2 Months!

Alex and his first companion in the middle

Hey everybody!

Today is officially two months after I left home and reported to the MTC! How cool! It has already gone by really really fast! So pretty much this week was insane because I was responsible for knowing the area with my new companion, and I don't really know the area so it was a lot of getting lost and trying to find people and a lot of frustration! But, he is awesome! His name is Elder Hansen and he is from a small town of 150 people down by St George, he only has 6 months in the mission, but is already training! He has even had a crazier few weeks than I have because when I first got here he was training someone else from my generation but that companion had to go home, so he has had four companions in four weeks, hopefully we are together for a little while! He is very different from Elder Lewis but it is probably good to experience different types of people this early on! My Spanish has improved a ton in the last week because I am the one that already kind of knows the people we have been teaching or the members so I have had to talk a lot more! But, I think it is really coming along for only three weeks here!

So this week we gained some new investigators! When we went to meet with Susena, her daughter was there and they were both super interested in the Book of Mormon but they have to work out the time to come to church still, so they will be kind of stagnant until they can make that a priority, plus we can only meet once a week with them so it is slow going. We didn't get a chance to meet with Maria Ester and Carlos Vega this week but they both came to stake conference so that was a good sign! We had two really good lessons with Ana Gasparlino and set a baptismal date for the 6th of Dec but then she didn't come to church so that is frustrating! She doesn't want to go because she doesn't understand, but she doesn't get that going will help her understand better! Then Gabrielle Torres' husband got out of jail and even though they both can't get baptized until he is off parole in two years we started teaching him! Then we had the funniest experience in the world, our neighbor is 84 years old and I think that she might have dementia or something just not very bad, but she is just really lonely so we help her like clean sometimes and stuff but last time we were like anything else we can do and she is like yeah, I want to go to church with you guys so we started teaching her. We taught her the whole restoration and everything and she was like that is beautiful and stuff and then our next lesson she said she believed the Book of Mormon was the best book ever and she sleeps with it under her pillow and stuff, so we asked if she would pray to know if our church was true and she replied with, of course I know that the Catholic Church is the only true church. Which led us to the awkward conversation that La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días is different than the Catholic Church and we were both just laughing because she honestly thought we were Catholic but we were invited back so we have to figure out if there is actually something wrong with her mind or if we can keep teaching her!

Alex and his new companion

Looks like companion study and a lot of junk food

The members here are amazing! There is this one street really close to our house where the family Alquciera lives, I mean like the whole family. There are like 5 different houses that all stem from the same family! There are like 6 recent converts in the family and the bishop and the relief society president and just like half the ward, it is so awesome, whenever something falls through we just walk up and down that street looking for someone to teach and we always get invited in and get 2nd dinner and like a goody bag to take home and a bunch of references of friends to teach and we just love them so much. The other night we taught the Alquiciera Fiuentes about prophets and then they just brought us out enchiladas part way through our lesson, and then sent us home with milk, yogurt, flan, donuts, muffins, and cinnamon rolls! They are so awesome!!!

Everything is going great here, I love and miss you all!!!!

Elder Stout

Cool Mexican pottery