Freaky Sunday!

April 29, 2013

This week was pretty great / kinda bad. Last monday night we had a Family Night with the bishop and his family and it was awesome!! We made tacos and guacamole!!! SOO GOOOD!! I miss guac and chips so much...

But moving on, this wee was a lot better with finding new investigators, but no one accepted a baptismal date, so that was a little bit of a bummer. But we had some really good lessons with investigators progressing. It makes me feel a lot better when we have investigators that read and like the church and want to learn more.

One really great thing that happened this week was when I gave my talk last week I told everyone that my favorite juices are Maracuya and Lulo, so almost every lunch we had with members we had one of those juices!!

Also I told this member that my birthday was April 5th, but then she got upset with me and said that she would´ve bought a cake for me, then we stopped by her house later in the week and she got me a cake!! People love me here!

This week nothing really big happened, but yesterday was absolutely nuts. After church we went to lunch and the family made us a huge plate of arroz con coco, french fries, and chicken nuggets, but the chicken nuggets were a little funky so after we ate we went back to the house to rest, but after I got up, I threw up. Then we called the office, they told me to drink Gatorade, so I drank some Gatorade, laid down, then threw up again. Then once again slept.

But we had to go give a blessing to the sister of the Relief Society president so we went to her house at about 8. Basically that was one of the freakiest experiences of my life because turned out that there was a bad spirit in her. So long story short, priesthood power is real, we cast out spirits, and I didn´t sleep very well last night.  Again, kinda freaky, yesterday we kinda did an exorcism / cast out an evil spirit from a lady and I don´t really want to take all the time to write what happened so here´s a video, hopefully you can download it and watch it.

Click HERE for Nathan's Video on YouTube

Ya, that´s kinda it for this week. I think saturday we´ll have 3 interviews for baptisms because we have 3 baptisms scheduled for May 11th!!

Well that´s it! Love you all! Abrazos y besos!

Walking in the Rain!

April 23, 2013

Well this week was pretty good, not too much exciting happened but the rainy season started and OH MY GOSH Barranquilla was horribled designed because all the streets are just perfectly made to converge and make huge street rivers. It´s basically just like a flash flood in the streets and very unsafe (Oh these street rain waters are very dirty as in sewer dirty). We took off our shoes to walk through the rivers and we got soaked  walking back to the house, but I thought it was fun.

This week we also had interviews with the president, but traveling to the interviews was the funnest part. We took this big bus called the Transmetro then transferred to another bus to get to the office. Once there the interviews were backed up so we went out contacting for a bit then came back for the interviews. All went good, the president and I just basically talked and then we ended with a prayer, not much really happened.

But traveling back our area was crazy. We took the bus again but had to wait forever for it to come, then when we got to the terminal place it was absolutely packed because everyone was going home from work or school. When our bus arrived everyone turned into savages and were fighting/pushing to just get on the bus. We didn´t get on. So we left to find a taxi, but no one wanted to take us that far so we walked around for a while and finally we found a taxi and at about 8 we got back to our area. Super looong day!

Sunday I gave my first talk and it was great! I was a little nervous because it was the first talk that I had given in spanish, but I rocked it, even cracked some jokes and everyone was laughing (I said that the bishop assigned me to talk about the obedience of the wife to her husband. The bishop almost died, but then I said chiste and everyone laughed!)

Basically that´s kinda it for events that happened this week, but HEY I finally got my Scripture Cases!!!! They look sooo awesome! I´ll send you a pic! I´m probably overreacting but I´m happy! Language is coming along pretty good, I almost know all the words for body parts! Rolling my rrs is still coming along.

We had some really good lessons this week and another really funny. The best one that we had was our investigator Reyla, she´s been super great with reading all the assignments we give her and coming to church, but didn´t have a testimony about the Book of Mormon so we talked to her about praying and receiving an answer through the Holy Ghost and how she can feel the Holy Ghost and on Tuesday when we went to visit her SHE GOT HER ANSWER! Super awesome lesson!! Now she´s more excited for her baptism (May 11th).

One of our funny investigators is Carlos Altamiranda (the old toy story 2 chess playing guy). We´ve taught him alot and talked about the church, the organization of the church and everything. And basically he just keeps telling us how great our church is and how much the Catholic church lacks, but won´t accept a baptismal date although he reads the Book of Mormon every day. He´s a funny old guy, but this week we´re going to crack down and program him for baptism.

Dad to answer some of your questions, in the mission there are about 198 missionaries, in my ward normally about 140 people attend, and North Americans in the mission we don´t exactly know how many but we´re guessing about 40. Things are going better with my comp, we´re working better together and doing better with teachings.

Oh hey and the mail system down here is super lame because I just got a letter from Clint that he sent just after conference, but I haven´t gotten letters from anyone else so please be understanding and don´t get mad if I don´t reply to your letters because chances are that I haven´t received them.

I had a little paper with all the things I was going to talk about but I forgot it in the house so that´s it for this week! This week again we didn´t do anything, but my comp just got money from his fam so next week I think we´re going to the zoo!

