Week 29

 From 2 weeks ago…

Hola! Buenos días! Espero que todo estén bien! This was another pretty good week. The time this transfer has been flying by.  Not too much happened this week, but I'll tell you what did happen. 

Our water is still not working, we finally got water in our tank but now there's something stuck in the pipes and so none of the water is working. We have resulted in fetching water with a bucket and rope from our water well. It was fun the first time, but now it's just inconvenient. I'm very thankful for running water. 

Some Dominicans do not like to feel like they're wrong, and so when they don't understand, they'll tell us to speak Spanish even tho we are definitely speaking Spanish and they didn't hear us. 

Oh, this should probably be at the top, but there was an earthquake this week, and so that was super cool.  It was the first one I've ever experienced, and so it felt so weird. I was on exchanges in Ciudad Satellite, and the house started shaking a little bit, and then it started shaking a bunch, and the house was even swaying a little bit. It was awesome. It was a 5.6 on the richter scale, whatever that means. 

I showed a bunch of kids a "magic" trick with a pencil, and all the kids thought I was insane. It was hilarious, and then they all started following us everywhere. 

We were talking to one of our friends' brothers and were like, what does he do for work. His brother told us that he drives up and down the highway with his moped and looks for people that are broken down. He then tells them he'll fix their car for a thousand pesos. I thought it was hilarious to imagine a 70 year old man cruising up a highway on a moped.  

I also had the opportunity to baptize Tony this week. This was such a cool experience. He came 20 mins early because he was so excited. He was smiling and laughing and then when I baptized him he came out of the water with the biggest smile. It was so special and it's one of the coolest parts of being a missionary. 

Anyways for my spiritual thought I really love asking members about their conversion story. Because almost everyone here is a convert it’s so cool to see how they came to know the gospel. I've noticed that in every story there is one thing that is the same. All of them included sacrifice. Whether it was dropping coffee or sacrificing money to get married or changing jobs so they could come to church. There's so many different ways to make sacrifices and it's something that makes the difference between being converted and not. I've also found the opposite, I've met so many people that believe all that we are teaching and want to continue on the path but they're not willing to make the sacrifice.  I testify that as we sacrifice our time to God we will receive many blessings. We will find that though the sacrifice may be hard at first it will always always be worth it. 

Have a great week
Elder Jonah Greer