NEW COMPANION written March 10, 2014
This week has been a blast. On Tuesday I said goodbye to Elder Mason and welcomed Elder Mendez to Patchogue. He is a really cool guy. He is from Los Angeles and his parents are from Mexico. They pretty much only speak Spanish, so Elder Mendez speaks it really well. I think my vocabulary has doubled in just the last week alone. He's been on his mission for about 15 months, so we're both pretty old out here. The other new missionary in our district is named Elder Ozuna and he is straight from the Dominican Republic. So now our district is unstoppable when it comes to speaking Spanish.
We've been more or less up to the usual things. Teaching English class on Tuesday and Wednesday. People are enjoying it, but few of them are interested in the church. That's okay, they may gain interest over time. We did a bunch of door knocking on Wednesday and met a number of people. Now it's just a matter of continually going back and hopefully finding a time to meet with them.
We met up with a less active family on Thursday night, the Diaz family. We taught about divine worth and how no matter what has happened in our lives, we're still children of God and can always repent. It went well, but they still didn't come to church. We'll just have to keep trying.
Friday we got to teach Hermano Ventura and his wife who isn't a member. She made us a huge dinner of chicken and rice and salad, then we sat down to talk. He would really like her to get baptized, but nobody is quite sure how she feels about it. She won't ever open up to anyone. We tried to talk to her about how she can get an answer about baptism, but she was very quiet and wouldn't answer most of our questions. She is a very nice woman, she's just very shy.
Saturday was spent mostly looking for people. We knocked a lot of doors and looked up a lot of people, to no avail. We had a good time though. I got to knock doors with Elder Ozuna and learn some Dominican sayings. Grano a grano se le llena la gallina el buche. Take it for what you will.
Sunday was a nice day too. Church went well. I got to translate for another speaker from the stake. Translating on the stand is always an adventure. It was cool though, because I had Elder Mendez on the front row and if there was ever a word I didn't know, I would just ask him. Nice to have native speakers around. Later, we had dinner with a member family. We got chicken sandwiches, El Salvador style. Which is essentially shredded chicken, cabbage, beets, and romaine lettuce. I really enjoyed them. After that, we visited a less active family and they gave us a salad that was really just chopped up cucumber, tomato, and almonds. I feel like a salad should have lettuce, but apparently cucumber and tomato is all you need. Whatever. It was still pretty good.
And here we are today. We've got an appointment set up with the Briceno family for tonight, so hopefully they don't cancel on us again. Things are going well, the weather is warming up, and I'm learning lots of Spanish. Life is good.
Love,
Elder Erickson
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