Elder Sam Jensen

  Hola! Como están? I hope you all had a great week! Well right after I finished last week's email we went to dinner and then to Adrian's house. We put him on date for the 18th of February too and got to say goodbye to them. Hopefully Elder Ochoa can push the date for Maria back to the 18th so we can have them all in one day. That'll make it more likely that I can go to visit on that day and attend at the baptism. We immediately went to la casa de hermano Anthony Díaz after to say goodbye to him. It was a pretty emotional send of, actually, because to be honest he's kind of my Peruvian dad. He referred to me as his son, which he only does for his favorite missionaries which have only been me and Elder Richards. He accidentally called me Elder Richards 3 times because that night reminded him so much of when he said goodbye to him. We talked for a while about the mission and my potential before saying goodbye. Packed up the next day and at breakfast got pictures with herm...

  Well another good week has gone by. I hope you all had a great week too! I forgot to mention last week that one of my exercise bands snapped.  I used the good old square knot to make it usable but it's still a little bit shorter than before. Looks like boy sports paid off.  At least I still got my other ones. On Tuesday we picked up hermano Elber so he could be the goalie for Pueblo Libre's young men soccer team for the stake competition going on. He played well and blocked a lot of shots. Pueblo Libre beat Jordan 1-0 so looks like we'll be moving on! Hermano David also came and he's going to receive the Melchizedek priesthood in the next stake conference! Hermana Bethsaida, who helped translate for him while we were teaching is his girlfriend and they're planning on getting married. David also walked us through his job in detail and even showed us a video. He works at the meat plant where he cuts up and removes meat from animal carcasses. He also has to kill a bu...

  How about that, I hit a year in the mission. That's crazy. It's been a wild year and I've learned so much. Of course I still have quite a bit to go, but now that I've gotten a lot of things down I'm going to make 2023 the best year ever! I'm looking forward to the many people I'll meet, the experiences I'll have, and for the opportunities I'll have for the spirit to work through me. On Tuesday we had our first zone conference instead of the normal multizone conference. It was nice; we listened to the APs and Presidente Hiatt speak. He actually showed us a clip from the new season of The Chosen. He ended up translating it into spanish as we were watching it for the Peruvians to understand. Afterwards we did something I did not expect; I got sung to for my birthday! They had prepared some snacks and cake so they could sing to all the November, December, and January birthdays. I didn't think my birthday wouldn't end until a month after it happ...

  How y'all doing? I'm doing well. A while ago Elderr Sánchez was trying to tell Elder Strock, "wanna fight?" but he didn't know how to pronounce it so he ended up saying "wanna fish?" So now that's become a saying in the zone for whenever we're angry or annoyed. All I could think of was the veggietales movie of Jonah when the people of Ninevah were slapping each other with fishes.  When this transfer started I really wanted to have at least one more baptism here in Pueblo Libre, this being my 4th transfer here. I reminded myself that my assignment here is to do what the Lord asks, and all other things will fall into place. We continued to meet with Javier this week. Now we just need to have him get a testimony of the Book of Mormón. He's fulfillinh the commitments we're giving him, but he just needs to take that little step. Hopefully we can try to put him on date next week. I guess there was a littlw miracle this week. On new year's...

  ¡Feliz año nuevo! I hope you're doing well! When I got food poisoning the only thing that sounded good to me was fresh fruit, so I asked Hermana Gladis dor some more fruit. Now I get all the fruit I want! She's given us apples, peaches, bananas, pears, lots and lots of grapes, and most surprisingly, blueberries! I think I've had more blueberries in the past few weeks than I've had in my whole life. I guess it's because my comp doesn't like them so I always eat his too. They're still expensive down here but she keeps giving them to us and I'm not complaining. We had interviews with Presidente Hiatt on Wednesday and got to talk with Hermana Hiatt a little bit too. This week we did a lot of work with the ward member list. We have a list of all members, actives and inactives, so we got to each of their houses to confirm that they live there, see how they're doing, and set up home evenings with them. A lot of the time we'll end up finding relatives ...