Feb 15, 2016

Hola y buenas días,

Yo sé que vive mi señor. Este semana fue el mejor. Cada día teníamos
una lección con un investigador y también todos los lecciones que
teníamos fueron perfecto.

So this week was amazing. Every day was a blessing and we had
wonderful lessons with all of our investigators. We had about 5
lessons with Rashid, our Muslim, who is scheduled to be baptized this
upcoming Saturday. He was going to be baptized last Saturday but we
had to move it because we still had a lot to teach him and not enough
time to do it. Also he's having struggles with wanting to follow all
of the commandments because following them means that he would have to
change from a lifestyle that he's comfortable with to one that he's
never lived before. But he still has a desire to be baptized and next
time we see him we're going to reteach him the plan of salvation so
we'll see how that goes.

We're still teaching the Medinas who are a Venezuelan couple. (Just so
you know Venezuelans are extremely hard to understand. Their Spanish
is all over the place!) so the husband (Ronan) is a wonderful guy who
is really open to the gospel and is doing everything he needs to be to
gain a testimony of it. We had some amazing lessons with him and he is
so close. He has a baptism date scheduled for the 27th of this month.
His wife (Elba) is a staunch Catholic that doesn't want to give up her
childhood beliefs. She still meets with us and will listen to the
lessons but she rarely does anything else like read her scriptures,
come to church, or pray. However yesterday we had an awesome lesson
with them where we just read the Book of Mormon. The chapter we read
was 1 Nephi 15. After we read we just talked about what it said. They
both really opened up to us and we were happy to see that Elba enjoyed
it. We have a lesson with them this Wednesday and hope that we can
extend a date to Elba.

We also picked up a new investigator yesterday named Juliana. She is a
Colombian exchange student who was taught a little by the missionaries
before but she moved before they could finish. She just so happened to
move into the house of the second counselor of the stake presidency
and he speaks perfect Spanish. So we picked her up as a new
investigator yesterday and taught her the restoration. She said yes to
all of the commitments we gave her which were got church, read the
Book of Mormon, pray, and be baptized. However she has a lot of school
and never any time so we don't know if she'll be able to do any of
these. But next time we meet with her we'll extend a date for the 5th
or 12th of next month.

Me and my companion are getting along great! I'm at the point where I
can talk to my companion all day in Spanish and we've been working
really hard to learn more vocabulary and to also get rid of our
accents. I'm getting pretty comfortable talking to people in Spanish.
I can understand about 90% of what's being said and it's just words
that I don't know yet that throw me off. With speaking my verb
conjugations are the worst. Past tense is what gets me the most.
People keep,telling me that English is so hard to learn but it's
really not. Speaking is actually really easy it's just reading English
that's really hard because none of the words sound like how they're
spelled. This is the difference between English and Spanish.

The verb to be in past tense:

Ser (to be) past To be (English) past
I fui We fuimos I was We were
You (informal) fuiste You were They were
You (formal) fue
They fueron

It's pretty insane! But I am getting better. Here are some pictures:

Elder Olson on the right who we saw at the temple.

Have a great week!

Elder Austin