Changes Again!

If you think your phone is a piece of junk... Look at mine...!

Lake Cuicocha

Panamerican Highway goes right through my sector

Yup...! It's just what it looks like...a bunch of cow stomaches... They think it's delicious here

She's 7 years old and washes her clothes by hand!

He's 13 and cooked us lunch!

This is what he cooked for us!

I've got some news for all of you. My companion Elder Cruz had emergency changes and left for Quito. I haven't really said much about him lately, but now I can tell you. He wanted to leave San Roque really bad. He was always whining and complaining. He also doesn't have any desire to be obedient. Last week was kind of rough for me and I lost patience with him. I was pretty miserable...Then this sunday at 11:00pm the zone leaders called me up and told me to pass the phone to Elder Cruz. That he would be happy with the news. So I passed the phone to him and they told him that he had emergency changes and he would be leaving tomorrow. He was so happy to be going. I was kind of happy too =). So he left this morning. I'll be staying here and training. But there's a catch. The new missionaries get here in 2 weeks, so I'll be with some other missionaries in my district until then. My sector will basically be closed for the next 2 weeks. We'll only have a couple of appointments there in these 2 weeks. 

Despite my loser-ish companion Elder Cruz we actually had a pretty good week. We found the secret to our sector. The secret is visit people with the members. For example. The missionaries have been working with certain less active families for a long time, about 4 months, and we haven't gotten anywhere. We take a member with us, he says a few things in Kichwa and then they say that they're going to go to church. We had a few experiences like that. We also ended up finding about 4 new investigators just because we went out with the members. I'm pretty excited about our new discovery. Although San Roque is a hard sector, I want to stay here a little while to be able to help the people here more.

Just so you all know. I want to train a "gringo" (an american =)). I'll tell you why. So, when the american missionaries get here they don't know any spanish. When they hear someone speaking spanish they can't tell if the have a gringo accent or not. Or in this case if I speak spanish he wouldn't be able to tell if I had an accent or not. So what I want to do is tell him that I'm Puerto Rican, which wouldn't be lying =). Then I'll only speak spanish for a good long time. Maybe the whole change. The whole time he would think that I don't know english. Then, the last day of the change I'll start speaking english like it's normal =). He'll be so surprised. You might think, "He'll notice that you're gringo if he sees that your name is "Elder Black". Let's remember that in Puerto Rico there is a lot of American influence. So I could tell him that my grandpa was a gringo and his last name was Black. Then my parents were born in Puerto Rico and I was too. Yup, I know. It's a brilliant prank .

That's basically all for now. The things are slowly getting better in San Roque. Especially since we're starting to leave with the members. Helping them to share the gospel and do something other than just sit in church and then forget about God for the rest of the week. I also gave a talk in church this sunday on pride, repentance and forgiveness. I tried to machete them a bit to get them to wake up. Hopefully it worked.

Funny thing of the week: Look at the next pictures =)