Birthdays

Here it has been very rainy. I am glad that I got a new umbrella on Wednesday when I was in San Carlos. This week went well. We got a lot more teachings in this week. We also went to a new area. We went to La Libertad. There we had a great experience. We taught a less active family with a part member and that less active family gave us 31 referrals in that area!!! We are thinking right now how we are going to be able to teach all of them consistently because we can't be there past 5 pm because of transportation, tricycle or bus, and we can't go there very often because it costs us 20 pesos to go there and takes about 15 minutes. We are going to ask president for missionaries there so that they can try to start a new group there.

We taught Mary Grace again this week. Her husband was there as well. It was a different lesson because her husband is an apostle for the Catholic church, each big church has 12 apostles. He really tried to use the Bible to understand us or disprove so we didn't get to teach. We told them about the Book of Mormon and committed them to read it. He is still wondering where Lehi is in the Book of Mormon. We will focus on the Book of Mormon. We didn't make it to Paskil and Galanza this week. We went to Jessa this week. She is doing great. She wants to go to church but is shy so we talked to her and tried to help her. She is also shy because her aunt doesn't want her to join. She knows it is true so maybe in 2 Sundays she can attend church, we have district conference on Sunday. We tried to return to Yuriza but she wasn't there so we taught her sister Agnes. We taught the plan of salvation and she believes it is true. She just needs to pray to know the Book of Mormon is true. We also started teaching a relative of our branch president's wife. She didn't want to let us teach at first but when she found out they were members, we were able to teach. That is the power of having a fellowshipper that people know. The boarders are doing alright. We are still trying to get them to pray about the Book of Mormon. They seem scared to do it. That is our focus right now. We got a lot of new investigators this week that seem really good. I will tell you more about them later.

We eat a lot of coconut here but we don't eat the fresh ones. We eat the baby ones that just barely got the inside growing and has the water. We use the water and add the inside then we add milk and maybe sugar then we eat it. It tastes very good. The mission rule for houses is they have to be cement and have tile floors. They also have to have a gate and have screens and bars on the windows. Most of the houses in our area is cement because it is a "bigger" city and our area is a richer area. We have some that are made of dried leaves but not to many.

We had a great week this week. It is a lot better to have lots of lessons.

I love you all,

Elder Nielsen

PS the picture was a cake for Elder Ponseca's birthday, last Monday, and early for my birthday