Locked out!

This week on...The Hills...haha jk

So this week in Curacavi things we´re a little cray. Things were going so well for so long and I was just waiting for something to happen, and it did, and it ALWAYS happens when an investigator is about to get baptized...without fail! It all started thursday when we got locked out of our house. I left the keys inside and our home has a gate that can´t be opened without the key so not only were we locked out of our house, but locked in our own yard without escape. We made several attempts at opening windows or sliding our BIP card (for the metro) to unlock the door without any success. 10 phone calls to the Pensionistas (a senior couple who are in charge of housing), our zone leader, the land lord and the local pizza place (we got hungry!) and 2 1/2 hours later the Elders in the office came to the rescue with spares and a camera to take embarrassing pictures! lol. Sadly we were never able to order our pizza because they thought my companion (with her gringa accent) was prank calling them and stopped answering our calls so we managed to use a stick to slide out our cereal boxes through a tiny window in our kitchen. All in all we had a good laugh and lesson learned, we won´t ever forget our keys again! 

The following day we got a phone call from one of our recent converts who´s friends son, Elvis, lives with her and is an invetsigator with a baptismal date for the end of this month. She said that Elvis, who´s been sober for 2 months, got drunk and hit her and took a knife out at her and broke a window. We biked over immediately and found her with stitches and a black eye. We had a lesson with Elvis and Maritza and her daughter Denisse the recent converts, one of which I´ve ever felt the spirit so strong. Elvis not only has drug abuse problems but is zchizophrenic (sp?) and Maritza took him in and has sought out professional help for him and has helped him so much with his problems. Hna. Broadhead we´re able to see the great love that she has for him to the point where she´d allow for this to happen to her and forgave him and doesn´t want to kick him out of the house cause she knows the street has nothing good to offer him. Elvis felt so sorry for all the damage he caused and we taught him about repentance. There were tears in both Hna. Broadhead and I´s eyes as we testified of the atonement and the ability it gives us to be clean of our mistakes. Neadless to say we might have to push back his baptismal date.

Our other 2 investigators with a baptismal date are Monica & her son Cristobal who is in a wheelchair. His mom recently found a wound on him from sitting for so much on his wheelchair and has had to go to a million doctors for the past week making it impossible fo rus to teach her and prepare her for her baptism and making it impossible for Cristobal to come to church since he has to be in bed-rest for 3 months. So we are also going to have to push back her baptismal date a couple weeks. But all hope isn´t lost because we still have Jose Miguel aka Mickey who we found contacting! He is super eager for his baptism sunday, has been coming to church, reading, and went to all 4 sessions of conference! He´s what you call a GOLDEN investigator. He works the evening shift everyother week so we haven´t been able to see him at all last week, so this week we have to teach him lessons 3,4 & 5 and have his baptismal interview and prepare everything for the baptism in 6 days, it´s gonna be hectic, but we´re gonna do it and feel so blessed for this miracle the Lord has given us.

Also, I thought it´d be funny to mention that I was trying to go after a contact that was running away from me (typical) when I tripped on the uneven sidewalk and totally biffed it! Luckily the person didn´t notice and just kept walking, but I scraped my knee (again) and slightly sprained my wrist. I just sat on the floor for 5 minutes crying of laughter with my companion, it was a pretty funny fall.

My last crazy story happened yesterday. Sundays we report our weekly numbers to our leaders. My companion and I had our planning sesh and started getting ready for bed when I noticed it was 11 and our district leader hadn´t called us. So I tried calling him and got no answer and the phone said the call wasn´t able to be completed so I made several attempts at calling other members with no results. I turned the phone off and back on and attempted again and this time it worked and our DL answered, he said he´d tried calling us as well as the zone leaders for the past hour and that they were super worried. Next thing I know the bishop is outside our house and then I start to get an explosion of phone calls from our sister training leader, the office elders, the AP´s, sister Essig and then President! I explained to all of them that our phone had malfunctioned and wouldn´t let us make and apparently receive phone calls and everyone had been so worried that president called the bishop to go check on us. I felt really bad that we freaked everyone out, but felt so comforted to know that  they truly care for us and that in a real emergency immediate action would be taken. I admire President Essig and ALL mission presidents for that matter for what they do to care for us, he is constantly watching over his sheep and is the last missionary to go to bed everynight.

p.s. Shout out to ma boy Ian Hatch who was in the Liahona Noticias de la Iglesia en Sud America for baptising a man of 108 years old in Uruguay!!! Way to be!!!

xoxo,

Hna.Ibarra