Thick Tortillas

Hola from San Clemente!

This week went pretty well. I am still trying to get the hang of this missionary thing, so my mood often changes from super eager to work and doubting my will to do anything. But that is normal, and I am figuring it out. My biggest challenge has been actually talking to people. I feel pretty good about speaking in Spanish, but my comprehension isn´t as fast. But, I am progressing and trying to love the people and open up to them.

This week our numbers weren´t quite as high for lessons and such, but it was still a good week. San Clemente is usually divided into two sectors (so 4 missionaries split up), but as a trio we take the whole city, which gives us a lot of people to visit. But, a lot of people aren´t really progressing, so this week we will try to do more contacting and focusing on a few solid investigators.

We had a lot of rain this past week, so it sounds like we weren´t too different from Florida. On Wednesday night we all woke up at about 4 am to terrible rain, wind, hail, and lightnining. We have a metal roof and there isn´t really anything besides rafters between the roof and ceiling, so it was super loud. That is unusual weather for here, but everything was okay.

Yesterday we had an awesome lunch with the branch president, Presidente Ibañez. We had barbecued chicken, pork, and choripan with rice and tortillas. It was a lot of food, and for the first time I wasn´t hungry by the time we got home at night. Hermana Ibañez showed us how to make tortillas with a ton of flour, oil, hot water with salt, and bicarbonato. But the tortillas here are super thick and basically just bread. They are really good, but probably really fattening. Oh this week for lunch one day, I also made Kraft Mac n Cheese, which was a good taste of home.

Oh, this week we also started focusing on teaching FamilySearch. This is such an important tool that can really help people grow their faith and do good. Our branch has a Temple trip to Santiago in October, so we hope to get people excited and ready for that via FamilySearch. I am going to get one of those Mi Familia booklets and fill it out to help in our teaching.

Well, it was a pretty good week. Still overwhelming, but I am getting the hang of it.

con cariño,

Elder Richards