Not Even the Stray Dogs Were Down to Be With Us

Hey all!  How is life going at home?  This week has been super super crazy! It was really hard to get into things and it seemed like everything was against us this week!  Everyone went on Vacations which was really really crappy!  It was hard to get people in their houses and everyone and their dog cancelled on us!  Not even the stray dogs from the street were down to be there with us!  However things are looking up for us! We are seeing tons of potential and are having people that we really think can progress!  We are hoping for the best!  There are lots of people that haven't progressed as well as we would have hoped but we still have faith and we are planning to get things done this week!  It will be just about the last full week of the cycle that we have to work but we are super excited! 

Tuesday was changes!  We went and got all that done and got the news out! We had some really really good news come this cycle!  Then we had the deads and we went and spent some time with them! 

I added this photo because I could see Elder Orchard there in the background looking all official at the table!

We also had to go out to Ixtapaluca for a Maleta (bag) that someone sent out there and they shouldn't have sent it so it has been really really weird!  It was a weird day all in all!

Wednesday was the longest day of the week by far! We hadn't slept much the night before and we were waking people up all night to get them ready for their flights!  The day started at 3 am with about one hour of sleep!  We headed out to the airport and things took forever!  We had lots of things go wrong that we hadn't really seen the whole time that we had been there! I mean I am basically a pro at the whole airport thing now and things were coming up and i was like how in the world does that happen!   It was super super hard to say bye to Olson though!  It was a sad moment!

Laura Lowe (The Stutznegger's daughter.  Elder Orchard has gotten to know her family quite well from being an office Elder.  She is as awesome as her parents!)

It is six weeks that I will be without him but it is like nacho without eskeleto, or peanut butter without jelly, Coke without tacos, and all that stuff! It is just too weird without him here!  So from there we went and got everyone dropped off and then we headed out to our area because we had citas.  It made for quite the day that is for sure!  So we went there and went with a family that was going to give us a reference but they said they couldn't because his mom had died so he took us with his family to sing a song and do a prayer and we talked a little bit with them! We will see if they end up wanting anything from the gospel right now! Then the food which went good we showed up kind of late but it turned out good in the end! Then we just kinda walked around like zombies for a little while! 

Thursday was just about as bad! We tried to find a bunch of people but they weren't home! Then we had to help someone lower the stairs in their house but we did end up going with the Family Aguilar Santiago which are doing good! They are progressing well and had done some reading and we had a good lesson with them! They gave us some amazing tostadas de tinga which I loved!  It was so good! Some of the best I have had!  

Friday was a pretty decent day! The morning just kinda sucked but we had a good time in the afternoon! We had been in a trio but we sent him on divisiones with the zone leaders from Oriental which was good we could go back to working really really hard like we had before and we were able to find a few new people to teach! Hopefully they can just move on and progress quite well.  Then we went and ate with a family that we are teaching their daughter and we are hoping that she can progress enough to get baptized here before we have to head out! 

Saturday was our best day! We found some less actives and found some part member families from it, Then we went and found someone else we had been looking for! The highlight was Enrique and his wife Magali! They are progressing sooo well! They are reading and praying and doing everything that we are hoping they could have done!  Also they are already married which is the best news of all!!  Hopefully more to come from them in the coming weeks! We might move their baptism up depending on how they do! Also we had english and music classes and it was a huge success! We have an amazing family that gives us tons of references and so they just keep supplying us with people to teach!  It was funny they had told us about someone that the missionaries had been teaching before and we got her number and tried to call and set up an appointment but she said she would call us back, well we told her and we said we will keep trying to call them and she was like no I will call and get us an appointment for this week and so tomorrow we will see how that goes! 

Well this week has been full of blessings and we hope to see tons more this week!  Thanks for all your support! Love you all!

Elder Orchard