Love you all! Abrazos y besos!!

Have a Coke and a Sonrisa!

April 15, 2013 (Patriots Day)

Hey¡¡ How´s it going? And yes, I´m on the stupid upside down exclamation computer again.

This week was good and really rough at the same time. Good because we had some great lessons with investigators and finally got one programmed for baptism and rough because almost everyone that we contacted just told us to come back another day or they weren´t interested at all, which after awhile got kinda tiring.  It seemed like we walked forever far and I´ve just been exhausted at the end of each day.

On a super-spiritual note...OH GREAT NEWS¡¡¡ THE COCA COLA PROMOTION CONTINUES¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡ We thought it was over but we had like 16 caps and one day a lady a tienda told us she had coca cola to give away so we brought all the caps and empty bottles to trade....we drank alot of coke.

Some funny things that happened this week, we were talking with this member kid and he told us that this one lady up the street really doesn´t like the mormons so for a test we sent the kid Jorge with a pamphlet to see what would happen. He dropped the pamphlet next to the lady, she tore it up and threw it in the street while screaming profanity at Jorge. It made me laugh.

Also outside our apartment in the morning there is a fitness class, but it´s kinda old fat ladies and one big muscly guy. The best thing about this class is that the teacher is fat and they really don´t do much for exercise, more like jogging in place and punching the sky.

Bummer about this week is that our ward mission leader left to Bogota to work so now we don´t have a mission leader and less awesome dinners because he usually cooks for us.

Once again for pday we did nothing (we can´t do anything with other missionaries unless we achieve the goal for baptisms. So that´s kinda a downer), but I did get a haircut and we found out that our cedullas of extranjero came in so we´ll be stopping by the immigration office to pick those up and then I´ll be a legit Colombian¡¡

Also exciting news, I´m finally going to give a talk in church¡¡ It´s only taken 9 months for someone to have confidence in my speaking abilities¡ Pumped for that, just going to rock this ward with awesome Norberg powered doctrine¡

Well that´s kinda it for this week, hoping that this coming week we don´t get as rejected so we can find more people to teach.

Love you all¡¡ Abrazos y besos¡

Easter & Birthday Weeks!

April 8, 2013

Hey¡¡ This letter is going to be super awesome and detailed because mom got on me a little bit last week for being a crappy writer so I´m going to be better this time¡ (oh and the exclamation is still lame this week too).

So to start out, this week was kinda so so, it seemed like almost every person that we contacted didn´t want to talk to us so that was a bummer..especially on my birthday... But we had some good lessons with investigators, one of my favorite people here is Carlos, he´s this old Catholic guy that reminds me of the Old guy in the video clip before Toy Story 2. He´s kinda bald, small, and even does the little mouth thing.. It´s really freaky how similar they are, but really funny too.

One really awesome thing that is going down here is a battle between Coca Cola and Postobon (another soda company). Basically all you have to do is take to lids and a empty liter bottle and you get a free Coca Cola or Postobon, depending on what lids an bottle you trade and we really monopolized on that¡ I drank soooo much Coca Cola this week... it isn´t even funny, we´ve just been stocking up on all the lids that we can find, it´s fantastic¡¡

My birthday was a really average day, for lunch Hermana Teresa made arroz con coco and fish and it was so good¡¡ I love that stuff¡¡ Contacting sucked that day though, like I said before, literally no one wanted to talk to us. When we got back to the house we had a little cake and after I blew out the candle the other  savage Elders that I live with attacked me with spuma (foam spray) and silly string. I´m going to try to get the video to you guys so you can understand what happens during birthdays here.

On saturday I received my birthday package and OOOHHHH MMMMYYY GOOOSHHH¡¡¡¡ Family you are great, but that tech deck skate ramp park thing is outragous¡¡¡ But I love it¡¡¡ Also with the yo yo, shirt, pen refilsl and everything¡¡

 Conference was great, saturday we watched in Spanish and I understood basically everything¡¡¡ High five for me¡ and then sunday we watched it in English, which was super awesome, because I like to listen to their voices.

My fan is getting more and more ghetto/sketchy

And to top the week off, yesterday was the 200th birthday of Barranquilla so alot of places in the city were setting off fireworks and it reminded me of the 4th of July. So ya, that´s how my week went. I hope that you are content with it¡¡

Love you¡¡¡¡¡ Abrazos y besos¡¡¡¡


April 1, 2013

Hey!! How´s it going?? I am staying in Barranquilla with my companion Elder Gonzalez.  This week was pretty good, but kinda slow with Semana Santa. No one had school and basically almost everyone left for vacation. But they all celebrate that Jesus died on Thursday, but he really died Friday soo their beliefs are a little bit incorrect.

We had some good lessons this week and had a couple investigators come to church. In the morning today my comp cut his hand on his fan, because it doesn´t have a gaurd on it so we couldn´t really do anything for pday...which sucks...But it just makes me more committed to do something next week!

Love you all! Abrazos y besos!