Training and THE BEST DAY EVER!!!!!

March 2, 2015

HELLO!!

Well what a week it has been here in Puno!  I sure do love Puno!  I will be really, really, sad when I get a change!  It has kind of become my home here in Peru.  It is weird how your body changes and you just start to think of this place as home.  I mean it will never be HOME home, but it is home.

So this week I went to Cuzco on Tuesday morning.  So there is my Tuesday in a nutshell - BUS!!  Haha, so ya, Tranzela is the bus agency that we use and I am starting to get to know the attendants and everything.  They are really nice people actually.  They get lots of business from the missionaries.  Every 6 week (transfers) it is a hay day for Tranzela!!

Anyway, on Wednesday, we had our training.  So at 3 in the afternoon we headed over to the office and were expecting a huge training from President.  President came and he was sick as a dog.  He looked about as bad as he felt I think, poor guy.  He had been in the hospital and the doctor told him that he couldn´t do anything.  He told us that his "children" are so important to him and that he had to at least come and shake our hands.  He is a really good man!  SO, we got our training from the assistants, and they did a really, really, good job.  It wasn´t anything like I was expecting.  They just talked about leadership.  There was really no "training".  They just explained that leadership in the church is not really leadership.  It is just being a really good example and that is how you lead. Being a leader really is just being an example.  That means that I need to be more obedient.  A more consecrated missionary.  The most important thing is I need to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

So I had to get back to Puno somehow.  Thursday was travel!!  How fun, right?  Another 8 hours on the bus.

Friday was a good day.  It was a day filled with visits to leaders and people from the ward so that Elder Garcia could get to know them.  Not very eventful really, and so I will tell you about Elder Garcia.  He is a short little guy from Columbia.  He is 21 years old and has just one change more than me in the mission.  We will finish the same change.  He is a really hard worker which I am really happy about because that is when the work goes the best.  We will try to help our two little sectors.  Haujasapata is the ward, and they are struggling a lot.  The have about 30 people come and it is just 2 big families really.  It should probably be called a family group.

Saturday we had our baptism and everything was ready to go.  We had talked to President Asqui and he said that he would get the font started in the morning and that it would be ready by 5.  We headed over to the church at about 2:30 - 3:00 to start getting the water heated up.  The heater was not working so we went to go check on the water because we figured that Franky could just be baptised in cold water.  That was not the case.  The church just didn't have water hot or cold.  There was like 5 inches of water and ya, that was the problem!

A good friend of ours who has served in Puno told me once that Peruvians
do not smile in pictures.  But I believe that both of these fine young men were very happy!

Elder Garcia is from Columbia and he has a great smile!
Elder Garcia, Franky, and Elder George - HANDSOME, HANDSOME, HANDSOME!

We ended up just having our baptism on Sunday and everything worked out.  While we were changing Franky just kept saying how happy he was and that he always wanted to feel like this.  I explained to him that he wasn't my first baptism, he was my first convert.  It is more important to have converts than baptisms.  If a person is converted to the gospel of Jesus Christ they will stay active.  That is my week in a nutshell.

Love you!!

Elder George