Elder Parker Spanbauer: Week 21 Vallenar

Aug 3, 2015

This is my weekly update! This week was a pretty successful week I guess you could say. We had a lot of lessons with people as well as a super fun activity in the church. So we have been teaching a lady named Ingrid Vasquez. She just recently divorced her husband and has 3 kids. She is super receptive and we had a lesson with her that was awesome. She is really interested in going to church and reading the book of Mormon. She has real potential as well as her kids! All of her kids are above the age of 8. Her youngest is 10 and her oldest is 15. Honestly, she is ready to be baptized.... well at least as far as we know. She obviously needs to attend church 3 times first and listen to all of the lessons but I have a feeling she will be baptized in the future with her kids. The only problem that we see as of right now is that her X husband is super catholic.... and we aren’t even aloud to teach her when he’s home. This makes things complicated. We have to wait 2 weeks until we can teach her again. We have also been teaching Jonathan still. He went to the activity and his girlfriend went! They took us home after the activity and said they loved it! Just a quick run down of the activity... We had a Noche de Aviones... or night of airplanes. We instructed everyone at the beginning of the activity was that they needed to construct a paper airplane and get it to reach a certain point on the white board. Then we threw a bunch of distractions at them. We said they needed to make a poster with an airline brand and that they needed to present it and a bunch of other stuff. The main goal of the activity was to get their airplanes to hit the point on the white board. After they all tried to hit it at the end of the activity no one was able to do it. They spend all there time building the posters instead of building planes and practicing. We then told them in life, we all have a purpose but that there are tons of distractions in this world. It’s hard to focus on our main goal or purpose when we put our focus in other things. After we ate completos! It was a super successful activity! 40 people went! So we thought all was well with Jonathan and Roxana (his girlfriend) and yesterday we went over to their house to have a noche de pancakes! We made American pancakes! Then Jonathan started bringing up temples and started talking about temple ordinances. He had look up temple videos and stuff regarding sacred temple things. He was looking on a bad website that can destroy his faith. He is not in a good place right now.... he now has a lot of doubts. We explained to him that those things are sacred and we cannot be looking those things up. He started saying that he’s not so sure about this anymore. We are going to have another lesson with another member that can explain these things better but I’m pretty sure this could be a "do or die" lesson. We will see what happens. I have faith that all will be fine. On another note, we had an awesome BBQ today in our backyard and I ate Cow heart! It tasted gross but I did it! I have a video but it’s hard to send videos through email. Anyway, gotta go guys. I hope you enjoy the pictures! Chao!

Answers to Questions:

Honestly, I love receiving pictures as well and I kinda wish I had some pictures from high school to show people as well cuz people don’t believe I played soccer before the mission haha.

Language update: so my Spanish has been improving and I’ve been getting a lot more confident with it. I feel that I can teach just about anything in my own words so that’s good. I can understand most conversations if the person isn’t speaking a ton of slang.

Physically, I am good. There was one week where I ate terrible and I’m sure I gained a little weight but I’ve been watching more of what I eat now haha.

Companion: Elder Malan and I get along super well. We have very similar personalities and we haven’t argued yet haha. We are constantly laughing and having a good time. I’ll admit that it’s a lot tougher to speak Spanish all the time with a gringo companion but its been a nice break.

There is a shortage of water here in Vallenar so they have been cutting the water a lot. It’s kinda frustrating but its all good. We have plenty.

Anyway, I love you guys so much and you’re always in my prayers! Dad, do something fun with mom haha. Love you guys!

Elder Spanbauer