Week 95 - Switching it up

Hey guys, sorry for the late letter. I didn't have time to write on Monday due to some errands I had to run. Not sure that all of you know but my mom is from Guatemala. Recently we found out that because of her being from here, I can have a double citizenship. I wasn't too worried about doing it, but President Shummer suggested I do it. So, I went to the Immigration building to try and start the process. I also asked President if my family who lives here could take me since I didn't know exactly where the immigration building was. So my companion and I went early in the morning. Come to find out, I need a bunch of documents to be able to do it. Documents that I don't have on hand here. So, after all that, we're going to have to do it through the Guatemalan consulate back home and do the process remotely. But it would have been cool to leave as a legalized Guatemalan citizen. But at least I got to spend some time with my family here. It was actually pretty interesting. I went with my mom's cousin, Marvin. It was a great experience. Marvin and his family took us out to eat at a really cool place called Cayalá. It's a shopping center that's made to look like the Spanish Colonial era of Guatemala. We ate some really good burgers there and I got to know a part of my family that I didn't know very well. Unfortunately, all of the pictures I took are lost forever because my memory card got a virus- so all of the pictures from the last two weeks got corrupted and I couldn't recover them. :( The traffic here is horrible and we didn't get back to our area until 430, so that is the end reason why I didn't write on Monday like normal.

But in other news... This week was interesting. Our area is so large we work by sectors (well, really we do in every area, but especially this one) And this week we decided to change up the days we would visit each sector. It was interesting because we would find new people because we would be in an area a day that is different than normal. We also found that we couldn't visit certain people who we would normally try to visit. So it had its ups and downs but I think we're gonna stick with it and try and make the scheduling work with the people we couldn't visit. 

One of the new people we were able to visit this week was a family I had contacted a week ago, The Zaput Family. I had talked with the wife (Arelis) but, because the husband was not home, we couldn't enter the house to teach her. We went another time and they were on their way out the door. But on Sunday we had an appointment for the afternoon when the husband should be home. We arrived and they were again getting ready to leave. We asked if we could share our message and the husband (Oscar) said it'd be fine. So we went in and taught them about the restoration. They said they had distanced themselves a bit from church but their son was going to a Christian bible study group and they were kind of getting the feeling that they should start going to church again. They were super receptive and accepted a baptismal date. It'll be a bit tricky since Oscar will only be there on Sundays but we're gonna try to teach the rest of the family during the week and that he can catch up a bit on Sunday.

The other is a kid named Kibn (pronounced "keevin"). My companion and I were contacting near a hill looks like a more like a concrete wall when we found him. We were just knocking doors and my companion knocked his door. His mom answered and told us to come back maybe another time (classical "I'm not interested" response) I was knocking on another door talking with someone and my companion was talking with someone in the street when the grandma came out practically yelling "Come back! Come back!" My companion tried to figure out what was going on while I finished my contact. She took him back to the house we had just contacted and was inviting him in. when I finished I went to see what was up. Turns out that when we left, Kibn showed up. His mom wanted us to talk to him because she said he was a bit of a wayward child. We sat down and talked with them for a bit and we judged that he might not be as (wayward) as his mom thinks. Maybe he has some things he could change but they were normal things of adolescence. We explained that anybody can change if they put their faith in Jesus Christ and his Atonement- that we all have the freedom to make our own decisions but we also would have to accept the consequences of our actions- that if we make good decisions we will get to return to live with our Heavenly Father again, and if we don't we may be separated from his presence forever. In the end we felt they both understood the principle of agency and the positive effect it can have in our lives as well as the negative. It all depends on whether we are willing to follow God's plan and put His will before our or if we are going to use our agency to do whatever we want, regardless of the consequences.

We visited family that we found a couple weeks ago, the Alvarez Family (I don't remember if I've mentioned them before...) Anyway, we had left them with a pamphlet to read but they hadn't read. We explained the reason why we leave "homework" and testified of the truthfulness of the restoration. I know the Spirit testified of our words because the mom was crying and the dad personally committed to reading the pamphlet before our next lesson. We arrived for our appointment on Sunday and we had just barely gone in when the son and his girlfriend came looking for her coin purse. Here, coin purses are where women put ALL of their money. In it she had left over 350 Quetzales (=approx. $50) So we decided to help them look. We looked and we looked. We lifted up couches we dumped the kid's toys all over the floor to see if it got mixed up in that. We lifted up the couches again. She retraced her steps. Nothing. It occurred to me to say a prayer but I forgot in all the ruckus. We ended up sharing something brief because of the time the search took up but we asked if they had made the effort to read and they said they had! I was so happy. It was a shame we couldn't talk about everything we wanted to but now they had a start. At the end the mom included in her prayer thanks that we had come, for help to keep reading, and that the son's girlfriend could find her money.

That's all for today. Until next week.

Elder Mattiaccio

Barrio Las Brisas, Zona Florida, Guatemala Sur