¿Que onda cuates?
hey! that title translates to whats up dudes? or literally what wave dudes. you now know spanish! haha.
well this week has been amazingly awesome. what happened was (i forgot to mention this in my last email) that a tropical storm hit the itzmo which is a coastal area here in Oaxaca and flooded the crap out of it so just before the storm the area authority evacuated all the missionaries in that area and moved them into the city until the flooding and stuff was under control. so we´ve had 2 elders living with us who were evacuated from out there named Elder Black and Elder Jimenez.
we switched companions and i have been with Elder Black who is an American from San José California who has about 20 months in the mission and is a great missionary. He has been a zone leader for about 9 months and has had a lot of success and its been super awesome to be with him for this week. unfortunately he goes back to the Itzmo today at 5 so its all about to come to an end and i´ll be back with mr. ¨I proclaim myself Mr. Awesome¨, Elder Castellanos who picks and chooses which rules he´s gonna follow and makes it about 10 times harder for me to not fall into the same semi-obenience trap. I just want you to know i haven´t ever fallen into that but its a daily battle with him. Its also hard to love him when he thinks he is the best thing to ever happen to the world and all the other things about him that bother me, but somehow i choke it down and we get along. anyway, thats my rant. i'm obviously not too excited about going back with him.
being with Elder Black has been a lot more of what I imagined the mission would be like. im sad its ending, but changes are next week so maybe i´ll go with someone else... but we´ll see.we found a new investigator while working the area castellanos likes to neglect. she was pretty pilas so we´ll see how she keeps her commitments. oh, this is just another manifestation of Castellanos personality. when we were talking about what to do with the 4 of us he decided that we would divide the area in half and he and the lazy mexican companion of Elder Black would work the top part (with all the investigators and most of the members I know) and me and Black would practically reopen the bottom part. at first we were pissed, but I wanted to get to know the bottom part and see if we could get anything going down there with the more powerful companionship. I wanted the challenge so instead of getting mad at Castellanos I just accepted it and we went to work.
even with reopening half of our area me and Elder Black by far had the highest numbers in our ZONE this week. it was awesome. I learned a ton from him. I would venture to say that I learned more from him in a week than I´ve learned from castellanos in a change and a half. literally. so ya, it was awesome. apparently one of the investigators that we temporarily left up in san louise beltran they got a hold of and she is progressing rapidly so we might be baptizing her in a few weeks if im still here so thats exciting. anyways, so i´m gonna hit this week running and hopefully continue working like me and Elder Black did while babysitting my trainer. we´ll see what happens.
oh also the other day while me and Black were going to the offices there was a protest blockade at the biggest intersection in Oaxaca. what happened was the teachers wanted more money so they found ways to hijack buses and semi trucks (with guns, knives, or whatever they wanted) and parked them long ways across all the lanes of traffic. this intersection is HUGE so it caused some major traffic problems. me and black talked about how something like that would never fly in the US but here the police just direct traffic around it. literally they don´t do anything else about it. so that was somewhat scary and interesting. I took pictures so you can see somewhat what it looked like.
well, that's the update so i guess im gonna take off. I love you all and loved reading your emails! I hope you all have a great week and know that I miss you and love you!
love, Elder Henze
