Los Locos!

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

So I think I need to work on my barber shop vocabulary, because this happened...

At least I wont have to cut my hair for a while! :)