Dalton - 6/17/13 email

P-Day Started a Little Early

I doubt that my attempt to explain this week will really work out, but here we go.

In this mission, President Dorius gives "dying" missionaries something that I like to call "trunky week" or, in Spanglish, "trunkazo week."  A dying missionary gets a few days to be with another dying missionary to go around the mission and say bye to converts.  That being said, my dying missionary left, and I was a temporary in a different area.  At the end of the week, one dying missionary needed a companion, so my job was to follow him around.  I just wanted to explain why I might not have many stories in my area to write for now.  I'm really antsy to get back to work in a permanent area.

My temporary area this week is essentially a different mission than what I know.  Just a normal, big city in this zone.  Had a McDonald's cone in the middle of the day.  I could almost hear Cindy Lou Who singing a beautiful rendition of "Where are you, Lima?"  But, one awesome thing to see this week was, ok, I forgot his name, but he was inactive as of two months ago, not wanting to hear anything about the church.  This week, we accompanied him to the church for his interview to start his mission papers.  It´s really something else to see those kinds of changes.

One other kind of funny story, but kind of sad, was with my dying companion.  He went to visit one of his favorite convert families, but when we got there, the house was not there.  I don’t mean the family, I mean the house lot itself was gone.  Just one house…  nothing…  another house.  We went to visit a member family that knew the converts, and their house had also disappeared.  Elder Savage apparently managed to translate part of the branch!

In other news, Peru is going to have 100 stakes by the end of the month.  It will be the 4th country in the world to have 100, and it is definitely the smallest country to have it.  (Mexico, Brazil, and the USA each have around 200-300 million people, whereas Peru only has 30 million people.)  No big deal.

Well, transfers are tomorrow, so you'll find out what's what next week.  Love you all.

Elder Johnson

Another (very short) email 15 minutes later:

Ok, I just heard the transfers.  I’m staying in Prolima with Elder Bulacio.  I hear that he's really good, so there it is.