2nd Week en Mexico

¡Hola! I hope that everyone is doing well. 

Mountain view from Tlaxcala

Things are well here in Tlaxcala. So more specifically I am in the neighborhood Loma Bonita of Tlaxcala which is a nice pretty quiet community. It seems to have been a pretty regular week. Right now we have about 5 progressing investigators so we usually at least one or two lessons a day. Our lessons have been good, I´m still working on my Spanish so I don´t talk as much as I should but I´m definitely improving. It is really tough to not be able to really communicate well with people. I look forward to the day that I can engage in conversation in Spanish and not have to think about it that much. I know that if I trust in the Lord and keep working hard that he will help me improve.

Loma Bonita of Tlaxcala

So our days usually consist of a lot of walking and going from place to place. We do a fair amount of street contacting which is actually pretty painless because most of the people here are very nice. The food has still been good, not too exotic either. There is actually a KFC in our area with a Little Ceasars pizza right across the street. So it´s not like I´m way out in the middle of nowhere haha. Our area is pretty big though. We mostly stay in the northern part where most of the people live but every once in a while we walk to the southern part. We still havent seen probably the southern half our area. It´s alright though because most of it is empty land with a few scattered houses.

Church was good on Sunday. It is actually kind of interesting to hear the people sing. They don´t exactly sing in tune, but they sure do give it all they got. This Sunday was actually pretty sad for us. We had invited about 4 people to come to church but none of them showed up. It was especially rough when the Sister Missionaries that also serve in our ward had about 6 investigators show up to church. It is really sad as a missionary to see people not progressing in the way that they could. Hopefully we will be able to get more this Sunday. We might have a baptism this week. A member family has a nephew that is 9 years old that they say is ready for baptism. We are going over to meet him tonight to see if he actually is ready or not. So hopefully that will work out, it would also be a great oppurtunity to invite our other investigators to the Baptism to show them what it is like and so they can feel the spirit that is present at those meetings.

Overall things have been good. We´ve done a lot of walking which has started to help the weight I put on at the MTC haha. We did have a couple encounters with a few drunk people on Saturday night. Two of the people were pretty harmless, they just talked a lot. However near the end of the night we ran across this German guy that was pretty gone. He came and talked to us for a while and the spirit was not there. He was pretty agitated and at the end when we left he started yelling at us. Afterwards I realized how the spirit was not there at all and how bad it felt. If I have learned one thing on my mission it is to rely on the spirit and follow those promptings. The reason we have the word of wisdom is so that we can keep our bodies in a place where we can recieve those promptings. I also realized how vital the spirit is in it´s absence.

Anyway, love you guys!

-Elder Hartvigsen