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