21 Nov 2011

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!! This is gonna be my first Thanksgiving away from home ha it´s gonna be weird. But some of the people here actually celebrate Thanksgiving so it´s gonna be interesting to see what it´s like down here haha.

This week was an interesting one! We went to the doctor on Wednesday because I still wasn´t feeling to well and found out that I have Bronchitis! So that was kind of a bummer but I got some meds and I´m on my way back to being health again! ha hopefully it lasts for a while! It´s rained almost all day everyday this week so we think that has something to do with it. The doctor told me I needed to take a couple days and rest so we didn´t do as much work this week as we had hoped. But we´re hoping to get back at it this week if we can both stay healthy. My comp thinks he´s starting to get sick so we´re crossing our fingers that he doesn´t.

Tuesday we had an awesome day though. We taught some awesome lessons and the spirit was so strong! She was raised in the Catholic church and her family members are super against the church which is sad. But anyways Tuesday night we taught this girl about the restoration and prayer and the spirit there was so amazing. We asked her if she would pray that night to find out for herself if the things we had taught her were true. Wednesday morning we got a call from her and she was super excited and told us that she had received an answer to her prayer and she knew it was true! It was so awesome! We weren´t able to teach her again last week because I got sick but we set up an appointment with her for this week. We´re pretty sure she´s gonna be baptized pretty soon.

Other than that not a whole lot happened this week. The doctor said to rest for 3 days so we weren´t able to go out and teach as much. We still did a little but not a ton. But we had a lot of time to study the scriptures haha. It´s awesome the things you can learn when you read the scriptures. I love it! I wish we had more time to study because it seems like every time we study we find something that can help us become better missionaries by helping us in our teaching.

The mission is awesome! I love it! I love you all and thank you for all of your support and prayers!

Elder Westwood

14 Nov 2011

Hey everyone!!

This week’s been another rough one. This week I came down with some kind of cold that kind of kicked my butt a little bit but its getting better! Tuesday morning when I woke up my throat was hurting super bad and I couldn’t breathe through my nose so that was pretty awesome haha. Then I lost my voice by about Thursday but now it’s back and the cold seems to be going away so I think I’m getting over it. I guess we’ll see!

Because I was sick my comp didn’t want to work too hard because it’s been raining a ton this week and he didn’t want me getting wet and making things worse so we just kind of took it easy this week. Which was kind of a bummer because I hate just sitting around doing nothing and would rather be out teaching but I guess once I get totally better we’ll just have to work extra hard to make up for the time we lost!

This week we continued teaching the Jaen´s which are a family we found in the record book. They were taught by the missionaries almost a year ago and then for some reason the missionaries just quit going. I’m not exactly sure of the reason. But anyways, they aren’t married like most people here in Panama but they want to be baptized so we got the papers started for them to get married and it should be the end of this month some time so that will be sweet! We also set a baptismal date for the end of the month to; I think they’ll get married on like a Friday and then baptized the next day on Saturday so it should be a pretty awesome weekend ha-ha. They both have super strong testimonies of the church and have read the book of Mormon. It’s so awesome!

This week we taught a lady who we had contacted earlier this week but she didn’t have time to talk to us then so we made an appointment to go back. When we went back all of her siblings were there and her mom as well. We taught them about how families can be together forever and the mom got super excited about the church at that point. She said that she wanted to come to church with us on Sunday and she was going to make her husband come too haha. Unfortunately when we went back to get her, the daughter said that she had to leave town because there was a family issue or something like that. But we’re gonna go back this week and see if we can get her to come next week.

This week’s been hard being sick and all but I’m getting better and hopefully be back at work hard again soon! Sorry I don’t have much else to say for the week.

Love you all thank you for all of your support and prayers!

Elder Westwood

11Nov 2011

Hey everyone! This week has been a crazy one!

We knew we had transfers this week but Elder Echeverria and I thought that if anyone was going to be changing it would be him. Well... we were both wrong! I got the call Tuesday night around 930 telling me that I had transfers and I needed to pack up all my things. At first I thought it was a joke but then I realized that it was for real. I was kind of upset because we were having a lot of success in that area but it’s all good. The Lord needs me here in my new area.

