Jarett Hale: Peru, Lima North Mission

Week 21: And a Happy New Year

Hey Everyone!

I hope you guys had a great snowy Christmas! We had a busy week, and a great Christmas down here! This week we had a Christmas party as a mission! All of us went to the offices and played soccer, basketball, had a dodgeball competition and then a steak dinner! It was super fun and great to see some of the other missionaries that I haven't seen in a while! We received 21 references from members this week so we've had a lot of work to do! We haven't been this busy in a while, and it's great! We have been trying a lot lately to work more through the members because that's honestly the best way to work! This Friday we had a ward activity where they sang songs, showed a couple Christmas clips from the church website and ate Paneton (some giant muffin thing that Peruvians eat for Christmas) and hot chocolate. We weren't expecting many people to come because our ward is pretty un-united and not many people usually come to the activities, but we had a great turn out and lots of members brought their non-member friends! We were running all over meeting people and writing down names and addresses.

On Christmas eve we didn't have too many lessons because people said they were busy but a lot of people invited us to dinner so by the end of the day we were STUFFED after eating like 3 dinners. That night my comp told me to not even try to go to sleep because I'd just get woken up at 11:30 pm by all the fireworks. When it turned midnight, basically every single Peruvian was lighting off fireworks at the same time—it was crazyyyyy. We live on the hill so I can see all of Lima out of my window and it was one of the coolest things I've seen—I'll send pictures. On Christmas morning, we had church and we actually had a great turn out!! —despite the fact that everyone was up to 3 in the morning the previous night. Luis is doing great and will be baptized next week! He loooves the gospel and loves learning! I am excited for him! My comp is still super weird but we get along alright!! He is pretty disorganized and sometimes that leaks into the missionary work and effects others which bugs me a bit but we are doing good!

Oh, and something awkward/embarrassing and funny that happened this week is we were going to a new investigators house and she answered the door, we talked for a sec and we asked if she had a few minutes that we could teach her and she said that she already had somebody teaching her right now and we looked in the door and saw the Jehovah's Witness missionaries on the couch. Hahah, it was so awkward and confusing. Hahah but yeah, anyways...

Love you guys and have a great New Year!