Feb 4, 2013

Ok! So my comp and I have worked super hard this week but we were still not able to bring any families to church yesterday. We have worked day in and day out, contacting families and teaching lessons. We have 11 families that we are teaching so that keeps us super busy throughout the day. We are always running back and forth, teaching and visiting recent converts and less active people. This week, I fasted 3 times. One time last sat-sun, wed-thur, and this sat-sun. We did these fasts as a Zone so every single missionary in Villa Flor was fasting. We have seen a lot of success but we are praying and hoping for more. As I said, we weren't able to bring a family to church yesterday so after we took the sacrament, we left to go look for a family to bring to the church. We walked in just about every single one of the neighborhoods that are in our area. We found a lot of new families to teach and a lot of people that wanted to go to church but not til next Sunday. So by the time we had finished looking, church was over so we headed to our food appointment. And we got robbed... Yes, it happened. But don't worry, I am perfectly fine and so is my comp. So we were walking down this street at 1ish in the afternoon in front of one of our recent converts houses and this guy walked up to us. He was about 21 yrs old and was acting all cool with us. He asked us where we were from so we told him. Just about every person asks us where we are from so we didn't think anything of it. Well when he figured out I was gringo, he started to talk really quiet and in a way that I couldn't really understand him. But he told us that we were going to give him our watches and our rings, and since I was the only one wearing rings, that was directed at me. My comp started to tell him no and the guy told us that if we didn't do it, he had 2 other guys that were waiting in the street, waiting to see if we were going to try to get away. He also said that he was going to break our legs or something but I couldn't quite understand that part. So realize that situation.... We are standing in the middle of this neighborhood road, at 1ish in the afternoon, with all the neighborhood kids and parents walking by us. And the other 2 guys he said he had waiting, we didn't know which ones they were. So my comp handed over his watch, which was a gift from his Dad who is not a member, and I handed over mine. He then motioned to my hands and said to give him the silver ring. He pointed to my Joseph Smith ring when he said this. So I gave it to him. He then asked for the other one too, the CTR ring I got as a gift from Bro. Zito. I was tying to make this conversation last to see if anyone would see and help. So I gave up my other ring. He then asked us where we were going. We were headed up the street to eat. So we told him where and he told us to go straight there and that these 2 other guys would be watching us to see if we would try anything. He then gave us fist bumps and walked away. We turned and walked the other direction toward our food appointment. When we got there, they weren't home so we had to wait until they got there. When they did, we told then what happened and they got really mad that people would do such a thing. One of the members knew who did it and he left in his car to go look for them. He came back a little while saying that he couldn't find him but that he was going to get our stuff back for us. So in all, we got lucky with the robbing that did happen to us and we are safe so don't worry about us!

Ok so I've had the awesome opportunity to teach people English here. Its a lot harder than you think and I myself have a hard time remembering how to speak it sometimes. So after I teach people about English, they like to throw all these crazy words in Spanish at me that are really hard to say. They are called Trabalenguas, or Tongue Twisters.
Here are some examples:
Paranguauterimicuaro
Meteorologo
Odontologo
Arqueologo
Oterrinonaringologo
Descontatinoplapolitamisar
Those are only a few, and they have long sentences that have a lot of words that sound the same or have the same meaning and are really hard to say, especially for a gringo who was raised speaking English!!

So this week was pretty crazy but I loved it! I love being here in Nicaragua, serving the Lord!!

“When you’re on the Lord’s errand, you’re entitled to the Lord’s blessings.” Thomas S. Monson.

¡¡¡Les Quiero!!!

ELDER DAUGHERTY