I bought some pants.

July 16, 2018

This was a long week that had a lot of nothing that spiked in stressfulness at the very end, but it's all good now. We were able to visit some members and had a couple successful weekly activities in the chapel throughout the week, but not too much progressed in regards to who we have to teach.

On Tuesday we taught English. The topics we discussed covered global warming, alternative energy sources, CO2 emissions, deforestation, endangered animals, fossil fuels, and pollution...it's a more advanced group. I was surprised by how much I knew about all that hippy dippy jazz. I could explain everything but geothermic turbines. Elder Burnard helped me with that one. 

It's starting to get got here. I don't know if we've hit 100° yet, but the combination of higher 80s, direct--and I mean DIRECT--sun exposure, and humidity makes it pretty difficult. Also since nobody is really out and about, but simultaneously not home, there's a lot of walking to do. I've been sweating a lot recently. Wednesday was a sun day that was fortunately interrupted by lunch with a family of solid members (Cristóbal: Spanish Hagrid). It was a rather uneventful day otherwise. 

Thursday had some pretty successful activities in the evening. Because we lost a companionship of missionaries in Cartagena this transfer, we now teach English on Tuesdays and Thursdays, instead of just Tuesday. This time we talked about countable and uncountable nouns, and idioms. After that we had our ward FHE where we had a pretty solid turnout. We watched The Restoration movie (the 20 min version) then played a game afterward.

Friday was a kind of weird day. Why? I don't know, but it just was. There was a baptism in the other ward in the evening so we invited Angel, one of our few investigators, to come and he did!

We then went from there to Los Alcázares to stay the night with the zone leaders so we could start our companionship exchange the next day! Normally, an exchange starts in the evening, and continues on until lunch the next day, but the baptism threw a wrench into that plan so we just did it all of Saturday. We played soccer in the morning with the youth from their ward and tossed a football around as we waited for our team's turn to play. We then headed back drenched in sweat, showered up, and headed out for an hour and a halfish. I was with Elder De La Rosa again and we had a pretty good time talking. Nobody we talked to really wanted anything , but then again a solid 90% percent of the people there were tourists. After lunch and studies, we had a lesson with a man that they'd been teaching for a while. There was a little hiccup and the lesson ended up lasting a loooot longer than it should have been. Just so you all know, Jesus Christ is in fact the Jehovah of the Old Testament. We don't pray to Jehovah in the name of Jesus. We then had a member take us to San Javier to pass by some people who ended up not being home aaand that was pretty much the intercambio.

So, what caused the stressful spike was this:

On Thursday I was informed by our ward mission leader that I would be giving a 10 minute-long talk in sacrament meeting, on Friday we learned that we needed to meet with the dueña of the old apartment to turn in the keys by Sunday, and all of Saturday was spent on exchanges with the zone leaders. So the task list jumped from one item (plan district meeting) to needing to write a talk, set up everything with the dueña, prepare for exchanges, go to a baptism, and have exchanges. It doesn't seem like much when I write it down, but the talk is what was really driving me crazy; I practically didn't have any time to write or prepare because study times and evenings were always taken up by something else! But it's fine. I wrote and gave the talk, people told me it went well, and it miraculously hit the 10 minute mark. Everything else on my list was taken care of in due time, each one addressed according to their urgency. It was a little refreshing to be on my toes like that again.

Boy howdy that was a lot of writing I just cranked out. I have interviews with President Galli this week so I'm pretty pumped for that. I bought three pairs of pants today for proselyting. As of Friday I was down to one sun-bleached pair. I'm pretty stoked. Hopefully I can find a suit soon. Elder Burnard gets impatient with shopping really quick.

I hope everyone has fun at the Jensen reunion!

Elder Jensen :)