Hey Everyone!!

What another awesome week this was again!

This week we had interviews which was pretty sweet. I love President and Sister Ward they are so awesome! Then this weekend was stake conference for our stake. It was pretty intense! The speakers were the stake president, president and sister Ward, the temple president and his wife, and then Elder Martino who is the presidency for Central America. It was so awesome to get to meet them and the conference was great! They talked a lot about how important it is that the members each help friendship everyone in the wards, especially the Recent Converts. It was pretty sweet! ha a funny thing that happened though, after the conference this girl came up to me that I’d never seen before and supposedly told me that I have pretty eyes. But the only problem was that I had no idea what she said so I just sat there and smiled and didn´t know what to say and then she like got embarrassed and turned and walked away pretty fast. Ha I didn´t really know what she said until later when Elder Echeverría told me so we´ve been laughing about that haha.

This week one of our investigators was really sick. We stopped by to visit him and he could barely even talk it was super bad. So we offered to give him a blessing and he said that he wanted on. The next day we went back to check on him and to see how he´s doing, his voice was almost all the way back to normal and he said he felt a ton better! It was so awesome! We had another miracle happen with him this week too, we have a baptismal date for him and his daughter but he hasn´t been able to come to church because he has to work every day. So we´ve been praying for him hoping that something would happen with this job. Well when we went back he told us that he found another job that would actually pay him more and he wouldn’t have to work on Sundays! It´s awesome how the Lord will make everything turn out alright when we´re doing what we can to follow him.

This week we have a super busy week but it´s gonna be sweet! We have a baptism this Friday for a boy and his younger sister. They´re so sweet. The boy is actually a friend of the family that we baptized at the beginning of the month so when they got baptized he became really interested and his sister as well. They both have a bunch of friends that are actually members of the church so that´s a really positive thing as well to keep them active. On our last visit with them the mom actually seemed more interested as well so we´re hoping to begin teaching her now too.

This work is awesome! I love seeing the blessings of the Lord in the lives of the people here.

Thank you for all your love and support!

I love you all

Elder Westwood

Hey Everyone!!

This week was a pretty good week! The baseball game we went to last p-day was awesome! Ha I miss baseball. The tickets we bought put us way up in the top of the stadium but luckily the stadium wasn’t that big so it didn´t really matter haha. And the tickets were only 2 dollars which was even better! Some of the other missionaries that came with us bought their tickets from someone else and they ended up sitting right down the first base line ha it was sweet. And I think they´re tickets were like 3 dollars.  I can´t believe how cheap things are here! But anyways during the game the missionaries sitting down by the field were able to talk with the players from the U.S.A. team and got a flag signed by everyone on the team and then after the game we all got to go take pictures with the team. ha It was pretty sweet!

This week I went on splits Elder Almeida, one of the zone leaders from our zone. At first I was super nervous because he doesn´t speak any English which would was good because it meant that I could only communicate in Spanish but at the same time it was a little scary because I was afraid that I wouldn´t be able to understand what he was saying. It was awesome though because as the day went on, I could understand more of what he was saying and we had some super good lessons. One of the houses we went to there was a little boy outside hitting a ball with his bat and after talking to him for a bit his grandpa came out and we started talking to him. At first I didn´t think he was gonna let us in but then he saw that I was American and let us in which I thought was kind of strange. But then he said that if he listened to our message then he wanted me to help his grandson with his English because they teach all of the kids English here. It was kind of funny I thought but we got to teach him something and by the time we were done with our lesson he seemed really interested. So hopefully things stay that way.

I forgot to tell you about this other guy we met. He’s so sweet, he´s 24 years old, is already a practicing doctor at the hospital here, is married (most people here aren’t married which makes a big problem when they want to get baptized because the things they have to do here to get married are ridiculous!) he has a couple of kids I think and was really interested in the church so hopefully we´ll be able to put a baptismal date with him.

Saturday Elder Echeverría and I weren´t having any luck at all. We went to this new area that we´d never been to which looked really nice. When we got there we started contacting and were getting rejected left and right. Ha it was bad we´d go to a house and people would look at us through the windows but wouldn´t say anything and act like nobody was home. Even though we could see them haha all I could do was laugh. We even had one house that they opened the door and let their dogs out to come bark at us. Luckily there was a fence between us. It was also raining super hard that day and we forgot our umbrellas at the house so we were getting soaked! But our luck changed that night. We went to teach a boy that we have set a baptismal date with and when we showed up his whole family was there and some of the dad´s friends were there as well. The boy is awesome! His family is pretty active with another religion but one day Rojelio, the son of the family we just baptized, invited him to church and when he went he felt the Spirit super strong. Then the next week he went to his other church and he said that he just felt like something was missing. And when he came back to our church and when we teach him he feels the Spirit again. It´s so cool! Well we ended up teaching all of them and most of them were really open to our message and seemed pretty interested. Especially one of the dad´s friends, it was crazy! He like asked us a ton of questions about the Book of Mormon and said he wanted to read it and when we set up our return appointment he had to confirm it with us like 4 or 5 times just to make sure he knew what day and what time we were going to be there.

So guess who´s coming to Panama on like the first or second of November?! Ha Aerosmith! A bunch of us keep joking that we´re gonna go to it. That´d be so much fun and i bet it´d be super cheap to!

