November 22, 2010 Mapping El Talar

So Jordan is finally going to make a big trip [home], all by himself. My little brother is growing up, sniff. Anyway, I´ll be sure to pray for him tonight and tomorrow. I can´t even imagine a vacation right now... ever since I changed areas I have increasingly grown tired and worn down. But that´s probably just due to the extreme change. I kind of feel like I did when I first arrived here! El Talar is very near to Grand Bourg (we´d pass through whenever we´d go to the offices in San Fernando) and my area is a little bit smaller than in Grand Bourg. I met the members on Sunday and am struggling to remember names but hopefully that will come in time. I also did not have the chance to go to the baptism [in Grand Bourg] neither have I heard if they were baptized or if there was a delay, but with Elder Torres I am confident that he got the job done.

Spiritual experiences for the week, it has been interesting because we don´t have many investigators right now, only about 3 or 4, so we have been doing a lot of contacts. I still have no idea how to do them but I can go up and start talking, so I´m doing something. In the beginning of the week I encountered a question that I never encountered in Grand Bourg, and that´s when they say "I´ve already been baptized." Right now I´m studying how to answer that.

This weekend we started having success though. We contacted one person outside of an electronics shop and he immediately invited us in. So we went in and in between customers we explained a little bit about the Book of Mormon and why we are on a mission. He said he loves to read and will read the Book of Mormon. So that was a relief to finally find someone willing to at least read it! We also had another contact who said we could talk as long as his wife didn´t mind. He said she was religious and so we were unsure if we would be able to talk but she said we could talk with her husband. We invited her to listen also and she accepted and we taught prophets and the restoration to them. She seemed to like what we were teaching and accepted to be baptized if she received an answer to her prayer. Her son and his girlfriend (I think?) started listening at the end and they seemed interested as well. We also started having more success with contacts accepting to listen to us so now we have more names to pass by. Definitely a test of perserverance.

We are also working on constructing a big map of our area to put on the wall. We are then going to take all the old investigator records and order them with numbers and then put píns in the map with their corresponding numbers written on them. Hopefully this will help us plan more efficiently and to find more new investigators during our time here. I´ve already bought a tourist guide and now we just need to make photocopies and then glue them together and pin it up. Well the pictures have almost all finished so I´ll wrap it up and write more next week.