September 7

Another week down and i am just learning this new area and trying to do my best to set a good example for my companion. Really right now we do not have a lot of progressing investigators which is hard, but as always we will keep looking. The one that seemed to have a chance to progress named Jose Saavedra kind of annoyed me a lot this week. Why? Well during this week we set up an appointment to visit him and teach him more with his family. He is the only member in his family that is not a member. As usual he was late, but this is normal for the peruvians always be ontime and expect them to be late so that is not what annoyed me. We came in and started talking with him and about his life. He told us he had a cold but all would be fine. Sadly, he did not read the chapter in the book of mormon we left him, so we started to read the chapter with him. The thing is about after 5 verses and some explications he started getting sleepy. Then the lesson kept going on and the member with us shared his baptismal experience and then my companion felt that he needed to share a different scripture that was way off topic. He is new so I just wanted to see where he took the lesson because he is entitled to inspiration too. It was a really nice scripture about putting the lord first and putting things like work, school, and other aspects of life. It was a great scripture but my companion likes to talk a lot, a little too much during the lessons, so Jose Saavedra fell asleep. My companion is not boring in his talk and lessons it was really interesting what he said, but Jose did not pay attention to any of it...  It was just plain sad. I talked to my companion about focusing more on the investigator and asking questions after. The thing is that we did ask questions... I felt like I was talking to a wall... Maybe it just is not the time for Jose  or he was super tired and sick. I am just hoping other lessons like this dont happen.

Besides this we are doing well. Our district leader challenged us to do 120 contacts for the week.And to give a a little incentive he said if we did not hit 120 the companionships would have to do 200 push ups during the next district meeting. It is not a very good reward to do 200 in a white shirt and tie. So this week we made sure every day we did at least 20 contacts. Which is kind of hard in a small area like the Cria. We ended up talking to some of the same people more than once. the only thing is they got angry at us and told us to go away. The typical life as a missionary. At the end of the week we had 122 contacts. Just enough. It was nice to be able to say we accomplished the goal, now the hard part is maintaining 120 every week.

Life is okay here. I feel like this town is like a mini Aurora Utah. The only thing is here they hard "stores" in the homes and there are of course bars... But they are a lot of animals here. Many people have pigs. I know now why we can not eat pig. They feed them whatever they can find. I saw one guy feeding his pigs dead cats. The other thing that is common is that almost every house has cuys or guiena pigs. They raise a whole bunch of them just inside of their houses. All they eat is corn and other leaves. So basically they have two types of animals pigs and guinea pigs. The other thing is everyone knows each other.. And that is how their addresses our. Like in a contact, so do you live here close ? Ya for the house of Jose Hernadez. And what street. Ahh, there aren't any streets or house numbers... And the majority of the time we don´t know the person... it is a little difficult.

I am doing well. Solamente hay que trabajar.

Elder Mecham