Week 20 Ahome

Hey everybody! It was a good week here in Ahome. The weeks are going by pretty fast; I can hardly believe I´ve already been in Mexico for 20 weeks. These last 2 weeks with Elder Martinez have been really great. It´s amazing how much a companion can impact your experience in the mission.

During this week:

I didn´t get to teach English to the district because we had an all day long seminar on Tuesday by our Mission President. Tomorrow I should teach again.

I taught piano lessons again, and I found out that I will be playing piano for a ward choir. They are relying on me to help them practice and prepare for ward conference. So I am basically the pianist and the choir director at the same time. I´m gonna keep everything super simple, because the melody is hard enough for them to sing. Haha

I had splits on Friday with Elder Reader. We hitched a crazy ride to Las Grullas. The guy in the truck decided to stop halfway there and he gave us some watermelon. We all sat in the back of his truck on the side of the road eating watermelon and he sang us some songs. We taught him a lesson as well, and it was a pretty fun experience. About an hour later in Las Grullas we taught the best lesson that I´ve ever been in while in Las Grullas.

We discovered a new church. I don´t know anything about it other than it´s name. It is called "Jesús es la Onda" Onda is a slang word that means the thing that is really cool. Imagine a church being called "Jesus is What´s up" or "Jesus is the Shiz." I thought it was a pretty funny name for a church.

We helped a lady "desgranar" all her corn yesterday. I´m not really sure what that means in English, but we used our hands to get all the kernals off the corn. Later someone will beat the bag of corn with a stick to turn it into a flour to make tortillas de maíz.

Facebook posts by Tere Hernandez 

At the church

Photos with sister missionaries

Week 19 Ahome

Hey guys. 
This week felt like the first week a the mission again. A new companion is a pretty big change. My companions name is Elder Martinez. He has 9 months in the mission. He is from Aguascalientes Mexico. He is super chill. He doesn´t know any english except for little words here and there. I think his accent is super awesome, especially when he says English words. He loves super spicy food. That´s just a little information about him.

At the beginning of the week it was a little tough for me. I had to do all the planning, figure out how to get our fridge back, and our phone ran out of minutes. I didn´t even know that phones still used minutes. During this week, I showed my comp all our area and we taught a lot of investigators. I learned a lot from watching my companions methods of teaching. We gave talks yesterday in church; they were so much better than last time because I had time in advance to prepare. 

On Tuesday, I taught the first English class to our district. Since the district changed, there are 2 Americans and 8 Latinos. I taught the Latinos how to say a prayer in English and tomorrow we will learn how to bear a testimony in English.

In Ahome right now, there are a ton of people working to harvest all the corn, and in about a week or two all the Mangos will be ripe. I´ve tasted some of the early mangos, and they are so good. That´s about it for the week. Have a fun last week of school. Adios!

Me and my new companion Elder Martinez

Week 18 Ahome

Hey everybody! 

This week was pretty crazy. Today was transfers: I stay in Ahome, but my companion, Elder Coello left to Huatabampo Sonora. My new companion is Elder Martinez from Aguascalientes, Mexico. He´s a pretty cool guy. He doesn´t know English at all, so that means 100% spanish for me. The mission president here wants all the Latinos here to learn English, so I will have to teach the whole district, because I think I´m the only American in the new district. It´s kinda funny seeing the Latinos get super frustrated with English when they give us a hard time with our spanish all the time. Now they know how it feels to struggle. Haha

The fridge story is the same. Still no fridge, and this marks over 3 weeks with no fridge. They said by Wednesday we should have it, but that doesn´t mean anything. I can´t wait for the day when everything in the casa works the way it should.

Because my companion is new to Ahome, I´m gonna have to do all the planning for the first little while and teach him the area. Right now, we are trying to help some investigators get married, and that´s been kinda interesting and different. One of our struggles is that we have a huge area, and in each small village in our area, there are only maybe one or two investigators. That makes it really difficult to visit all of them, and it´s frustrating when we set up an appointment and they are busy after we travelled all the way just to teach them.

Yesterday was an awesome day. I got to talk to my family on Skype. It was the fastest 50 minutes of the mission, but it was great. That´s all for this week. Happy Mother´s day Mom!

Here is a picture of where I think I lost my name-tag. 

I was feeding some cows, and I think it fell off as I was picking grass.

Here is my companion saying goodbye to Ahome

Week 17 Ahome

Hey everyone! 
Here is week 17 in Mexico. We got the power fixed last week, but for whatever reason the fridge broke, and it´s still not fixed. It´s not too bad though. We have a weird milk that doesn´t go bad for months. We should have the fridge fixed on Wednesday and hopefully it doesn´t cost too much.

Here is a story of how I followed the promptings of the spirit. It happened over a month ago, but now we are seeing why it was so important that we followed that prompting:

We were walking around El Águila in the dark looking for a man named Santiago. We weren´t having any luck and were about to give up. We passed a man in the dark, and as he said "Buenos Noches" I had a strong feeling. I told my companion, "He sounds like a Santiago" and I returned and talked to him. It turns out that he wasn´t Santiago, but a man named Leopoldo. He agreed to let us visit him.

He lives in a legit hut: Sticks for walls and palm leaves for a ceiling. At first when we taught him, he didn´t progress very much and was never available, so we stop visiting him for a long time. A little while ago we visiting him again and met his wife. We invited her to church and she came. She absolutely loved the church. Now when we teach, we teach their whole family which should be called a tribe because there are so many people. It´s been really great teaching so many people at the same time and having all of them accept our message. One person that we passed on the street allowed us to teach so many people our message.

That was the highlight of the week. My spanish is improving a lot. I can fluently speak with people as long as they´re not super old or drunk. People compliment me on my spanish finally instead of the opposite. Things are really good here. I´m excited for Sunday to talk to my Mom for Mothers Day, and that same day we have transfers, so that we be interesting to see where I will be next week.