Week of Firsts

My first dominican baseball field that I've been on.. they take better care of their baseball fields then anything else!!! (sorry it's blurry)

This is the best part of my week, Monday -  I get to write home and I get to hear what everyone is up to!! P days are pretty boring here because it is just so hot and humid you just don’t want to go outside you just want to sit in front of your fan and be semi cool. Yeah I guess it is kind of missionary fun that we enjoy, but at the same time its hard fun and really works out my brain because I’m trying to learn Spanish.  Right now I’m just trying to focus as much as I can and trying to put the sentence together so I can understand what they are saying. But by the time I put the sentences together I’m lost because I’m so behind and I just have no idea what they are talking about. Then my mind just wonders from there and I don’t really pay attention, I’m trying not to let my mind wonder and stay focused, it is hard. I’m feeling great and working my hardest to understand and speak the language. I think I’m speaking much better, however I may not and no one is telling me they don’t understand!  I received one package that had a hacky sack in it with some beef jerky, I have got to say the beef jerky was dang good because you can’t buy that type of food here. I’m starting to get the letters that were sent now that I’m in the field. 

 Yeah I guess we have our own cooks but they cook the same thing pretty much every day which is rice, beans and meat every meal then my companions and I have to do the dishes when we are done eating.  I would rather cook than clean.  

I’m looking at getting a new camera – my companion bought a Samsung for 4,000 pessos, that is   like 115 dollars.  This camera doesn’t use a sim card and I can just send the pictures when I have wifi.  A lot of the computers that we use have viruses on them and when pictures are sent home the computer can delete all the pictures on the sim card. I haven’t heard of anything stolen, people here take great care of the missionaries and they know that we wouldn’t do anything to harm them so they don’t bother with us. Rarely do you hear of someone getting jumped or robbed. 

We have two baptisms scheduled for the Saturday after conference. I am excited about my first baptism - it is going to be a double baptism. We are also working with a family right now, but they have to get married before they can be baptized, so we are waiting. Unfortunately, it cost money for people to get married here and they don’t have much money to waist. I don’t know when that will happen. 

I had my first zone conference and Elder Zivic (Quorum of the Seventy) and his wife.  Everyone was freaking out about having a Seventy talk,  but he came to the CCM when I was there and talked to us so I wasn’t too shocked.  He and his wife are super nice and you can tell they love the missionaries so much! It was a really long meeting, we had to be there at 8:30 and we didn’t get out until 4:30 so it was long day of just straight Spanish. But I could understand a lot of it because he spoke clear and slow. He talked about how we need to get more baptisms and we need to be more focused on trying to hit those goals. There were 4 districts there and we had the smallest district with only 10 companionships, our district had 9 baptisms which is pretty good but we do need to get more. We don’t want to just baptize people in the church just for the baptism we want to make them stay in the church and want them to be good members.

We went contacting in Almida which is a really rich neighborhood and it is clear out of our way, we had to walk a long way as it was at the furthest area in our district. Our only contact was one guy that was from New York and lived with his parent’s, I don’t know why they moved back here. When we rung the door bell the maid came out like all the other houses we went to.  We said we  were here for Steven and we introduced ourselves, we talked to her a little bit and she was playing us like she was not a member but we figured out that she was a member. The maid went to get Steven she told us that he can only talk a short time because his dad is home and his dad is a strong Catholic, and criticizes all other church’s except the Catholic.  Steven confessed to us that he hates going to the Catholic church because he knows that it isn’t the true church but he can’t do anything about it because his dad makes him go to church weather he likes it or not. We ended up giving him the The Restoration folleto with our names and number hoping that he will call us later. We told him to read the folleto and pray about it to see if it is true.  We haven’t heard from him yet.  If he does call it will be tricky to teach him because he is only 16 and it’s a mission rule that the investigator has to be 18, if under 18 he has to have their parent’s permission to be taught.  

That’s pretty much all that happen nothing to exciting other than lots of lessons that we taught. But all is going well and I’m doing great and still loving the mission life and my companion is great and is funny so we have a good time. We are still walking 45 minutes to our area and still sweating like a horse when you take off the saddle. 

Love everyone back home and thanks to everyone for the support.

Love, 

Elder Medrano

The new missionaries who arrived 11 Sep 2013