Besides getting food poisoning, freezing my tail off, and almost dying a couple of times, this week was great!

Me with some sign we found.

Elder Juan

Hi there!  Sorry I didn't get to email yesterday.  The website wasn't working and so we decided to come back today and give it a shot!  I left the library yesterday thinking, "Oh man.  Mom's probably going to flip when she doesn't see an email tonight."  So yeah, I'm great.  Don't worry :)

Besides getting food poisoning, freezing my tail off, and almost dying a couple of times, this week was great!  I'll get to that stuff letter but first off guess what!    Because of how hard we worked last week, we ended up finding 23 Spanish people willing to listen to us!  We found a couple more awesome white people too, but we had to turn them over to the English missionaries...  

Today was so warm!  It was a blistering 15 degrees!  These past few days have been dropping below 0 pretty consistently because of the wind here ( -14 the other day with the wind chill)  so I've been really grateful to have two things:

 1. My giant warm jacket from the Abbotts and 

 2. A companion who complains about the cold as much as I do.  It makes it really entertaining to go hiking through the cold as he starts making up songs about how "its so cold and the people should let us in because the little Guatemalan missionary and his gringo companion are going to die".  

The weather when we got back to our car after a couple hours of walking

Snow?

This week I also learned that I'm not a huge fan of white people, at least not while we're knocking doors.   The Hispanics hate the cold more than we do so they almost always say, "Por Favor, pasan."   (Please come in) while the white people just say, "Get off my porch."  Its a lot of fun :)  I love being a missionary.  

Guess what I tried this week!  One of the members in our branch brought me a bowl of soup but didn't tell me what it was and sat there staring at me until I had finished it... turns out the little weird chunks of meat were cow stomach...  The soup wasn't half bad.  But it also wasn't half great.  Elder Juan just about died from laughing when he told me what was in it because apparently my face was priceless.  Also during that meal, the member asked how I wanted my eggs, and not knowing how to say how I liked them in Spanish, I just told her I'd have them like Elder Juan had his.  However, apparently Elder Juan likes his eggs almost raw so I woke up the next morning super sick and couldn't leave my bed until around 10:30 because I was so weak.  Elder Juan and the Zone Leaders gave me a blessing though which gave me the strength I needed to get out and work.  I still couldn't eat a lot though (which offends the Hispanics that make the food you eat) so when we were at the house of another member for dinner that night, she made me some nasty alkaseltzer apple juice medicine mix that she said would help.  I figured, "Well heck, if I can eat cow stomach, I can drink this too."  It was awful.  But it helped a lot!  I'll have to get the recipe from her so I can send it to you :)

Sunsets here... amazing :)

Last story of the week.  We met this guy named Maynor this week who knows the Bible and believes in it more than anyone I've ever met.  He let us in and we got to talking to him about his beliefs and about our beliefs and the whole time he was just trying to contradict us with the Bible.  It was so much fun.  It was great to see his face when we would prove our points using the Bible and explain how it made sense.  When we got to talking about the Book of Mormon and inviting him to read it, he just said, " I can tell you guys are representatives of Christ.  I'll read your book.  If I pray about it and feel its good, I'll keep reading.  If not, its going in the trash."  All I said was, "Please do."  After which I followed up with my testimony of how I KNOW the Book of Mormon is true.  That its another testimony of Jesus Christ and that it contains His full and complete Gospel.  I know that if he reads it and prays, that he too will know that its true.  I'm really excited to meet with him again tomorrow :)

Anyways this weeks been great!  I love you all!  Thank you for your love and support.  Have a great week!

Lots of Love,

Elder Zack

Quick Story:

This is the quick little story of two missionaries with a broken dishwasher.  We didn't know the dishwasher was broken.  We loaded it.   We started it.  We started our studies in a different room.... we came back to this... 

the end.