First Week in New Area

So this week was a blast! It was really interesting to say the least because there have not been missionaries in this area for over 7 or 8 years. We are serving in an even poorer area than my last. We spend most of our days in the sticks walking around to houses made out of mud, cement/sticks and tarps, with the majority being tarps. I love them all.

We also have a large area that is way bigger than my last one, which I thought that was huge. Our zone is so spread out because we are serving in the country. I love to go walking in part of our area that is full of sugar cane fields. It's about a 45-1 hour walk depending if we book it (lol), but it's nothing but sugar cane fields on either side of us. I have yet to try it straight from the field but all of the people want to give us some. Right now we are in the proccess of finding a machete or a very large pocket knife to skin it so we can eat it. lol

In this new area, we are starting from scratch. We have no investigators, no converts and a very very old carpeta de area, which translates to knocking like crazy. Every day for at least half of our days we are knocking, but I especially love knocking in our areas. We are having some good luck and currently have 12 new progressing investigators and 6 people commited to baptism at the end of the month. We will continue to teach them to help them prepare for this date that they will feel confident of their decision. I am so grateful to be here and to have this opportunity to serve them and to share in their life experiences. Because of the size of this area, we have a lot of work to do but I know that president has confidence in us and we have to prove him right. lol I don´t know how but we are trying!

My comp is a good, good worker. I love her to death. I didn't know how I felt about an American comp because I like speaking Spanish all day with my Latin comps. It really helped me with my Spanish and I have developed a good accent but being with her is still great. We are working hard and giving it our all.

This week we asked the Bishop for a blessing to work in his area and we also wanted to talk to him about how we could help get the ward growing and going. Well he said he would but then started to talk to us about his life and how this calling has been very difficult for him and within the first couple of minutes of listening, I knew that this night was not for us but just to help him out and to listen. It was a good conversation and quickly found out that this ward needs a ton of help. There are about 450 members but only about 25 go to church. I was shocked! So this week we are going to be setting up activities with the R.S and Priesthood to visit menos activos. We are going to have a meeting and talk about the importance of members in this work and their role as members. A lot of them are really young members and don't really understand how these programs run and the importance of them so we will be having a lot of activites/meetings to learn about the church programs and the role of being a member. I'm excited but I feel a bit overwhelmed, but what can I do, this is the mission right?! So I'm just going to suck it up and work all I can during the day and sleep hard in the night. lol

I love the mission and I know it's going to be hard to leave them. Dad was right when he said that it is hard to leave people when you have invested so much into them and when you serve them with all your heart, you feel like you belong with them.

love amanda