Hermana Walker: Week 12: OneTransfer Down

Hola hola hola!

Another week has come and gone! On Sunday we got transfer calls. Normally after the first transfer (6 weeks) of training, you stay with your trainer for another six weeks to finish your training. This would mean that in a normal situation I would be staying with Hermana Johnson for another six weeks. But alas, on Saturday night we got a very suspicious phone call from one of our zone leaders, so by the time Sunday morning came around we were pretty sure what was going to happen. A lot of companionships were changed around this transfer, and so while I'm staying in torremolinos, hermana Johnson is going.... To stay in torremolinos too!!

Yes, that is how our zone leaders told us we were both staying when they called us on Sunday morning. Kinda freaked us out at first, but no worries. We're both staying!!!

This is really good for two reasons:

1) hermana Johnson is the BEST

2) I still haven't figured out how to open the door to get into the piso

Here we are posing by our apartment pool

So this week, we really didn't have a lot of citas (appointments). Actually we really DID, but everyone decided to fail us. But that's okay!!! We had a lot of chances to contact and follow up on some future investigators (people whose name and number we have, but haven't actually met with yet). But by having a lot of time to contact, I really mean we had a LOT of time to contact. One night we decided to contact every person we passed as we did a big loop around centro. Unfortunately, this meant that I accidentally contacted the same person twice, about ten minutes apart. I didn't even notice that she was the same person until hermana Johnson told me afterwards! She politely declined both times haha. I'm going to work on recognizing faces better...

One cita we DID have was with Victor. We actually met with him twice! We've already taught him the first three lessons and are going through the commandments now, but the problem is that he still hasn't come to church! He tells us he'll try every weekend and loves reading the scriptures with us and (sometimes) on his own, but he never actually comes to church. But we're still working with him and know that there's a special spirit that comes from being in church so we're going to get him to come!!! And he's also really excited for elder Holland to come.

On Tuesday, we met with this man, vlad, from Romania. He's learning English (his English is really good) and we're meeting with him to help him practice his English. It's a service opportunity and we also take a while to share a spiritual thought or a lesson with him before talking about other things. Two things about these meetings :

1) teaching in English is WEIRD

2) Vlad is CRAZY! He's a pescatarian (I think that's what it's called? Like vegetarian, but eats fish) and he goes scuba diving about every other week, in the ocean, to catch his own sea food. But not just like little fish either. Like funny eel things and stingrays!!! He's also really self - motivated, which is awesome. He gave us a talk about being motivated and setting goals and gaining knowledge. He made one really good point :don't pretend to know things you don't, or just ignore the things you don't understand. You need to ask questions when you don't understand, or you'll never learn anything! This is especially applicable to Hermana Johnson and I with the language, but also applicable to just life in general. Ask questions!!!

We did meet with one man who's kind of a Europe traveler sort of guy. He had all these piercings and tattoos and was a reference from the elders. But he was one of the nicest, most polite and accepting people we've taught. He's only in torremolinos for a few days and now he's on his way, but we taught him the first lesson and gave him a book of Mormon and a card with the church website on it. He said he would read the book of Mormon and pray about it and hopefully he'll find the missionaries again sometime in the future! Moral of the story : don't judge a book by its cover!

GOOD NEWS! although we really didn't have a lot of citas this week, we did have two people come to church!! Our investigator, lorenzo, and also Giovanna, the less active member we've been teaching, both came! Giovanna even brought her scriptures in a little bag! This is the first time since I've been here that anyone who we've been teaching has come to our ward, so it was super exciting! And it was fast Sunday (the first Sunday of the month, when members of the congregation get to come to the front if they want to share their testimony) and it was a REALLY GOOD fast Sunday! The stake president and his wife and the bishops wife and hermana Johnson all bore their testimonies. But the best part of the meeting was at the very end. There was some visiting authority, we're still not sure who (we think he was an area seventy?) who bore his testimony. Normally our ward is pretty loud. Just a lot of babies and kids and an echoey room. But I kid you not, when this man got up the room went SILENT. It was incredible and the spirit was so strong!

Random note: please stop over feeding the missionaries! There's no such thing as too many eating appointments (in my opinion haha, but that's coming from someone who has, at most, two a week), but there is DEFINITELY such a thing as feeling bad and feeling like you have to eat so much at every cita. The missionaries probably aren't starving. Don't make them eat everything :)

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but we have an enemy. He's not OUR enemy, we're sure he's a nice guy. We see him talking to his friends. But he seems to think we're his enemies. He's the man who cleans ramon and norma's building, which is also the building where a few less active members live. So we're there every so often visiting these people. Around my third day in the area, we ran into him in the lobby and he was getting really close and yelling at us and pulled a pass along card out of his pocket that was ripped in half and threw it on the floor and was yelling at us to get out of his building (why on earth he had a card conveniently in his pocket, I have no idea). Now every time that he's outside the building and we walk by, he's telling all the people around him about the testigos de jehováh (jehováh witnesses) that keep trying to get into his building and warning them to watch out for us. First, we're not testigos. Second, we're just visiting people we know! We're not sure why he hates us - - he doesn't have to listen to our message, but he doesn't have to hate us! - - but it's kind of an exciting adventure every time we're in that area or trying to get into the building to visit people haha.

Today we met up with elder Ramírez and elder Stratford and also pascal from our ward and took a tour of a bull ring and walked around Málaga centro. It was really fun! Tonight we're going to meet with vlad again. He doesn't think he's ready for /wants God in his life, but we can tell he totally does! Poco a poco :)