Great Week in Barranquilla!

May 20, 2013

What´s up people¡¡¡ How´s it going?

This week has been awesome, but kinda slow with lessons. We had two big conferences this week; one on Wednesday with President Gaviria and the other on Saturday with Elder Uceda (Area 70). Both were super awesome... blew my mind too.

They talked a lot about what we can do better with our investigators, how we can help them to keep their commitments better, and different things we need to do with them. All in all they were awesome days. I learned a lot of stuff and found some way that I can improve.

One big thing that the two talked about was English. The missionaries that don´t speak English need to study, they really hammered on that. The rest of the week was pretty good. Our numbers for lessons have been down because we´ve been contacting a lot in apart of our area where the previous missionaries  didn´t really go. It´s been kinda rough there, but we had an amazing few lessons with one family.

We first got a reference for a girl ,Vera, so we went and taught her the first lessons and she loved it and wanted to learn more. We said that we would come back Thursday for another lesson, but when we got there she wasn´t there.Vera's little sister, Lora, was there and she had read the lesson 1 pamphlet and had a lot of questions so we taught her. She loved it and wanted to learn more so we said we would come back there on Saturday. We went back and Vera wasn´t there again, but Lora was and also her cousin Liseth. Turned out that Liseth was super interested in the Book of Mormon and had read all of Moroni and all of the introduction.

I had my mind blown¡¡ It was sooo awesome¡¡ She is golden¡¡ She reads everything we give her and understands it too and she really wants to know if it is all true¡ I'm soo pumped for those three¡¡

We´re also working really hard with Reyla and Leslie so that they can get baptized either this week or next week. They are just a little indecisive so we need to give them a little push.

We didn´t do anything for pday... just played pass the pigs and slept. We´re going to have a Family Night with some members and Reyla. I am making hamburgers for everyone so I get to bust out my Nielsen skills tonight¡¡

Well that´s about it¡¡ Love you all¡¡

Abrazos y besos¡¡

Skype was Awesome!

May 13, 2013

Hey!! So this weekly update is going to be kind of short because I wrote last wednesday and not much has really happened. 

This week we contacted a lot in the part of our area where the other missionaries haven`t gone to before. It was just really loooooonng contacting and it just made me more tired at the end of the day. We found some new people but not a ton, which is kind of a bummer. 

We had a really awesome lesson with Reyla the other day. We were talking about her baptism and when we would do it because she wants to get baptized. Her parents aren`t super supportive so we were talking about that and then her aunt told us that they have a plan. So I was thinking something bad was going to happened but it turned out that Leslie (cousin of Reyla and daughter of the aunt of Reyla) wants to get baptized too with Reyla!! 

So now we`re going to baptize them both on the same day, but we just have to pick a day so we`re going to talk with them tomorrow about it!!! Hopefully this Saturday or the next! Fingers crossed! 

The Skype call yesterday was super awesome! Loved talking with you guys!! It was really weird to see the house again. The place that we went to skype is the internet of Reyla, so once we finished talking with our families, her dad just looked at us, told us to shake his hand and that we didn`t have to pay!!! So we got to talk free! 

But ya, that`s about it for this week. Everything is going well with my comp, just working hard (or hardly working) just kidding. I`m going to be making some goals in these next couple weeks so I can accomplish and get to where I want to be in this coming year.

Love you all!! This week we`re going to have a zone conference and a conference with an Area 70. It should be a great week! 

Love you all!! Abrazos y besos!!

Week of Food & Floods!

Mary 8, 2013

Me, Alvarez, Webb & Gonzalez

What´s up?! This week has been pretty crazy.

Starting with Monday/Tuesday, we passed by Sofia, the lady we did the exorcism blessing on, and she went to the hospital to get medical attention because she wasn´t doing too well. Basically more creepy stuff/bad spirit stuff was happening at their house too so we gave her husband a blessing. She´s doing a lot better now which is good to know so we´re hoping that she can keep improving.

River in the Street.

This week has been kinda rough with my health because I got sick again. On Wednesday we ate fish, but it was different than what we have had before. Elder Web and I got sick and I threw up more and just stayed in the house the whole day with Elder Webb. The bummer is that since that Wednesday I haven´t been feeling super great. I can´t eat alot of food or else I throw up... :( .

It rained some more this week SUPER HARD!! The streets were rivers and it was thundering really loudly too. Luckily we were already in the house so we just waited it out. After the storm a ton of bugs just showed up out of no where. It was really hard to eat/teach because bugs landed on us every 10 seconds.

We had Zone conference Saturday and they told us that the transfers are now going to be on Mondays. Our pday for the week of transfers is Wednesday, but the rest are on Monday like normal. They also told us that this Sunday or Monday we can Skype families!!! YAAA! Doesn´t feel like it was that long ago when I called for Christmas.

Me & some friends.

Also at the conference I got my cedula!! Basically it´s just a foreign id card, but it´s super awesome! I also got 3 letters, two from Granny and one from Mindy. So sorry people that have sent me letters, I haven´t gotten them ...

More Friends.

Elder Alvarez (left) and Elder Briceño - que lindos!

On Sunday we found out about our new changes and my comp, Elder Gonzales, peaced out to Cartagena and the rest of us stayed. My new comp now is Elder Briceño. He´s from Chile and super awesome. We get along really well and he´s a great missionary. We only have two days together so I don´t really know him that much, but so far we are doing great.

One of the best things about transfers was that I got to wait in the terminal for 7 hours. I just chilled there and got to talk with all of the missionaries passing through. I got to see sooo many people. I finally saw Elder Neff (from my group in Bogota) and Elder Soderborg!!! It was awesome talking with them and catching up on what has happened in the mission.

Mickey D's!

Today for pday we finally did something! We went to the Plaza to find Taco Bell, but it wasn´t there!!! We weren´t happy. So we ate Mcdonalds instead. I also bought a new bag because my old one is worn out, dirty, and broken.

Things are going pretty well with our investigators. Reyla passed through her interview perfectly fine, but the problem is that her parents aren´t super supportive so we´re working really hard with her so she can get baptized. We also have two others, Monica and Vicente, who just need their interviews and then they´ll be set to go for batism! We´re just working with them trying to get them preped for that and finding new people to teach!

We also got a new rule for pdays! Every first pday of the month we can have a district pday, meaning we can go to different plaves in the city with our whole district, and the pday after we get money on the 15th we can have a pday with 4 missionaries! So basically we´re going to be doing more fun stuff for pdays!!!

Chicken Chow Time.

So ya! That´s it for this week, I´m going to be writing again Monday so I´m not sure how much will happened between now and then but love you all!!








Abrazos y besos!

Stay Classy.

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!