"Hoopy" New Year

Pday this week was kind of crazy. We were told that there was a team, here in Tarma, that wanted to play us missionaries in basketball. So we show up and they said, "hey let's go to the coliseum" (which is kind of like their rec center). So we said, "sure, that would be a lot better." The court there has a wood floor, even though it's kind of crappy (wood pieces would get kicked up as I ran) but they have decent hoops. Little did we know that we were walking into the biggest game of our lives. Haha. All of a sudden they had fans rolling in and they had a referee there to officiate! So there was me, Elder Larson, Elder Walker, and Elder Calle. We played for like three hours straight. It was kind of nuts but fun! Elder White and Elder Roberts stayed with us for the night because we were heading to Huancayo the next day for the zone leader council.

Tuesday in Huancayo we had KFC for lunch and lasagna from Pizza Hut for dinner. We learned about the doctrine of Christ and also watched a training on how assistant's and secretaries should be the best proselyters in the mission. So they are going to be in the office a lot less now. There are a lot of changes in the mission right now. For example, when we do divisions, the other missionaries will be coming to our area instead of us going to their's because our area should be a model of how it should be.

We got back from Huancayo on Wednesday and Jersy from San Ramon actually drove me back. He's doing really well and Kevin is going to be baptized soon, which is awesome. We had a decent day of work. We played soccer at the church and visited with a number of people.

Thursday we had a full day of work. We cleaned the church for our service. We were going to go to this chakra (farm) for this lady but she turned us down. When we showed up, she said they did not have time and already got "it" done. But that is all right, so we clean the church instead. We had some lessons and that is about it.

Friday we did our weekly planning. We visited Sergio and when we got there he was drunk. He told us how he just can't stop drinking and smoking marijuana and everything. It was sad. We talked about the atonement and how he has power over temptations. José Villegas came with us on a couple of visits, which was nice. We had our weekly meeting with the district president also (the district president is kind of like a stake president of the district). I did a baptismal interview that night and then went out for hamburgers. We found a nice little burger place for 5 soles.

Saturday we went to La Oroya to do 2 baptismal interviews. A mom and her eight-year-old little daughter are getting baptized. I interviewed the little girl and my companion interviewed the mom. I almost didn't pass her. I had to explain most of it and it seemed like she wasn't quite understanding things. I went off to the side for a moment and prayed about it. I basically explained to God that I was going to pass her. I felt really calm and peaceful about it. When I thought about not passing her, I felt like I was literally choking, which was kind of weird. It was a pretty cool experience. Her mom is awesome and is really on the ball. We got to lunch really late and we were only able to get in 2 visits before dinner. The missionaries had their baptism, which was awesome and that was about it for the day.

The new schedule on Sunday seems to throw us off a little bit. We didn't have a single lesson. We tried to visit people in the morning and they weren't there, then we had church and then we had our branch council. That took up a good chunk of the day but, we had about five of our investigators at church so that was nice! Well, that was my week. I hope you had a great week and we'll chat later!