This week was pretty good, the hardest thing that I've encountered so far is that nobody wants to talk to us! We've called and shown up at the doors of less-actives, interested-people, and other people who were interested at some point recently. A lot of them say one of four things: they are busy, they are in Mexicali, they are working, or they are eating. It's been hard to have a lot of success because of these reasons haha. Also, we've set up so many lessons, but a lot of them have fallen through because the person will not answer the phone, or because they will say they are busy and want to reschedule. However, we have had some success in talking to people.
A few days ago, we went to the park that's right across the street from our church building and tried talking to some people there. We gave a Book of Mormon to this guy with 3 skateboards and a bunch of tats who said he loved reading. This guy spoke English. He showed us this book he was reading, and he said he reads about 4 books a month. We started out by asking him about where he thinks we go after this life, and that got the conversation directed towards religion. So we slapped down a copy of the BoM on him! He got really excited and said, "No way bro, you got a free copy for me bro? That's f'n cool, for sure, I'll check it out!" We gave him a rundown on what it's about, gave him our number! We also spoke to this nice, older Mexican couple in the park that were super receptive and open-minded. We asked them what their first impression of us was, and they said, "I think you're doing the Lord's work." How cool that someone who isn't even a member of the church can recognize what missionary work is. So we will probably be meeting with him on Sunday! The wife didn't seem too interested until the other junior companion, Elder Bullock, and I started to bear our testimony of the book. Then she perked up and started listening haha.
I've learned some fun slang from a member family's kids. Chido means sick, or dope pretty much. Quiubole means What's Up, Vato is dude, Neta means For Real, hijole means Dang, and Ah, Te Creas is something you'd say in place of "just kidding", as the punchline of a joke. The older Mexicans also chuckle when we say Hijole, because apparently it's like an outdated term from a few decades out.
My companions and I have had some fire companion studies, and gotten into some really good discussions about things. That's definitely something that's awesome about the mission. You just dive into scriptures for an hour or two every day and just go hard. Also, planning out your whole day and being busy all day is super nice too. Hopefully these are some good habits I can keep after the mission lol.
Well, everything is going pretty well, we've just been grinding every day and mostly getting rejected left and right. It makes the successes that much better!
Elder Pettit
Pics:
1. Elder Montague with the Ibarra's super energetic dog Gunther
2. A cool mural outside of a church in El Centro
3. A huge spider
4. A thumbs down because we were getting turned away all day
5. We did a cool musical number for our morning devotional that the whole mission watched