We found a couple more families this week which all seem pretty interested so hopefully we´ll continue to progress with them. I love the work here it´s awesome!
Thank you for all of your love and prayers

Elder Westwood

My first Baptism!!

This week was so awesome! It was a week full of doing things for the first time.

The first one was the baptism. On Saturday we baptized the Gonzales family they are a family of 4. The daughter of the family is special needs though so we didn´t baptize her because she didn´t need to be baptized. I was so nervous ha Elder Echeverría baptized the father and the son and then I was able to baptize the mom. It was so cool; the spirit there was so awesome. Elder Echeverría told me that the family used to be very against the church and they basically wouldn´t give the missionaries the time of day. But then one night Hna Gonzales had a dream about the missionaries coming to their house and teaching them and then getting baptized into the church and then like a few days later Elder Echeverría and his last companion showed up. And that´s what got the ball rolling. It was so awesome!

We almost didn´t the baptism though. We went to the chapel Saturday morning to fill up the font and we went to turn on the water and we got nothing. So we were sitting there trying to figure out what to do, and then a guy showed up and told us that he was there to fix the water pump because it was broken. He thought he would have it fixed though pretty soon.. well he got it so it would start pumping the water but the line was sucking air into it so it would only pump for a couple of minutes and then he would have to turn it off and re-prime it and then do it again. He didn´t have the supplies with him to fix the line so he ended up just doing that the whole time this was going on we were just praying like crazy that it would work and that we would have water to do the baptism. We ended up having just enough water to baptize in and then we couldn’t get any more water at all. It was crazy but awesome at the same time I know that our prayers were answered.

Yesterday at church a girl came up to us and asked if we could go to her house because her family was going through a hard time and just wanted to talk with us. So we got there and they talked while I tried to pick up on as many words as I could to figure out what they were talking about but it wasn´t much. But I could still figure out the main points of what they were talking about. And then before we left they asked if we could give them blessings. I’d never actually given a blessing before, I’ve only stood in on them so I was a little nervous at that and then the fact that I had to do it in Spanish was even more scary. But as I gave the blessings it was like the spirit took over and I gave the blessings using words that I didn´t know I knew. It was so awesome! I loved it!

We have another busy week planned for this week so hopefully all of our appointments and things will go through. I love the mission!
Thank you all for your prayers and support!

Elder Westwood

I love Conference!

General Conference was amazing!! It’s crazy how much more I learned from this one. I think before my mission I kind of took for granted being able to listen to the prophets and apostles and I probably didn’t pay attention to them as much as I should have. Well that’s changed here in the mission. I love listening to the general authorities of the church speak. Ha in the MTC I made a little journal that I took notes in as we had devotionals and firesides. So I did the same thing during conference. I counted the pages last night ha I took 24 pages of notes haha.

Aside from conference this past week has been a good one! Monday we had p-day which was pretty fun. We got together as a zone and just hung out pretty much haha. I think in a couple of weeks we’re gonna go see the canal though I can’t wait for that! We have some sweet missionaries in our zone. The weather last week was really weird. It was super hot most of the week and right now we’re supposed to be in the rainy season. But we finally got rain a couple of days ago and it cooled it down a little. Except now it’s really humid so idk which is better haha.

On Wednesday I went on splits with the District Leader. His name is Elder Hill and he’s from Kaysville. Me and him have a bunch in common and we got a lot done. Our first appointment was so sweet. ha the reason it was so cool was because I actually understood most of what one of the husband was saying. Most of the people here talk super fast and cut their words so it’s just like one continuous blur. But this guy talked slower and actually took time while he was talking and I actually understood it. ha it was awesome! Other than that I still don’t know what most people are saying but I’m getting better! Ha everyone says it’ll be a couple of months before I actually can communicate pretty fluently so I’m looking forward to that day haha. When I was with Elder Hill he had me contact most of the houses too. Ha that was interesting but by the end I was getting the hang of it I think.

On Friday we had kind of a rough day. All of our appointments fell through so we contacted for about 4 or 5 hours straight. We just weren’t having any luck at all. I think we contacted like 15 houses before anyone let us share anything with us. I can see why a lot of missionaries get discouraged when they’re contacting because they get rejected a lot. But the way I see it is if we at least try to share a message with them then I’m doing my part and I will be blessed for it. That’s how I keep my spirits up with contacting. Finally we got someone to let us in and I can totally see this guy and his family getting baptized. He asked all the right questions and was really interested. So that was sweet. That afternoon we went to a member’s house for dinner and her grandson who is probably 7 years old said he wanted to buy us something. So he ran to his room and got a little jar which is about the size of a half a cup and dumped out all of his coins which was basically all of his savings and went to the store and bought me and Echevvería a sweet roll. The people here are amazing; they have nothing but will give everything that they have. I already love them!

Then this weekend we got to watch general conference which was awesome! They played it in Spanish in the chapel where they had someone translating and then in another room we got to watch it in English. It was so sweet! It was the perfect way to end the week! My favorite talk by far was Elder Holland’s talk in the priesthood session so as soon as you can get a hold of it watch it! It’s amazing! One of the next talks I liked most was the one by Sister Dalton. I hope you all listened carefully to her talk.

This Saturday we’re baptizing a family of 4 so it should be another awesome weekend!

I love the work it!

Thank you for all of your support I love you all

 Elder Westwood