Already To Harvest: Week 081 - Fixing Cars Is My Specialty

So I totally forgot to mention in my last letter how thankful I was to receive your letters. Written letters are totally way better than emails. But I did really appreciate what you guys had to say. Thanks for the photos of your trip. All the family looks really great. Demasiado facha.

So one of the great things about my life now is that I ask almost everyone if they need help with whatever they are doing. And usually everyone says no. so I’m not too scared about offering, even if I have no idea what it is that I’m offering to do. And so I got into this weird situation where I passed some fella in the street working on his car, or looking at it, I don’t know. but so I say hey dude you need some help with that thing you’re doing, and he responds with a classic "Si dios quiere" (if god wants). Riiiiiiiight. I’ll help. And so I’m like, "What are we looking at here?" And he says, "Well you’re the expert....fix it!" Riiiiiight..... You know what dude, can we forget that I asked to help you and let’s just talk to you about god? How does that sound? He said alright, and we just got into the Book of Mormon, and planned an appointment for another day. Fixing cars is my specialty.

So I found myself later in the week in my favorite neighborhood, 17 de Octubre. One of the great things about 17 de Octubre is that people do whatever they want. For example, Toni. Toni is the gringo of the barrio and all he likes doing is screwing around with his sling shot. But Toni likes us because he's blonde and we are as well, of course we are Yankees though. But this kid is a total punk, for example this last week we were walking and out of the corner comes Toni slingshotting every light post down the line. It was super impressive how smooth he would shoot out the lights each with one shot, and it was at night so it kind of was like the beginning scene from Harry Potter where Dumbledore sucks all the lights. I was kind of memorized by it, and as he passed I said "DUDE, you’re making a mess!" And he passes with no expression saying, "They were in my way." Alright, I guess you’re right. Good night.

On Monday nights we have dinner with one of our members. She’s from Paraguay and makes some great food. But she has this grandchild that lives with her that is super smart and funny and loves the church. He’s 7 years old and recently got a PlayStation so it’s been his main focus lately, and every time we come over he’s playing and it, and it’s beyond hilarious his reaction to playing. We are eating one day and all of a sudden I hear screaming and yelling from her grandchild, screaming "LORD LORD LORD, THANK YOU LORD, I WON’T LET YOU DOWN LORD." I look over to the grandmother and asked what’s going on and, she’s says, "Oh he’s just playing his games." Yeah, those high stress moments of playing video games really get to you.

For the past couple of weeks, Osvaldo has not come to church and we didn’t know why because he doesn’t have a phone and every time we went to go look for him, his daughter would say that he was out and she didn’t know where he was. But we found his brother one day who is also a baptized member and turns out Osvaldo fell off his bike a couple of weeks ago due to something that happed to his heart, so he has been in the hospital for a few weeks. So we go to the hospital to visit him and when we showed up we didn’t know where to go, and I think we obviously looked lost because the owner of the hospital asked what we needed, and I said that we were there to visit someone. And she responded with a classic "Look chicos...we are Catholics." Uhhhhh, we didn't come to teach you......yet. We came to visit a friend who is sick. And she just didn’t understand. She kept thinking that we were there to teach her. Anyway, we finally found Osvaldo and we were kicked out by someone who we thought was a doctor. But Osvaldo did see us before we left, we just weren’t able to talk to him. So we came back another day. And then we enter the room and totally get kicked out by his sister. So it was kind of lame because they wouldn’t tell us how he was doing. At least he knew that we wanted to visit him. His family is kind of jerks about the church, but we kind of knew that before.

We had a cool opportunity to go to San Cristobal to participate in an open chapel over there and me and Elder Hopkins were chosen to explain baptism and invite people to be baptized and it was a really cool experience because there were actually 4 people who agreed to being baptized next month, and so they invited the missionaries to come over to their homes and set up appointments to teach. It was really cool and we chowed down a ton of choripan!

I love you guys. Have a great week!

Elder Greene