No Investigators Came to Church - Pathetic!!!!

Buenos días everyone! I hope everyone is doing well. Thanksgiving is coming soon right? Crazy. 

K here's how my week went:

 

1. The bad: No investigators came to church! Agh! Pathetic! We do a lot to try to get people to come. A few days before everyone says that of course they're coming and God is first blah blah. We had 8 people who were maybe going to come, plus niños. But then Sunday morning comes. We call people to wake them up. We go to peoples houses to wake them up. We offer to help make breakfast and get the kids ready. We promise the teenagers prizes if they go ha-ha. But no one came. It was a huge bummer. Its like the worst to be a missionary and show up at church with no one.

 

2. We still might have a baptism next week though, of this really pregnant teenager. We want to hurry and baptize her because shes due next Sunday, and around here there are all kinds of superstitions about babies, for example, the 40 days after a baby is born the mom and baby can't leave the house or do anything. So we have to hurry. We'll see how it goes, I can for see a few big disasters coming with this one ha-ha...

 

3. I had a very interesting cultural experience yesterday (Sunday). Something awful happened - a young girl's husband died in a motor accident! It was really sad. She has 2 little kids. She found out during church. It's a tragedy. But it was really interesting to watch the ward come together. In America when something like this happens, the Relief Society organizes when dinners will be taken over, organizes who will be watching the kids. In Central America this is what they do: It was announced at church that the wake would be at 5pm and that everyone was to meet at the young woman's house (and in Guatemala, everyone lives with or right next to family, so all kinds of family live right there too). Me and my companion got there a little after 5, but people had already been there working for a few hours. The entire ward was there. All the women were in the back of the house outside cooking a HUGE meal for everyone. There aren't means to cook large meals here, so several fires were built with several huge pots on them, cooking things like a hot fruit drink, batter for tamalitos (kind of like tamales) chicken, vegetables. I was helping clean and dry about 200 giant banana leaves because here they use the banana leaves to wrap tamalitos, not corn husks like the Mexicans use. Other preparations were also made. The men set up a huge tarp tent thing with lots of chairs, I have no idea where they got that stuff. Lights had to be rigged up so the women could keep cooking (and when I say rigged, I mean there was a guy sticking a raw exposed wire into an outlet. It actually worked out. I got pics). It was basically a giant party, everyone was happy and smiling. But it was all in support of the family. Everyone felt kind of a sense of importance, of duty to be there helping. Wecouldn't stay to eat the food because it wasn't even close to being done when we had to go home. Apparently these things last late into the night. It was a really interesting experience. I got lots of pics and will try to send them next week.

 

So that was basically my week. Tomorrow we get to go to the Temple open house! I'm so excited! It will be awesome. I hope that y'all have a great week. I'm so grateful for the opportunity I have to serve a mission. Its a wonderful blessing and I'm learning so many things that Ill use forever. I love the gospel. Have a great week!

 

Love, Hermana Gilland