What a week!!! It's been the longest/fastest week of my mission! There are just a billion things on my mind I don't know where to begin.
Last Saturday, President Rios gave the office permission to go the temple Saturday night, the last session! So we were all super pumped. Well someone said the last session was at 7:00 and no one thought to check, so we showed up at 6:30 all ready to go! Well the confused looks on the temple workers faces told us that there was no 7:00 session haha. They suggested that we could maybe do initatories, which we agreed to. The only problem was that the temple workers were in training, so we had to wait a few minutes. As we were waiting for them to call us back, one missionary realized he didn't have his recommend, and another realized his recommend had expired the day before. So they agreed to wait for us. That is, until the temple informed us that the training would last pretty much until the temple closed, and that there was just no way to even get us in. So that whole thing was pretty much a fail. Even the pictures we tried to take turned out bad haha!
Monday we sent off the group of going home missionaries which was another crazy thing to experience for the first time! I knew most of them: Elder Anco (my second companion), Elder Tuares (lived with him in Virú for three months), and just a bunch of good friends that I've been in zones and districts with. Tuesday, we welcomed the new missionares! Two from Argentina, one from Colombia, one from Bolivia, and two from Perú. I felt so bad for those poor missionaries; they were up since two in the morning! They were pretty nervous (I remembered the feeling well) on top of being dead tired! But they were champs and kept their legs moving haha. I got to direct the meeting and introduce them to their new companions, a meeting that I also remember well from the trainer and new missionary perspective!
Thursday, we went to Huaraz! It's a mountain city seven hours from Trujillo, the most far out city of the mission by far. It's all within about three hours, and then there's Huaraz. President Rios picked us up at 8:30 in his car and we made the seven hour trip! Again, the theme of the week was new experiences. It was fun hearing some of his mission and life experiences, listening to the recent mission president training, and seeing the scenery! There's a mountain in Huaraz called "La Huascarán" (not sure if I spelled it right), but it's the mountain that the Paramount Pictures logo is based off of! I was colder than I've been in a long time and saw my breath for the first time in 19 months! The chapel doesn't have heaters of course, so I was pretty cold as we trained the missionaries Thursday night during interviews and Friday morning for the zone training. I've turned into a wimp during my mission when it comes to temperature.
We're teaching a couple named Robert and Laura, and they are such good people! They told us this week how much their lives have changed since the missionaries showed up just four weeks ago. They said they probably would be divorced right now if not for the gospel, but because of the missionaries they feel more love in their relationship than ever. I just thought it was so interesting, because the missionaries never gave marriage classes! They surely never taught from their own experience about how to fix relationship problems. They just taught true doctrine, and the Holy Ghost told Robert and Laura all things which they should do! True doctrine understood changes behavior, I know it! They'll be married on July 26th and baptized on August 12th, the day before Elder Rice goes home. Laura went to her home town, Tumbes, this week to get all the paperwork, so we're hoping that everything goes smoothly with that!
I love you all so much and will talk to you next week! We got permission to go to Hermana Kattia's baptism (who I taught before coming here) so we're headed over there right now!
Elder Hart
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