Week 90 - The week of Corona Virus changing things in the mission!!!

So this week has been completely nuts with all the changes in the church made recently! Wow!

On Thursday we had our weekly planning in the morning like normal and we spent most of the afternoon contacting. We found 3 really cool inactive members that wanted to come back to church and had committed to go and we were super excited! Then, later that night while we were visiting a member family, they received the announcement about the cancellation of all church meetings for a short time. So.... we're just sitting there like...we just invited some less active people to come today that now can't. Also, what are we supposed to do about our investigators.... So many questions. Later the Assistants called us and confirmed it; they didn't really have any answers though.

On Friday we went out and worked like normal, but it didn't feel normal because we weren't able to invite anyone to church like we normally would. We were able to make a couple of contacts but we weren't able to find many people; we visited a couple more members, talking to them and asking them about a few things that we needed to do with this new change. Later that night we got some more information about how we are going to be working from here on out:

1. We can get "people in church" by visiting them on Sunday, teaching them a lesson from "Ven, Si­gueme" (Come, Follow Me) and giving them the sacrament in their house, or by taking investigators to the house of a member to do those things.

2. We can continue doing baptisms, but the services need to max out at 10 people and the confirmation will take place right after the baptism.

On Saturday we were given a list of a bunch of things that we needed to buy in order to stock up just in case we get quarantined in the near future. We went out and bought the vast majority of it on Saturday. We've got about 3 weeks storage in our house right now. 

All in all, it's been a pretty crazy week! Especially having to be talking to the Assistants and then to the District Leaders all the time to constantly be coordinating all this information.

So my new companion is Elder Quintanilla from Peru. He has 15 months in the mission and this is his first time being a Zone Leader! He's really excited for it, but he did get kind of a rough introduction to it though with everything that went down. Ha ha! 

So Sunday we had a really good time. We went to the Chilan family's house for the "sacrament meeting." It was actually really nice to be with them. Brother Chilan is very knowledgeable in the scriptures and it was really nice being able to have that study time in "Ven, Sigueme" with him.

Afterwards, he told us that he had given a priesthood blessing to his whole family and he would now like us to give him one and then he could give us one to be blessed with prevention from the disease. After that, he gave us our assignments to visit 3 families to give them the sacrament that didn't have a Priesthood holder authorized to bless the sacrament. It was all in all a really good day!

Well that was pretty much my week! I love you all! Nos vemos!

-Elder Martin

UPDATE:  Bryant sen me a quick message today (Thursday) while doing Family History at the church:  The Area Presidency of the South America South Area has asked all of the missionaries to be quarantined until the end of the month at least.  He is allowed to go across the street to the church to work on Family History occasionally, but that is all.   :(

Looks like they will have plenty of good music while they are quarantined! 

In the Family History center at the church across the street from their apartment