Simple teaching is the best and Spanish hardly a problem anymore.

January 14, 2015

Awesome hike on P Day 

Mom,

My week was pretty good. Nothing really big happened this week though haha. I had a bad morning today though. Last night when we got back to the house, we went to buy food. We went to this little food place and bought giant hot dogs, called completos. They were a foot and a half big. We ate them last night and I woke up this morning and threw up twice sooo my morning was wonderful. The teaching is going good though. We don't have a lot of lessons, but we have some really good lessons. Spanish is hardly a problem now. My companion told me that he's gonna have me be the senior companion from now until the change, because he's sick of being it and he wants to give me more opportunity. So I have a lot more responsibility now and it's been really fun. We have two to three lessons a day. That Mormon Message (Enduring Love) might be my favorite one haha.

I don't know why Elder Tecun doesn't like to do contacts, but it's okay I'll do a lot more contacts when I have my new companion in this sector. Contacting means talking to people on the street, going door to door, talking to people on the bus or train, it just means trying to find new people to teach. Things are good with him though, we get along really well. There are four missionaries in our house. They're in different rooms than us, but they're pretty much considered roommates haha. The other two missionaries are Elder Melander and Elder Purnell. Yeah about the sector, I am in the biggest sector in the entire mission. There are only six missionaries in the sector. We split the sector between the companionships, and we have the top part, which is all neighborhoods. It's not super huge, it's big for sure, but not big enough where we have bikes. The other two companionships have bikes though. The other Elders in our house have bikes and they have to ride them for 45 to get to the end of their sector. The sector is about 10 miles long. I haven't blessed the sacrament one time because I always play the piano.

Yeah the cops here don't really do anything about guns being shot. There are people on the street smoking weed, a few missionaries have seen people get killed, people shoot guns very often. It's pretty scary. For divisions, with Elder Burhoe, I learned that the teaching doesn't need to be super in depth. You can teach super simple and have it be very powerful. Elder León always taught super complicated and it was pretty tough to teach with him. With Elder Melander I realized that I can teach better than I thought, and we just had a good time together. I get along really well with everyone in our house. We don't ride bikes in this sector, but the other missionaries do. Yeah there were over 2000 ties that we bought. We each only picked out about 50 that we like, which is still a ton in reality. We are giving away the rest of them. Right now there is just a huge pile of ties under our bed.  

Elder Tecun and a huge pile of ties!!

The Book of Life haha we taught a lesson reading that chapter yesterday, and it was a really good lesson. They are very big possible baptisms, so we have to keep working hard on them. The dad has quit smoking and drinking tea, which is a really big sign. The only problem is they aren't married, so we have to marry them before we can baptism them.

We are also teaching two people with the same issue of not knowing where their records are. They say that they were baptised, and they have witnesses and even pictures of the baptism, but there is no baptismal record. So we don't know what to do. We might have to rebaptism them or not, but we don't know whether to consider them investigators or less active members haha.
     
Also something else that happened this week is President Cook´s mom died, so if there's anything you could do for him, an email or something like that, I'm sure he would appreciate it a ton!

Love, 

Elder Stam                                

Proud of his missionary tag!