Week 11

Everything is well here. This is my compañeros final week of his mission, and he will be able to spend Christmas with his family. My Spanish has its good days and bad days. It depends on how many new words the person spits out.

The other day we were walking down the street and two drunk guys wanted to talk. They had taken lessons before, but they just wanted to chat with us. They were really animated, and it wasn’t too bad. They loved American movies, and all they know of America is from those movies. It was kind of scary when one of the guys closest to us grabbed the knife that was on the table to try and describe a sentence I didn’t understand, but all was well.

Christmas doesn’t seem close here because it’s super hot and getting hotter every day.

We still have Ernesto as an investigator, but we weren’t able to teach him this last week because he was sick. But we have high hopes for him considering as of right now he is our only investigator.

We walk all day to the houses that we have. We have had people talk to us and say yes to listen to a leccion, but we are lucky if we get to teach one any day of the week. We work a lot with non-active members. I bet I go though a few pairs of shoes on my misión.

I was able to help a guy out with his car. The cars here are different, but basically the same. He was having trouble with his breaks, and when he would go to stop, it wouldn’t stop fast and it had a squeaking sound. Sounds pretty simple for me, but for him he couldn’t figure out why because he replaced the front breaks two years ago. We went for a little drive. I figured it was the back breaks so we set up a day I could do service. We took off the driver’s side. It seemed ok, probably could use new pads, but nothing really bad....but we took the other side off, and there was so much rust where the shoes connect together. No wonder it had a hard time stopping because only one side could actually move to stop the car. I did the best I could with explaining what he needed to do with the car, but I don’t know the words so it was really hard.

I’m glad everyone is safe at home, hope you’re having fun. I can’t wait to see you on Christmas.

Oh, another thing, every time I see a flagpole, I look up thinking to see the American Flag, but it’s a big letdown not to see it. I’m still a proud ‘Merican .

Love, Elder Riley Newman

This is the family whose car I helped fix.

This is mate. The people here love it.