"Turns out half of your success in an area is determined by your attitude..."

Hey!

So new comp. I am so stoked.

Elder Salamanca and I.

His name is Elder Salamanca and he’s from Puebla, Mexico. I already knew him because he was in the zone next to us and he would sleep over at our house a lot.  He’s super obedient and hardworking so we’ve done probably more in this past week than in my first six. Also, he was like a semi-professional soccer player in Mex, so he’s wicked at that. Whenever we see a group of kids in the street he´ll grab a coconut on the side of the road and we´ll start a game with them, so we’ve already made a lot of friends.

Turns out half of your success in an area is determined by your attitude, so when he came I didn’t tell him the area was hard at all, I just said that there were a ton of people I know that we haven’t taught yet…so this week we taught near about all of them. Like every day we set bigger and bigger goals of visiting less actives and new investigators and were reaching all of them.

Our first time teaching one guy that I’ve been talking to, who lives at the Kuna house, his two sisters came out too. I was only going to ask him to get baptized, but I thought, I’ll just ask everybody. His youngest sister said no but the other one, said yes! And so did he!  We were stoked. So we met with them a few other times this week and taught them up to lesson 4. He has a heck of a lot of questions, which I thought would make it easy, but turns out you kind of have to know what you’re talking about, in Spanish, to answer. Salamanca has been having me teach the lessons near about totally by myself so I can learn. I’ve learned a heck of a lot and it’s been fun.

We even took him and some of the other Kunas, which are members, to the open house of the new Bella Vista chapel downtown that just opened. It’s wick, and he talked to a lot of people there that know more than me, so I think he liked it.

Also my Dule is getting frosty. After our lessons there, I teach them English and they teach me Dule. It’s so hard to pronounce the words but I’ve got a Book of Mormon in that language that I read out loud every day to practice.

My Tongan however is getting bunk. Until! This week some elders from another area stayed with us a night and one of them, Elder Palei, is from Tonga, so we talked and it was awesome. Still love Polys. So now I’ve added my Ko e Tohi e Molomona  (Book of Mormon in Tongan) to my language study every day.

Also in study time, sometimes I study things I understand. I’ve been trying to learn how to recognize the Spirit more. Still don’t know how, but I think I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. Because several times this week I’ll make what I think is just a random turn or decide to visit a random person in the area, and we´ll get a new baptism date, or teach an awesome lesson. And I won’t even realize it until were back home, but I’ll be like, heck we never even go on that street because it smells like poop, but if we hadn’t we wouldn’t have found that new investigator. Pretty wicked.

We visited an inactive family this week that we’ve talked to before, and my comp said I had a scripture I wanted to share. But I didn’t. So I thought I would just open to a random page and read whatever was there. And I opened up to some scripture mastery. I don’t remember, something about building your foundation on Christ. And we just kind of talked about that and one of the lady’s had just a ton of stories about how happy she was when she joined the church. So we invited them back and they said they’d try to start coming again.

In other news I finally climbed this hill above Panama Viejo that I’ve been wanting to climb forever. Salamanca’s basically down for anything, so we climbed through a hole in the wall to the cemetery and walked  through 7 foot tall grass till we couldn’t go anymore and decided we’d come back another morning with machetes. It was wicked though. Just a bunch of tin roofs, the ocean, and huge buildings in the background.

Also none of our investigators came to church yesterday! I was not looking forward to going to church because having investigators is a responsibility and I hate responsibilities, but it turns out them not showing up sucks way more. Nothing to do and literally I’ve been tired every Sunday for like 5 years and it hasn’t changed, so it is a struggle. And now we have to push back baptismal dates another week or two. A little girl in the ward, who just turned 8, asked me to baptize her at the end of the month, though, so I’m slightly sketched.

I also acquired a blanket this week. It’s been sitting in the corner for months and belongs to no one, so I claimed it. But I also started sleeping in jeans because it reminds me of summer, so that blanket is now my pillow.

Today for P-Day, we went to the Bella Vista chapel as a zone and played futbol. I’m faster than all these Latinos but their feet move too fast so I gave up. I’m getting better though. I do not plan on becoming a fan of this sport.

That’s all for this week. I have to go to the immigrations office on Friday, which sucks, but everyone from my first two weeks in the MTC, that came here, will be there so I’m stoked.

Also, I had a wild moment while at a member’s house for dinner this week. I kind of subconsciously answered a question someone asked me and I was like whoa! When did I start understanding these people? Such a weird feeling.

My companion is asleep...and I am so bored!

Love y’all!

Elder Green