Elder Tanner Leishman : Week 40!

Hey mom! About the Texas dude, he called us and said he couldn't get the number to work, I must have said it wrong. Oh well. It's all good. He says he is still bringing beef jerky so it's all good. I already have plenty of packages anyways :) And don't even worry about the length of the letters. I love hearing about what's going on at home and your the one who really tells me, hahaha.

This week was good! We made a big effort to set goals, and look at them every day and every night to make sure we planned according to the goals, and how to achieve them. We made sure to come home every night and look at what we did throughout the day, why we met our goals, or why we didn't. It seemed to help us a lot. We have the goals written up on the board on the wall so we can look at them and update out achievements every day. I think that is why we are having a lot more success.

Like I had written in previous weeks, we weren't having a lot of success in finding new investigators. We couldn't get references, and the people for some reason wouldn't listen to our message. But this week, we changed our approach. We tried new things and we had a lot more success with it. Also, God saw our hard work and diligence and helped us out.

The other day we were walking to the bank to pay a bill, and we walked by a girl talking to her friend. She kind of stared at us as we walked by so we said hi and just kept walking. So on the way back, we passed her again. After we got about 10 feet passed her she goes "Elders!" and we turned around to go talk to her. She introduced herself, and told us that she was less active, and that her parent want us to come visit them. So we set a date to pass by there house (They live wayyy out there in the middle of nowhere, we have to go in a bus). So early this week we went clear out there to visit them, and it turns out that the parents were non-members. They wanted to get baptized awhile ago (like 6 years ago) but couldn't figure out the whole marriage papers thing, so they ended up getting pretty discouraged and stopped coming.

So, a little background: One of the requirements for baptism is that if they live together they have to be married, obviously. The hard part is that Colombia makes is really hard for anyone to get married. If they aren't from this part of the country, they have to call and get there "marriage papers" sent here from the notary where they were born. You cant even change it and say "Hey I live here now." They just stay where you are born. AND they can't just email it or anything. It has to be sent by mail. And as everyone knows...the mail system here is not the best. So it's a real struggle to get some people to baptism because this process can take months, and if there is even the slightest complication (If they have kids with another person, previous marriage, etc.) it makes it cost a lot more, and take even longer.

So sadly, when this family (the Rodriguez family) tried to get all there papers going, all the elders got transferred at the same time, and nobody knew who they were or how to get to their house. We didn't even have a teaching record or even a person who knew them. So by a miracle, we were able to find the daughter in Leticia, and go out to meet the whole family. I could just feel that God held on to these people for us, or held on to us for these people. They are awesome. Although they are still pretty discouraged, i know they can do this.

Also, there is an area here in Leticia called Victoria Regia. In Victoria Regia, there is a small neighborhood where basically every person on the street was baptized, but went less active. Not really sure why, but it seems to be a Letician curse. So we were down there contacting, and we met a lady named Cindy. We introduced ourselves as missionaries for the church, and she goes "Yeah I know you guys, my husband is a member" so we took down there information to try and pass by some day. We kept calling and passing but we could never find the family when the man and the woman both were home. One day, we called, and they said "Yeah, come by tonight and we´ll both be here" so we stopped by, and WHATAYA FREAKIN' KNOW, they were both home. We got to teach them both. She seemed to be interested in learning more about our church, and he seemed really excited to be remembering the testimony he had gained so long ago, and seemed excited to get it back.

So yeah, that has been this week. Just some things I thought you would like to know is that we have been getting up early lately to go to the church and play frisbee. It's super good exercise because it's just running the whole time, haha. Also, today we went for a run to go check out the Amazon River, and we ran into a rad native dude who just wanted to chat. They always love chatting, so I was just like "Hey can I take a picture with you?" and he was like yeah sure, haha. I can't remember his name, but he is a fisherman. He fishes for a fish called Pirarucú. Its pretty much my favorite thing about the amazons. It's GIANT and a super cool looking fish. And on top of that, it tasted really good. He says it takes 2 or 3 days to catch just one. All the little gift shops sell wooden pirarucú so you know I've got a bunch of them, hahaha.

I know I've been pulling out a lot of money lately, I promise I won't do it as much when I'm in Bogotá. I just need to make sure I get all the cool Letician things while I'm here. Today I got a sweet shoulder bag made out of material called Chambira. Its something I haven't seen anywhere else in Colombia. They say its made from some tree out there in the amazons, and it's super durable. It looks rad and only costed me 35.000 pesos (a little over 10 dollars). Sorry I'm s´dang expensive.

Thanks for everything! Preciate ya. Love you!