Passport to Peru: Week 5 in Tumbes!

Dear Family and Friends!!

Goodness gracious I don't know how time flies so fast...but here we are in another beautiful Monday afternoon in Tumbes!

I'm not sure why I love this place so much, but there is just something so special about the atmosphere here (something besides the humidity ;)) and I really just love it.

Our investigator Michael (that I'm pretty sure I've told you all about already) is progressing really well. It's so amazing to see how much faith he has. Literally every time we show up at his house he always makes time for us, no matter what he's doing. He always says "I always have time for the word of God". Wow. And we've been visiting him a lot this week haha. Recently they made a change in the requirements for baptism...instead of teaching the first 4 lessons before baptism and the 5th after baptism, we now are supposed to have taught all five lessons before someone can be baptized. So since we set Michael's baptism date for only 2 or 3 weeks after we started giving him the lessons, we've been kind of cramming to get everything in. At first I was a little bit aprehensive about rushing everything so quickly, but it's so neat to see how prepared he is. He basically already has the exact same beliefs as us, so he just takes it all in. The things he didn't know about before like the Word of Wisdom, Law of Chastity and Tithing and Fast offerings he just accepts and is like "wow, now that I know I'd better start living that" without us even asking. It's amazing. And he's reading the Book of Mormon and everything...we just keep praying super hard that nothing happens this week that keeps him from making the sacred covenant of baptism this Saturday...because he is so ready! I know that I can't take any credit for having brought him to the fold or anything like that because the Lord literally prepared him for so long and just dropped him into our hands ready to be baptized. It's been such an amazing experience.

Hmm let's see...other exciting news this week....Oh! So basically Hermana C. and I are pretty much the best ever. President and Sister Rowley came to do room inspections this week, and when they walked in they were like "ooooohhhh ahhhh wow". They told us that ours was the best they'd seen so far, and congratulated us. It felt pretty good not gonna lie :) ---although the last time they saw this apartment was when Elders were living here so.....the comparison might have had a little bit to do with it haha.

After the room inspection, President Rowley had each of us sit down with him separately and show him our agendas and compare it with our area book. It was kinda funny to me because he started talking to me in English and I literally couldn't remember how to talk. I kept throwing in phrases like "como" and "entonces" in place of their English counterparts. Part of me was happy and the other part a little embarrassed haha. The hard part is that I really haven't gotten to a super fluent point with my Spanish, but now I feel like I'm not fluent in English either! I've decided that straight up Spanglish is the way to go :) But President Rowley congratulated us on our work and our agendas and area book and everything and suggested that in order to work a little bit more effectively in our area, we should really be focusing on the less actives and new converts and their references to find people to teach.

On Sunday, I understood why he said that. Currently our ward doesn't have a bishop (for reasons unknown to us, but he'd only been bishop for a few months so it was pretty strange) but the man that the stake presidency has temporarily put in charge of the ward talked to us in Ward Council about a few things that we need to change, or at least start focusing on. We talked about how there are 518 people that we have on record for our ward, but the average number that come to church is 100, and sometimes less. I knew that we had a lot of less actives, but until that meeting I had no idea how many. Our new goal is to get 26% of the membership of our ward to come to sacrament meeting. Wow. Talk about wake up call. It really hit me in that moment all the work we have to do here. At first it stressed me out a little bit, but then I remembered something that my parents always told me: about always trying to leave something better than I found it. It gave me a new energy to try my best to work to leave this ward a little bit better off than I found it. I know that this is what the Lord needs here at this time, and hopefully I can be able to help out!

Also on Sunday, we had a pretty hard hit in the face. We went to visit another investigator that has his baptismal date for this Saturday, but when we found him, he was drunk. Wow. It was really hard for us to see that, especially for Hermana C. because she's been working with him and helping him since she came here to Tumbes. We talked to him today and we'll have to see what happens with him, but it made me realize something really important. He would always tell us that a few years back he found his church and changed his life...that he hadn't drunk since that day and completely changed. We always told him that he needs to make sure that he keeps his pride in check and recognize that as human beings we're prone to make mistakes and he's never really going to be out of danger, but he would always say "yeah, but I'M strong." I now have an even stronger testimony that if we really want to change, we need to ask the Lord's help and act in faith that He'll give us the means to change. It's true that anyone can change and anyone can repent, but the only true way to do either of those things is through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

I've now decided that there's a divine inspiration involved in why we have Pday on Monday...because Sundays can be pretty darn stressful haha. Today was the last pday of this transfer, so we had a multizone activity. We all met at this sports compound place, and the Elders had divided us into 4 groups (with the sisters as the "capitanas" haha) and we played games. First we played another team in basketball, then we played them in volleyball...and guess what? we won. Both times. Not that it had anything to do with me, but it's always fun to be on a winning team ;) It was a really good time. The last pday of a transfer is always a little bit sad, because nobody knows who's going and who's staying, but it was fun to hang out with everyone one last time!

Annnddd that's all for this week folks! I hope that this last week was a good one for all of you, and that this upcoming week goes well also! Love you all!

Love,

Hermana Garner