Soooo, I don't know what happened to the super calm, nothing
ever happens "Los Cocos" because this week Los Cocos turned into Los
Locos!
So first, one of our inactive members who we found and have
been teaching for about 4 weeks decided to go on a rampage out of nowhere. He
is usually a super chillaxed, nice 28 year old man, but something made him tick
the wrong way last Friday. He exploded at his mom and attacked her with a machete.
Luckily his mom blocked it with a chair, so it sliced the chair in half instead
of her. He then left and his mom and her husband called the police (but they
didn't do much to help them) and are still on the search for him to figure out
why the heck he freaked out and where he is now living. We got there literally
right after it happened, so she was kind of a mess. So we have been trying to
help her as much as we can. But it's sad because she was so interested in the
gospel and so close to coming to church with us, but now she is just distracted
but her situation with her son :/ She seemed to be doing a lot better the last
time we visited her and we took a member with us who lives by her so she could
get to know a member and hopefully become friends with her.
Then on Sunday night, we realized that someone tried to
break into our house through the windows. Our windows are plastic shutters
basically and there are two on the top, two on the bottom if that makes any sense
at all. The bottom two were locked, but the top two were not, so anyone could
just open them and look right in our house and all the things we have. Our
neighborhood is usually super safe and everyone looks out for each other. We
are also super close friends with the neighbors across the street, two houses
down from us who own a colmada (Dominican Snackbar thing) and are always
outside/in the street. So if anyone saw someone weird try and break into our
house, it would be them. But they didn't see anyone. Anyway, we could tell that
someone tried to open/break our bottom shutters in order to reach in and grab
something. We wondered what the heck anyone would want to steal from our house
seeing as all we have is like scriptures and books in our front room. But then
we realized that my companion's camera was sitting on his table right next to
the bottom shutters, so that is what the person was trying to get. So now we
have a lock and lock our front gate every day and night so that doesn't happen
again.
A little bit later that night, right after our daily
planning, we heard a bunch of gun shots. Sometimes the motors here make this
weird popping sound that sounds like a gun shot, but this time we heard a bunch
in a row that sounded more powerful and real, like gun shots. They shots got
closer and pretty soon me and my comp were ducking under our study table. (Not
gonna lie, I was kind of scared, but it was kind of a thrilling scared and it
was kind of exciting ;p) the shots went right by our house and continued down
the street. Apparently two guys were shooting at each other on their
motorcycles. This went on for about 30 minutes and then we just went to bed
figuring we would here all about it the next day. And we did. It was the talk
of the town. Especially because the girlfriend of one of the guys was on the
back of one of the motorcycles with him and was killed. She ended up being an
old investigator of the missionaries before me :/ Way sad.
Now, enough of the craziness. On to the good stuff. We will
be having the baptism for Empenitrez, our most progressing investigators, on
the 21st. We were going to baptize her daughter too, but we feel that she needs
more time to prepare and understand the gospel more and the significance of
baptism. So we are postponing her baptism a little longer, but continuing with
Empenitrez's on the 21st. We are also in the stressful process of planning the
wedding of Rosario and Isidro for March 6th. We have to find all the paperwork
and information they need which is way hard, and try and plan the party and all
that fun stuff. We are having trouble finding help from our ward members
because they are... kind of lazy and don't always like to take time to travel
to Los Cocos, but my recent convert, Maritza has been awesome! I asked her to
come to a lesson with us with Rosario and talk to her about the things she
needs for the wedding and all that. She even took her to her house after the
lesson to talk about it more, and show her pictures and lend her things. So grateful
for her. Maritza has also been helping us with Empenitrez and wants to keep
visiting our investigators with us. Her husband, Orlando, who is also my recent
convert, has been great too and came with me to a couple lessons. I love the
excitement and willingness to serve that the recent members have. We should
always have that, not just as recent converts, but as members forever.
Rosario will then be baptized with her two young sons who
also love church. I am working hard on getting Isidro to church and farther
down the line, interested/committed to baptism as well.
Lots of things to look forward to! I am just praying they
all end up going as planned. I would love your prayers for them all, especially
that we can find/get all the information and papers we need for the wedding!
Love you all!
Elder Greer
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| So I think I need to work on my barber shop vocabulary, because this happened... |
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| At least I wont have to cut my hair for a while! :) |
