Hola familia - January 23rd

Hola familia,
Espero que muy pronto reciban las cartas que mandé la última semana. If you could just let me know when you receive the letters that would be great. Anyways, this past week has been somewhat of an exhausting week for me. I feel so drained right now. Sometimes I wonder if I will have the energy I need to finish my mission. Then I just tell myself just 2 months or so until a winter refreshing! I think I will love the cold more than ever before after my mission. I have no clue how hot it is down here but I know it is hot enough. Demasiado calor! So just a little longer and I am sure I will have more energy.
We had the conference this past Thursday which is always good and refreshing in itself. We always learn so much that we can do better. The difference is that now I feel like I am already doing a lot of it correctly. Of course there are always things that we can do better but I see that I have come a long way.
We brought our area book to conference and they took them from us to do an activity and we forgot it on our way back to our area. We had to take another afternoon to go and get it again. I felt so incredibly ridiculous having forgot that. It is like our life, only really it is the progress of all of our investigators. Luckily it wasn’t really hard to get it back, but it was some wasted time. So that was fun.
Recently we stopped by the Benites family and shared The Restoration lesson with them again to see how well they understood. They understand really well. I asked them if they knew it was true and they said yes. Our intention was to set a baptismal date with them again so they can do all in their power to be baptized. Instead we talked about how they can get married. They need to get a blood analysis which should be really easy and then finish all the paperwork and they are married within 7 days. They thought they would need more money for the Records place but we went and talked with the Records place to see exactly what they need to do and they only need money for the analysis which they already have. Other than that they have to go to Posadas to get copies of birth certificates and finish the papers. We are going to be in Posadas for interviews and we are going to see if we can do something for them. We will see. Kind of a pain, but I see the marriage thing within their grasp now. Just a little more!
We now have a new goal for the mission this year and that is to baptize a family every three months every companionship. Last year we concentrated on numbers of baptisms, but this year it is going to be families because that is what this mission needs, good strong active families. I can already see that the Benites family will be a family like this.
This week we have been working with an investigator named David Silva. He came to church this week and liked it. Unfortunately he had problems and needed to pay 80 pesos for rent. We as missionaries are not allowed to give money to anybody because it is not what we do and it gives people the wrong idea. Elder Cranford wanted to give David his watch though so he could sell it for the price he needed to pay rent. We called president Shakespear and asked him if we could and he said that if it was money definitely not. He laughed though and said it was up to us on the watch thing. So we went ahead and gave David the watch to sell. He was extremely grateful. He is twenty and he and his girlfriend are trying to start out and they were about to lose everything and have no place to go. The place they live now is very humble too. They like the church though and are reading the Book of Mormon and want to know more. They even said they would be baptised before, but due to how their circumstances were I don’t know how serious their desires are. We will have to be careful with them. For right now they are going to keep coming to church and learning more. They know they have to make changes in their lives before getting baptized. Still they are really great people. David studies a lot of martial arts and is quite the champ in competitions. I don’t think that he has ever lost. He broke a brick in front of us and it just looked incredible. He can break a huge stack of bricks, slabs of concrete, etc. It is crazy! He said we could learn and practice sometime. It would be fun, but I don’t want to injure myself either.
We also stared teaching the son of a member here called Rodrigo. He has been coming to music classes and is picking up on playing the piano really quickly. I am impressed. So after music classes we taught him the Restoration and he told us he would pray and we found that he is already reading because he has a Book of Mormon. He really seems like a pensive kid and really seemed to consider and ponder about what we taught him. He is an amazing kid.
Dad, I just though I would let you know that we also taught the first and second lessons from the Joseph Smith manual this month. I taught the first lesson as well. That book is going to be amazing. We used the bit from the book before the written account of Joseph Smith to help the people here understand the situations that brought about the Restoration and then we read pieces of the account and discussed it, just like you guys only in Castellano.
So mom, I hope that answers your question on who teaches. Generally we are teaching Priesthood and Sunday School. Every once in a while a member of our branch comes from a city about 45 minutes by colectivo and teaches, but he and his family just can’t travel every week or even every other week. We start at 9 and there are usually a good 25 or 30 people. We have a bunch of investigators usually in church. The Benites family is always there (all 5 of them) and we usually have 1 or 2 more. This next week I think that we may have 9 or so in total. Some come pretty frequently but I am expecting some new ones. It is frustrating because we have great people in church that just can´t get baptised because they need to get married or whatever. What a frustration! I see a great future for this branch though. It seems like just a bit more and we can baptize people left and right! It may not happen in my time here though.
But everything is great. Muchas Gracias familia por su apoyo siempre. Son grandes ayudas para mi. Espero que tengan una buena semana.
Les quiero mucho,
Elder Aaron McDonald