Gringooo

Dear familia,                                                                                             

As regards to prayers. I pray for each of you individually, and I’m firmly convinced that the only way that a missionary´s family is blessed during his mission is when he really recognizes how much he loves and appreciates each member and prays for them because of that love.

When you forget that you have supposed needs and begin to fill the needs of those around you, you will find that your needs disappear or that you have someone else filling them for you. That’s the challenge this week; fill the needs of someone else....also visit grandma and say hi to Aunt Judy if she´s around.

Thanks to Brother Larsen making sure I’m not forgotten around there :) Really he was a good teacher and really helped us to see too the teaching program of the church before the recent changes could be utilized in a more updated way. We don´t use facebook here or the Mormon messages, but that’s incredibly effective in the USA. 

I had a funny experience this week in the hill in our area. We had climbed to the very top and knocked on the door of a part member family who we had an appointment with, Luz and Edwin. They weren´t there, so we started to go down, but this voice came from behind us ´´gringooo´´.....we turned around, nobody.  ´´´gringoooooo´´´we turned around, nobody. Two more steps down ´´´vas a morir gringooooo´´ we turned around and Elder Gaibor caught the corner of a head ducking inside the window of a house super high up on the hill. ´´vas a morir gringoooo, voy a matarte gringoooo´´ we turned around one more time and didn’t catch him. Really it was just a super drunk person, no worries. Following that, we had a family that we hadn´t been able to contact for a while come to church and we had a member give us a reference for her daughter in law.

The daughter in law is pregnant, but not married to her boyfriend. They are living together in the girl’s mom’s house and she gave birth to a baby girl just two days ago, so we haven’t had contact since. Oh yeah, she’s 16 and he´s 19. That little detail was incredibly shocking, but then not, because missionaries from the jungle have told me that sometimes 14 year olds have two or three kids. So basically that was my first personal experience with a teen pregnant here in Peru. I did notice however that this sister, in spite of the situation she is in, has a strong desire to get her family back on track. She wants to get baptized soon and she’s working on convincing her husband to get married.

Elder Gaibor is from Ecuador, he’s 22 years old and only has a year of school left after his mission before he can be an electrical engineer. He wants to come to BYU to finish up schooling or get his masters. He’s Jewish descent, but from Ecuador for generations, and he´s definitely got the knowledge to back it up. He reads constantly and seriously knows a lot of deep things about the gospel. He meditates in place of exercises, and has served a year and two months now. He knows a ton of English, just misses how to pronounce things occasionally, and needs help to start talking faster. We complement each other well, and I hope we have a while longer here together because I have been learning a lot from him. He does believe in evil or wicked spirits and that can be a little strange. We are teaching a schizophrenic and Elder Gaibor says after the lesson to me that it can be something mental or a wicked spirit. I lean towards the mental imbalanced opinion haha.

Well, Dad received the other half of the letter for this week, so you can ask him about it when you get together for lunch. I mentioned about Elder Christofferson’s talk about the plaque or nametag to him. I hope that all of the ex missionaries have followed that counsel. They have more or less here and it’s incredible to know how much the church is helped by RMs.

Love you all, and as always I’m praying for you.

Love,

Elder Nelson