My new area is called San Isidro. It’s basically on the opposite side of Panama City than Arraijan was. It has a reputation for being one of the harder areas in the zone. This area has a lot more money than my other area and the people aren’t as open. Most of the people here won’t even give us the time of day it’s sad. San Isidro does have one thing in common as Arraijan though, that is that there are a ton of Hills! I actually think there are more hills in this area than in Arraijan except here they are a lot steeper.

My new comp is Elder Betanco from Honduras and he knows less English than I do Spanish ha-ha. So basically I’ve really had to step up my game with the Spanish. The first day was super rough ha I didn’t know anything he was saying but things are starting to get better now. It’s probably a good thing I got a Latino comp that doesn’t know any English because now I don’t have a choice but to speak Spanish and I’m actually getting allot better at it so that’s good I guess ha-ha.

ha I think Panamá is starting to take a little effect on me, Friday night I was sitting on my bed and I looked down at my feet and my ankles were so swollen. I was planning on still working next day but then Betanco saw them and said I had to call the mission nurse and she said to ice them and keep them elevated so I did for a little while Saturday but I hate just laying around so we still worked allot that afternoon. I also noticed these red marks on my chest that I hadn’t ever seen before that the nurse thinks might be fungus so I had to go buy some medicine to put on it.

Sorry I don’t have a ton to say; ha because of changes we didn’t really do a ton. Even though this area has a bad reputation right now, Elder Betanco and I are gonna work our hardest to change that!

Thank you for all of your love and support
Elder Westwood

Hey Everyone!!

Wow this week was a crazy one ha I don´t even know where to start!

Since this was the last week of the change Elder Echeverría and I decided we really wanted to push ourselves and work really hard. So last Sunday during stake conference we asked President Ward what the record was for lessons taught in one week. He said he wasn´t quite sure but he thought that it was like 54 or somewhere around that. So we set our goal to get 60 lessons this week. Well not only did we make 60, we actually got 68!! It was so crazy! Ha we worked so hard, by about Thursday we both were just dying because we were so tired but we kept pushing on and set the record. It was super fun though we found so many people that have been prepared and are ready to hear the gospel it was so awesome to see! This week really helped me a ton with my Spanish too, Elder Echeverría had me do a lot of the contacting and lead a lot of the lessons, at the beginning of the week I was a little rough but by the end I could definitely see an improvement which was good. Because we broke the record today President Ward let us go to the mission home and hang out with him and Sister Ward. It was so awesome!

We also baptized two people this week which was awesome! We baptized a 15 year old boy and his sister who is 13. They´re both awesome and have super strong testimonies of the church. At the baptism we didn´t have very many other members show up and the people who were going to give the talks didn´t come so my comp and I gave them. I was pretty nervous at first, but it actually turned out alright and the spirit was super strong throughout the whole service which was awesome. We also had an investigator come and he loved it and after the service he kept asking us when we could go teach him again it was so cool haha I love it!

It´s been raining super hard this week ha I think it´s basically rained all day for the past 4 days. Occasionally it´ll break and we´ll have sunshine for a little while but it doesn´t last very long. The other day we were walking to a member´s house and it was pretty nice out, it was a blue sky and it was super hot, within 30 minutes it was a complete down poor and it rained the rest of the day ha it was so crazy. It´s so hard to teach when it rains here because the roofs of all the houses are tin, so when the rain hits it, it´s SUPER loud ha we basically have to yell while we´re teaching and sometimes we still can´t hear what each other is saying.

This week has been an awesome week! Ha I can´t believe I’m done with my first change here in the mission. It´s been a pretty good one we´ve worked super hard and I’ve learned a ton! We´re still not sure if elder echeverria and I will be together next change but we´ll find out tomorrow night. We hope we can stay together another change but we´ve heard a lot of rumors that he´s changing. So I guess we´ll see what happens.

Thanks for all of your love and prayers
Elder Westwood