Día 111

This past week has been pretty good. I've had some breakthroughs with the language and I've been able to understand and communicate pretty well, so I'm really excited about that. On Monday we visited with the family in the ward from Ukraine that only two of the children speak Spanish. We watched the movie "Finding Faith in Christ" in Russian so that they could understand it, and I felt brand new again as I couldn't understand anything that was being said in the movie. I also came to be grateful that I'm learning Spanish and not Russian. Every time we visit this family they give us some Ukranian food that is always kind of strange, so I was really excited when I saw that this time it was 3 pancakes rolled up. Then I ate it and discovered that there was some kind of pumpkin or squash vegetable in the middle of the pancakes, so that was a little strange, but oh well.

We've run into some walls with the Guillermo family, and we've fasted the past 2 Sundays to know how we can help them. It appears that Danny really won't budge on waiting to get married until next year even though he knows he needs to be baptized. However, he gave permission to Axel and Bryan that they could be baptized. The only problem now is that Danny won't sign the baptismal record forms, because he believes that it isn't important to sign something to be baptized, the same reason why he won't get married civilly. We tried to explain about the form, but he just wasn't understanding and we're going to try to explain it a different way. They also didn't attend church yesterday because they had a birthday party for Axel until 12:00. We're disappointed, but we're just going to keep on working and press forward with faith.

Alan is really great and is reading and excited for his baptism. The only problem is yesterday élder Cruz and I had to go to the Villa to pick up some investigators, and our ward mission leader was to pick up Alan for church. We called and reminded him the night before, but Alan nor the ward mission leader came to church, so we aren't really sure what happened. That is a problem though, because to be baptized in this mission the investigators have to attend church 3 times, so it pushes his baptismal date back a week.

This week Jessica Guillermo gave us a referral of one of her friends, and we contacted Olga and her daughter Graciela and they accepted everything in the first lesson and came to church yesterday with us. They are looking for the right church, and Jessica had lent Olga a Book of Mormon and she was already reading it, so that was pretty awesome.

On Saturday we donated blood at a blood drive in a chapel in Chacarita, about 45 minutes from Constitución. élder Johnson and I were completely calm about the whole thing because we've donated before, but élder Buxton and élder Cruz were freaking out about it. Afterwards élder Buxton and élder Cruz had to stay in their chairs for about 5-10 minutes because they were really pale and loopy. 

Have a great week and enjoy winter because it's really hot and humid here. I'm thankful for all of you.

élder John William Garrett