New Companion!

Buenas tardes, todos!

Basically, the highlight of this week has been transfers. I'm staying here, while Elder Bonilla went back to Monterrey to finish his last 6 weeks in the field before he goes home. In his place, is Elder Garcia, from the Dominican Republic. Because he's Dominican, his Spanish is really different. (He's constantly saying something along the lines of "So in my country, we call this thing by this name, but I'm not sure if that's the same thing here". And it usually isn't. That's okay. The more Spanish I learn, the better. Also, he speaks a good deal of English, so when we talk, it's mostly Spanglish. Whenever we want to say something in a group of people and we don't neccessarirly want anyone else to hear, we speak in English. As another missionary I met in the CCM said, it's kinda fun having a semi-secret language. :)

Anyway, Elder Garcia is super awesome. He has 7 months in the mission, so he's fairly new, but he's a great missionary. He has a lot of enthusiasm, and he's a hard worker. I've only been with him for less than a week, but I've already learned a lot from him. He's also fairly new in the Church; he was baptized less than 3 years ago, and he's still the only member in his family, but he knows a lot about the Church and the doctrine and everything. Anyway, here he is:

I'm not sure why, but I look really tired in this picture. I don't think I've gotten the whole selfie thing down yet. Or smiling nice for pictures. I'll keep working on that.

Contact of the Week:

So we were contacting in this one colonia where we didn't know a lot of the people. We were having a lot of trouble finding people in this particular colonia, because people are almost never outside. We found some people in a park, and we naturally decided to talk to them. These people were a couple of teenagers and a bunch of little kids. Turns out, they are all cousins, and most of them are visiting from Texas, so they knew a lot of English. One of the teenagers we talked to, as it turns out, was baptized in Monterrey when she was 11 because a friend invited her to church, and she even went to the temple to do baptisms for the dead, but went inactive and lost contact with the Church not long after that, mostly because her parents are super Catholic, and won't let her have anything to do with the Church. We're not sure how she got permission to be baptized, but she was baptized. We invited her to go to church with us, but since she's still technically a minor (she just turned 17), we can't really do much with her until either she turns 18 or her parents change their minds and let us talk to her more. We did set a followup appointment in the park tomorrow, because she really wants to come back to church, but we'll just have to see how everything goes with her parents. At the very least, I thought this was interesting because we found someone who was already baptized, and we just kinda ran into her.

Anyway, I'm out of time for this week, so thanks for the letters and prayers!

--

Elder Jakob Schramm

From Camille:   Here are a couple of other pictures Jakob added to the drive: