Buenos dias

Hola mi familia,

We had a pretty chill week here in El Olivar!! We're just in the groove of missionary work and I can't believe it's been another week!

This week we had a fun little service project.  We painted the house of a less active family so that was pretty fun.  We blasted our mormon tabernacle choir music and sanded (I don't remember what that's called?) and painted their house.  It was fun and mostly I just listened to all the Elders joke around in Spanish.  I know Spanish and can communicate fine but still not well enough to make jokes and be funny haha.  Also we got some shirts for our zone "El Olivar" that I'm wearing in those pictures painting and it is pretty funny because they are bright green and I don't know who chose the color but they didn't think about how all of the people that work for the city wear the same shade of bright green.  All of the gardeners, garbage workers, police officers, and everyone so we put them on and were walking and realized we looked exactly like all of the city workers around.  It was pretty funny.  

Yesterday we had a broadcast for all of the members of ward council in the area. I'm not sure if in other parts of the world they are focusing on ward councils but here just about every training or broadcast we have is a focus on ward councils and how we can "hasten the work of salvation."

They are putting a huge emphasis on missionaries and how everybody together needs to partcipate on three things: Baptize, Retain, and Rescue. Everything that we do in ward council should be focused on people specifically that need help in one of these three aspects.  It's pretty cool and has been changing a lot.  Elder Uceda, the member of the 70 in charge of this area is really great and everything he says is golden.  And he's from Peru so he's even cooler. 

In the broadcast we also heard from Elder C. Scott Grow and Elder Waddell.  You can tell Elder Waddell served in Spain because he has a lisp in his Spanish - Matt, do you have the Spain lisp?

We met a man named Joel this week and he's solid.  He accepted a baptismal date for Dec. 7th and came to church yesterday.  He's great and loves the church.  Also we are teaching a couple who is not married but their daughter is a member living in Spain.  We are working to get them married so they can get baptized because they know the church is true and love it.  

Dad, to answer your question, there are about 40 sister missionaries in the mission and I don't know for sure but I think about half are from The United States.  Maybe a little more.  When I got here there were 25-30 and by the end of the year we will have 50.  Sisters keep coming and we've only had two leave! The mission is growing and the work is hastening. The church is true!

Love you bunches and thanks for everything!!! 

-Hermana Jones 

El Fuego

Hola!!

Felicitaciones a Matt y Jessica!!! Estan comprometidos, que chevare! 

Hello from El Olivar! Things are still going well here and we had a pretty good week this week!

So last week, I forgot to talk about this in my letter but there was a huge fire in one of the areas of our zone/stake.  Apparently there was this neighborhood of a couple hundred houses and they were all made out of wood and were all connected. That doesn't sound like a very good idea... but anyway so one day we were sitting in a park having a lesson with Gustavo.  There was this huge dark cloud and at first we thought it was a rain/storm cloud but then we realized that we are in Lima so that obviously wasn't it.  Then we decided it was from a factory or something.  It turns out that it was actually the huge smoke cloud from the fire.  Somebody in that neighborhood was making lunch and something caught on fire and it just spread until about 200 houses were lost. We didn't find this out until the next day and as a zone we went and did a service activity there to help clean up.

So as a zone we went the next day.  It was crazy, just a huge field of ash.  The Elders went right away and helped clean up the ash and the hermanas stayed a members house nearby.  The church donated tons of rice and chicken and potatoes and so we just cooked it all with a bunch of members and handed it out to all the people that lost everything.  It's pretty sad here because people don't have insurance type things here so when you lose it, you lose it, and you gotta start over.  It was really sad because we handed out all of the food until there was none left and there were still people who didn't get food.  So then we went up and helped clean up the ashes and everything and it was pretty crazy! There were like fried chickens and pigs and dogs.... so that was interesting haha but nobody died so that's good.  It reminded me a lot of Joplin, except with this there wasn't really anything to clean up, we just swept ashes.  

Anyway, this past saturday we had another service activity and the church donated tons of water and clothes and such and so we loaded up a truck full and went and delivered it to all the people.  It was really fun and I gained some serious muscle from carrying all of those 20L boxes of water.  It was a really cool experience and we all had our yellow mormon shirts on and the stake president did some interviews and stuff so it was really good.  I'll attach some pictures... It was all pretty crazy!

Anyway, so we had an interesting week! We've been having a hard time finding new investigators lately so that's been hard because we obviously want to teach and baptize but we need to find those people first.  The members here have been really helpful though and so this week we started to teach a couple of really cool families.  So in the next couple of weeks we'll start having baptisms again! 

Life is good here and I'm so happy to be part of this wonderful work.  I encourage everybody to get involved in missionary work if you're not already because it is so awesome, fun, and rewarding! It is the best. the church is true.

Love you all bunches!!!

Hermana Jones 

Solo un poquito

Hola mi familia!

I don't have much to say this week! I'm actually not really sure how it's already been another week, that's crazy! But yeah, I'm still here and things are going great.  

We had the baptism planned this week for the Family Quiroz, but unfortunately some last minute things came up and the kids had to go stay with their dad this weekend on the other side of Lima.  So that was a bummer.  I DO NOT like rescheduling baptisms.  It gives Satan another week to work and them and make more things go wrong, but it'll be okay because we have the Lord on our side.  They are planned to be baptized this week and they are almost as excited as we are for them! They are so great.  The bishop went and talked to them and is trying to find out ways we can help them and their living situation.  We're planning on building them a floor, a roof, and hopefully getting them some electricity too.  

We got a new ward mission leader the other week and he is great.  He is so excited about the work and is helping the ward a lot.  we had a training yesterday to help train the members on how to share the Gospel and it went really well! The ward is getting really excited about missionary work and is turning around a lot.  The goal of our ward mission leader is that the members do the finding and the missionaries do the teaching.  I'm totally fine with that! haha.  It's a process but the work is hastening and the members are starting to realize it and are helping a lot. 

Like I said, I don't know what else to say but that things are going well I'm so happy to be here serving the Lord and the people of Perú.  The church is true! :)