Week 9 - Third week in Uruguay

HOLY COW THIS WEEK FLEW!!! It felt like I was emailing yesterday, GEEZ! I'm really worried about how fast the rest will fly, I want to actually feel like I had 2 years here, but oh well, at least I'm doing something right!

Alright, so this week we only found three new investigators which was a little disappointing, but we have many investigators still and many of them are very capo. I want to say that we're at about 15 investigators with a couple awesome futures still waiting for the follow up, the work is still progressing, we just need to push a little bit more to have it progress to the font, but we'll get there!

We had a similar experience this week in contacting like Olazabal. Street: Gomez Ruano. This is probably one of the areas in our mission that is the most bravo (dangerous) and I was beginning to understand why. People were rude, cussing us out, yelling that we were of the devil, and all other kinds of things. Luckily there were no knives like in Colombia. But all 3 of our new investigators this week were waiting at the end of the street. One guy we found was believing everything that we said and told us everything we said made sense the second we said it, so that was nice for a change. We haven't met his wife yet, but we're going to visit them again this Saturday. The other 2 are Victoria and Natalia that we've been able to visit a couple times. Victoria is 10 and Natalia is 8 and they are finally our first people with a baptismal date for Sept. 22. Their Mom is ok with it, but is very shy and doesn't really talk to us that much, so that's going to be our focus this week, is just to try to win her confidence. 

This was cool, but honestly this week was actually kind of hard. So many people we tried to find every single day, we could never find, or we'd find them consistently but they didn't have time in that moment to have a lesson, we'd set another time, and then they'd be gone. John, Sai, and Michelle have been particularly hard to find, because Sai had her baby this week, and they've been doing all kinds of things for that, we found them again finally on Wednesday said that they were still really interested but didn't have time at that moment. We really need to find them again because they have such strong faith, no problems with the Word of Wisdom, and a real desire to learn, they're just very VERY hard to find. We'll keep trying though for sure.

Thursday and Friday were particularly challenging. Literally every person we planned to see, we didn't find, and every person we contacted wanted absolutely nothing. I thought that Thursday was easily the most dissatisfying moment of my mission, I kept thinking there was something more we should've done, then the same thing happened on Friday with the most terrible rain literally all day, and crazy wind that kept trying to steal our umbrellas.

Finally though on Saturday we contacted the second half of Gomez Ruano that is split by the only big street in our area, Millan, and we found a future who was really interested, with a huge family that we're going to try to contact this week as well. We had a member baptism that night also which was a nice break, and I am proud to say that there still is not a Uruguayan member in our area that can beat me in ping-pong, although Alexi Martinez got very close; we had 5-2 series and every game was close, so that was really fun.

Eventually yesterday we found many of the people we were trying to find during the week, none of them had time to have lessons but we have some more set appointments for this week, so hopefully we'll have some more teaching stories for next week. 

That's all for now folks! Nos vemos!

-Elder Martin