Sunday, October 26, 2014

Greetings From Ensenada Mexico

Elder Vega, a recent convert, and Elder Rawlings

Dear Everyone,

Whats up from Ensenada, Mexico!! It really is as beautiful as Grandpa said it would be. Well not my area but the city as a whole. My area is called Universidad, and it's basically cut into the side of three mountains. It's a 30 minute hike from our apartment to the place where we work, but it's worth it. The place kind of reminds me of the field that was behind our house in Utah, super dusty, super dry, super rocky. But the views of the bay are just awesome.

The people are great. Mega, mega, like mind bogglingly poor, but they are super nice and everyone knows us and wants to hear what we have to say. We've already set 4 baptismal dates since I've been here, but I'll talk more about that later.

Already some crazy stuff has happened. First off, right off the plane to get here, we put our luggage into a taxi van so that we would all be able to fit into President Garcia's car. But then the taxi driver got really mad, and asked for at least one of us to go with him. I had told President Garcia that on a scale from one to ten my Spanish was about a 7, which was by far the highest of the group, so he asked me to go. Aw yeah. As soon as we get in the car I asked the driver if he spoke any English and he said no. Less Aw yeah. But then he started asking about the church, what we believed in, if we were Christian, all that. Long story short I ended up teaching him the first lesson.  Super cool.  And then I met my companion, Elder Vega, and found out he speaks about as much English as Dad speaks Spanish (none, and with a terrible accent) so guess who has had to become fluent enough to converse in about 10 minutes. This guy. Aw yeah. He's a super cool guy though, hes been out here for about a year and he's a really good missionary.

Another funny thing. Freaking absolutely no one can pronounce my name.
That is, until I tell them it's like the Rolling Stones. EVERYONE here knows the Rolling Stones for some reason.  Then we were on the bus this one day and this guy got on with a straight up karaoke machine and starting singing about how 666 and how bad Halloween is. Lol cause he also chastised us for not having Bibles and Elder Vega and I just kind of looked at each other like, uhhhh, lol got em right here bro. Weird dude. Also we were walking and there was some chalk on the ground and Elder Vega was like "hey don't walk through that" and I was like "uhh why?" and he was like "well that was an exorcism and we dont mess with that stuff" oh good.

So our baptismal dates. The first one was just ok, I didn't feel like the lady was really learning anything, she just wanted to say yes so that we would leave her alone, but oh well. But then later that night we went to check on a reference we had received and ran into this lady named A.... We started talking to her, she said she was JW but she was willing to listen. So we started teaching. We got about 10 minutes in when her son came home. Turns out he had seen us walking around and had been praying to find someone to answer his questions cause he just had a baby. So were like "Hermano! Aqui Estamos!" (Brother! Here we are!) So we started teaching again and this dude was eating it up. We taught the first lesson and both of them agreed to be baptized. The son also asked if he could come to church with us on Sunday. Dude of course you can come!  So we are sitting with him in church and it was the primary program and he was loving it. All these little kids bearing testimony that their families now and their families to come would be together. This dude (named J...) was basically in tears. So was I, not gonna lie. And then in Gospel Principals we talked about Eternal Marriage and I sat next to J... and I could practically hear his thoughts like, yeah, I want this, i want this a lot. We have an appointment with him on tuesday. Ill keep you posted.

I do miss the MTC. I miss hearing English too haha. I miss Elder Sanchez. 
Anyway I'm doing great. I still feel super lost, but hey, its more fun that way.
Con mucho amor,

Elder Rawlings


Elder Sanchez and Elder Rawlings Provo West MTC

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