Elder Parker Spanbauer: Week 59 Antofagasta

April 23, 2016

This past week was one of the fastest weeks I have experienced in the mission. I feel like it was just yesterday I was writing you all. This week we had our ward conference in Antofagasta Centro and so there was an activity every night. This was awesome but also kind of hard because our time in our sector is already limited because we are in the office all day... but it gave us an opportunity to bond with the ward members. Tuesday we had an activity where we had to perform mini skits about biblical stories. Elder Morales and I weren't originally supposed to participate in it but they were short on people so they made us participate last minute! haha but it was fun. Wednesday we were in charge of the activity and we did a game night. We started with a game called "So you think you know English" and it was awesome! We handed out little study guides with a few words in English and then gave everyone 5 minutes to study the words. We then formed 2 groups and had them compete to see who knew more English. It was super fun because we played that game in the MTC in Santiago when I got here. It is hilarious to see Latins try to speak English! On Thursday there was an activity about genealogy, which was actually a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Friday, or yesterday we had a ward fair. We set up a bunch of different booths and had certain people share things about the gospel at each one. We also had a bunch of games set up a long with a popcorn stand and cotton candy! After that, everyone went downstairs where we had 3 rooms set up representing the 3 kingdoms of heaven. Elder Morales and I were in charge of teaching the class for the terrestrial kingdom. It was probably one of the best activities I have had in the mission! We tried super hard to get our investigators to come to the activities but none of them did... It is so hard to get people to keep a commitment here. It was funny because we live super far from the church so we had to literally run all the way back to the pension every night because we have to be in the pension by 10:00pm. I´m sure people were looking at us weird haha. We did manage to have a few lessons with our investigators and one of them says he will get baptized but he thinks it would have to be in a month or two. His name is Kermit. He agreed to keep the word of wisdom and he is making real progress. We also found a few new potential investigators this week but haven't had the chance to teach them a full lesson yet. Carlos Calderón still has not told us what happened in his dream because he is ALWAYS working... I have been trying to find that man for a week! His phone doesn't seem to be working but we will try and get in contact with him. Anyway, that’s about all I can think of right now but attached are some pictures! Take care and until next week!

Elder Spanbauer