November 8, Transfer Week

Transfer week. That means it was a long week with a lot less hours of sleep for my comp and I and the AP's. Two elders aren't ending up coming until next transfer and we didn't know that until one day before the transfer calls... so president and the AP's had to do an emergency transfer meeting and re-plan transfers again! That I am sure was stressful. So that put us a bit behind. I don't want to bore you all with the details that you either won't understand or won't find as interesting or crazy as me. But me and Elder Castillo are going on transfer number FOUR together! He will most likely be training an elder in his position the last three weeks of this transfer. Elder Vargas finished his mission so we got a new AP. His name is Elder Santiago from Peru. I don't know him very well, but he seems like a good guy.

Elder Rodriguez died! Oh no! My dad is dead! It was a sad day for us both. He called me the night before and he was super upset. Just way sad to end the mission. But excited too. I'm gonna miss that fool! Legit my brother and best friend. At least I still got elder Castillo!

So the fresh batch of greenies came. There are 22 of them! I still always feel so cool talking to them on their first day because they don't know anything and are so interested and think I'm super cool and like wise and old in the mission hahaha. Little do they know that I still feel just like them. Its definitely fun talking to them about my experiences in Salcedo with the riots haha. Or my living conditions in Los Cocos.

So we are working extra hard with the young men this week because an elder from the 70 is coming to our ward tomorrow!! He is like a councilor of the young men or something. He will be talking in Sacrament and some other classes! So it should be super cool!

We are planning on starting to have a young men's basketball night every Saturday at 6. Everyone here loves basketball and it should be a good way to get them to know one another and be at the church more and off the streets and maybe we will find some good contacts through it!

We are teaching a less active named Erik. He's super great. He goes to seminary every day but never goes to church! What kind of kid would rather wake up at 5 am every day rather then just go to church at 9 am?? Weird right? Well his family were all like super active a year back but all of the sudden they just stopped going. I thought there had to be more to the situation. Well I was talking to a missionary that used to serve in the area and he let me in on the info... wow. I don't want to say all the details as to what happened. But wow. Now I understand why they have problems. A super sad/crazy/scary situation within the family. So I have no idea how we are to resolve it. But the Lord will help us!! At least for Erik to come to church dangit!

My companion and I did a fast for one of our investigators who wants to get baptized and is basically an active member and is always mistaken for a member already. All she needs is the papers of her boyfriend who she is living with and has a kid with so they can be married. Unfortunately these papers are super hard to find because they don't yet exist... He wasn't born in a hospital so there are no papers or information regarding him or that he even exists. So we are sacrifice, praying, and relying on the Lord to help us!! Pray for Yokarin!

Funny thing that happened today: we saw a taxi driver get super angry and start freaking out. All of the sudden he snapped and whipped out a machete and swung at the guy he was mad at and like tried to kill him! They were in the middle of a super busy road too. #typicaldominican...

Well anyway, happy Halloween! they don't celebrate that here. But it's probably a good thing because I've seen one too many scary things here that have to do with black magic and sketch stuff like that. Haha.

Have a great week all.

Elder Greer

PS: the new greenie in my ward is named elder Green... so that makes it me (elder Greer) and Elder/Sister Grange (the couple missionaries) and Elder Green... Luckily Elder Graves just left or it would be even harder!