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