The ward is good

Clan Dudlan

How are you all?  How has the first few weeks of school been for you?  Hopefully I’ll get some mail tomorrow to know how you are all doing.  Sorry, I have no idea were the ceremonial get up garb is.  That is not Elder Johnson’s first name.  Trevor is my zone leader from back in Cuenca, but he’s long gone.  He was cool.

Antonia (Douglas Madre), Ivet, Duvan, Douglas, Moroni, ---, Maria del Rocío (Moroni Madre), Jaquelina (Duvan Madre), Misioneros

We have had a great first week here in Amazonas 2.  President Montalti has been asking the mission to try to implement a new finding strategy.  He wants us to look for really inactive families with little kids, reactivate the parents, and baptize the whipper snappers.  That way, the ward is happy with us and we get baptisms.  I am still warming up to the idea.  The last two elders were really into it.  Amazonas 2 is the land of the inactives, so this strategy works really well here.  It is a small area, so it has been combed over and over.  There is already a Libro de Mormón in almost every house and everyone knows a member somewhere in their family.  We have several families that we are working with.  We are actually having lots of success, both with plan pingüino and with finding more mature investigators.  I still am a little sad I got transferred though.  Eating all my hazelnut cookies by myself without Elder Fares, Kartchner, and Anchundia kind of made them feel stolen.

The ward is good.  There are several ward missionaries here.  They are really good.  A lot of them are RM’s (return missionary) and the other is the seminary teacher.  We had a big member training meeting.  We talked about some of the past general conference addresses.  There was one by Elder Uchtdorf where he talks about how his family tried to talk about spiritual experiences they had over the weekend with their non-member friends in open and casual ways.  We also talked about Elder Perry´s talk from last week, too.  Then we practiced (like missionaries) starting friendly, spiritually-oriented conversations with friends that can lead to deeper conversations about doctrine.

Love,

brother nano

Well, this is a new breed of companion, unlike I've had before.  Se cree Jesucristo.  There is a new rule.  We have to watch each other's monitor while we write.  More information later.

A quick email later that day:
I've never really liked that thing some people do where they say to little kids, "You are the best generation there has ever been.  You are going to do what they never could.  Now missionaries think that people a few years ago did not know what teaching with the spirit is because they did not have Preach My Gospel.  I think that is happening again with Preach My Gospel 2, which just came out.  

The new missionaries are all here to teach us how to teach people, not lessons.  I have been told that I need to change how I teach because I am not looking for the investigator's needs.  I guess it was a blow for my ego, but it is kind of aggravating because he goes around telling the members that they need to straighten up because he's on the scene and they have never seen a missionary like him.  

We were able to get special permission from a mom who did not want to let her son get baptized because of her personal  grudge against the church (which is evidence, I guess, that we are special).  It made me think a lot about being back with Elder Salvioli.  He was a really good missionary and a hard worker, but I always felt we could be teaching better.  I think he could tell I was frustrated with how it worked, too.  I didn't try to pretend that I knew what the solution was to our problems, though.  I don't know.  We will try to figure it out together.