September!!! I can´t believe it´s September already...it blows my mind. Time is going by extremely fast. At first I wasn´t sure how I felt about this Saturday Pday thing, but now I´m beginning to like it a lot! The weeks seem to go by faster for some reason.
The past few weeks we have been working with a part-member family. The girlfriend is a member but the boyfriend isn´t. They have a kid and live together, but still aren´t married. The boyfriend´s name is Juan and he had a baptismal date for next Saturday. I have never seen someone who has been so excited to get baptized! The problem is that here in Nicaragua the people have to get something that´s called a cedula in order to get married. I think it´s called an identity card or identity document in English, something like that. Most people already have them and get them when they are teenagers, but for some reason Juan had never gotten his. So we went with Juan and 2 ward members to the town hall in order to get a Cedula for Juan. When we got there we were informed that they are no longer giving out first time cedulas until January because Nicaraguan elections will be starting soon and it´s some sort of law here...So that was joyful news! But we are trying to stay positive and find ways to encourage Juan to keep coming to church and learning about the gospel. He seemed a little sad at first because he was so excited to get married and then baptized, but now he seems like he´ll be okay and will keep progressing. We´re still going to work with a few lawyers here who are members of the church to see what we can do.
Elder Rivera and I have been finding A LOT of new families lately and I can´t wait to see their progress. Last week President sat all the office missionaries down and encouraged us to start finding more families to teach so that we have more baptism possibilities. Well, this week we found A TON of new families as a district, and put baptismal dates with about 7 new families! The excitement in the office is going up and I think we´ll have a lot of success this next month.
I feel like I´m kind of getting used to the whole secretary thing, even though there´s still a lot I need to learn. It´s interesting being right in the middle of everything that happens in the mission and getting to see the progress of all the missionaries.
Today for Pday, President Monastel and his wife came over to our house and we had a backyard barbecue! It was mainly to celebrate the birthdays of Elder Miller and Elder Weight. I´ve never eaten so much steak in my life. My stomach still hurts! But it was nice to have a good cookout in the backyard and finally eat like North Americans do. :) We played volleyball with President and his family and just hung out for a while.
Well, I love you all! Have a good week.
Love, Elder Parrish |
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