one story to tell about one.  The craziest part about one is one Elder, who lives in colorado, was telling about his extremely crazy one, and all of a sudded, another elder who lives in florida started to realize that he home taught her at BYU!  How crazy is that?! Someone from Florida knows someones crazy ex girlfriend from colorado! It really is a small world!  

Another thing is the food here is great! At Provo, the food wasn´t really the best, becuase they had to mass produce it for about 3500 hungry people, but here, we actually have a real chef who cooks every meal for us about 100 poeple, so it is a lot better here!  My district is awesome!  I don´t have that much time, so I wont get into much more detail, but i will for sure next week!  Im sorry i dont have that much time to talk about you guys, but i love hearing about your lives and what you guys are doing!  Keep it up, I love you guys!   

Elder Stuart

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