Well to start off with a funny story, Tuesday night we were heading back to the room after a good days work when in one of the normal trash piles that you see everywhere we saw something a little out of the ordinary. We saw a big white rabbit that looked like it had just barely died from getting hit by a motor taxi or something laying the trash. After checking the poor guy out for a little, the best idea that I’d received in a long time came into my head: what would be a cooler souvenir from Peru than a REAL rabbit’s foot?? Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve always been on the lookout for some genuine and unique things to take home with me to remember my mission by, so yeah, you already know that I had to run to the room to grab my knife to do a little amputation on our little friend. After cutting off each limb one by one, Elder Westergard and I headed back to the room to clean the harvested feet. To our best judgement (we are not hunting or taxidermy experts), we thought it would be good idea to soak the feet overnight in bleach to preserve them. So that is what we did. When we got up Wednesday morning to check them out, we found ourselves quite the surprise: due to sitting in 100% bleach the entire night, all the white rabbit fur on the feet had COMPLETELY burned off, leaving us 4 nasty alien-looking rabbit feet, ha ha ha. We were pretty bummed for messing up our lucky rabbit feet, but we got a pretty good laugh out of it. The fun thing is that our souvenirs now actually are more Peruvian, as they match all the dogs, cats, and other hairless animals that live here. So I am sure we’re going to have a quite a few baptisms coming our way due to all the luck we have with our 4 hairless rabbit’s feet.
Wednesday afternoon we took yet again the long and dreaded 6 hour bus ride down to Piura for leaders council. The ride down actually wasn’t too bad, as we got on the “luxary prime” bus that had air conditioning! They were also playing a bizarre action movie starting Nicolas Cage and John Travolta that we saw glimpses of that was absolutely hilarious. The leaders council went pretty well, even though it was really painful to report that our zone had only baptized 2 people all of last transfer. We have lots of room to improve, and I know we can only go up from here. We also set some new goals for the mission and talked about how we are going to reach those goals. As 2019 rolls in, we are going to really start working a lot more with members, and trying to strengthen the branches, wards and stakes. We are excited to see what the future holds for the mission.
Friday night we did an AWESOME zone activity in the cemetery for el Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). We rounded up as many pass along cards, folletos, and Book of Mormons as we could find and made our way over to the local cemetery locked and loaded to just contact the people during their massive celebration I wasn’t really able to get any great pictures, but if any of you have seen the Disney movie “coco”, the scene looked exactly the same. The cemetery was absolutely filled with people all over the place taking flowers and gifts to their loved ones that have died. It’s cool because the people there all described what they were doing as “visiting” their loved ones, and they would just sit their at their graves for hours as if they were there with them in person. The coolest part though is how the whole cemetery is completely lit with candle light. There’s not really any big street lights or flashlights or anything. It was just a super cool atmosphere. It makes me a little sad that we don’t have such a cool celebration for our ancestors and loved ones back in the states like they have here. Overall the activity was really successful, as we found a ton of really great references. It was really fun to talk with all the random people and learn about all their families and to give them hope of a life after death.
On Saturday we had a training meeting with our district leaders in our zone. We talked with them about how we can better the zone from last transfer, and also our goal and plans for this transfer. We talked about how we all want to see miracles, but it will take doing all the small, mundane, little things to see those miracles. We are trying to focus on holding yourselves to a higher standard this transfer and always do things the right way, not the easy way. Also we are really focusing on receiving personal revelation for each of our individual area. Hopefully we can turn those plans into action.
On Sunday we had quite the church experience. While on our way to church in the morning, we made our normal pass by to our crazy friend, old man Sergio. Sergio lives just outside our apartment, and has definitely had one too many drinks in his life, or maybe has been a drug addict in the past because it is safe to say that he’s not all the way there in his head. However, he’s a super nice guy and always smiles and says “Hello gringos!” when we pass by. We’ve talked to him before about visiting him, but he never really wanted to. However, this Sunday when we passed by, instead of this regular morning greeting he jumped up and said, “I’m coming to church today!” Elder Westergard and I just looked at each other, shrugged the shoulders, smiled, and told him to come along with us. When we got to church, he sat quietly for the sacrament and also as people go up to give their testimonies. Then out of no where, he grabs my shoulder and says, “I’m going to give my testimony!” Before I could stop him to explain what type of things to say, Sergio bounded up to the pulpit and started preaching just about the most bizarre doctrine I’ve ever heard, ha ha. He started off by yelling into the microphone that the “kingdom of heaven is at hand" and that the end of the world is going to happen this week, and then started to explain how the earth has grown 7 times bigger in size in the past few years and that it’s all because of resurrected robots that are taking over. It was absolutely hilarious but at the same time uncomfortable, ha ha. All the members were at the same time super uncomfortable, ha ha. All the members were looking at us like, “this is your investigator??” After about a good 5 minutes of preaching, a member of the stake presidency who was in attendance finally asked him to wrap it up and go sit down. When he came back down from the pulpit he asked me how he did. I just smiled at him with a thumbs up and said, “You killed it!” I’m never going to forget that sacrament meeting experience. You really do see something new every single day here.
Well that’s all she wrote folks. I truly love this work and who it’s making me in to. There is nothing more satisfying than having your head hit the pillow at night completely exhausted after diligently giving your all to the Lord that day. This is the best and probably most important work that I’ll ever do. I just want to give Him my all with no regrets. Talk to y’all next week.
“El respeto vale mas que la fama”
Avanza su Verdad!
Elder Bailey
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