Elder Bears: I. SURVIVED.

this week was... fun. i´ll get more into why a little later.

first off. whats up everyone! how´s America? clean? lucky. ha no its not thattt dirty here.. but theres a reason the mission supplies us with hand sanitizer.

Oh and before i forget, just a cool story from a few weeks ago. we were at a members house talking with him and his wife and they´re kinda old. he was bearing his testimony to us and talking to us about when they first got baptized. he then said something that stood out to me.. "Eramos bien pobres, pero eramos bien felizes". which means we were really poor, BUT, we were really happy. All we need is the Gospel to be happy. everyone. move into a hut and take only your scriptures, a spear, and toilet paper. kidding. just remember whats important yeah?

Last week we had changes. Elder Paredes left our zone to go be a zone leader, Elder Fallas is now district leader, and elder Crozier is now training a new missionary named elder Aldana from Chile.

The Training Meeting last night- Yeah Elder Chris Ludlow gave the opening prayer! i also saw another one of my friends from school (Elder Mark Soelberg) and a few sisters from my Zone in the MTC. The meeting was cool but i was bummed that the only parts in english were the music numbers.

So cool story for the week. i´ll try to make sure it actually makes sense. so we were on a work visit (one of the zone leaders switches with one of us) and i was with the new Zone Leader, Elder Salazar (yes i made harry potter jokes all day.). We went to go talk to this lady we had been teaching to see how she was because she´s been sick. turned out she wasnt home, but her husband was. we talked to him for a while and asked him what he thought about what we were teaching his wife and about the church in general. he thought it was cool and it turns out one of his work friends is a bishop and went on a mission. So this guy (Hugo) told us we could come teach him. this is HUGE. he and his wife can help each other out now to make it to baptism. thats not the cool part of the story. so after this, we went a street over to this lady named Santa to see how things are going. Her son had been sick for a few weeks and if i understood right he has the exact same stuff ive always had with my lungs. she was talking about him using a nebulizer machine too. so we offered to give little 8 year old Jesus a blessing. BUT we couldnt go inside her home without another adult guy with us. so we left to find someone and we look across the hill to the other street at Hugo´s house.. we went over and told him the situation and so he happily joined us. we went over and gave Jesus a blessing and this awesome nonmember Hugo got to watch it. Afterwards we were just standing there talking in a hushed voive and asking the kids how they felt. the spirit was definitely there and i was so stoked Hugo got to experience that.

So now the fun part of my week.

On Thursday i had bad chills all day. i thought it was just the cold but my entire body felt like garbage. that night i thought i was going to die. i barely got any sleep and literally experienced one of the longest nights of my life. My stomach and.. other bowels? felt like death all day but luckily i didnt throw up because id rather get mawled by a diseased Peruvian dog than throw up. the next two days i was in bed resting and trying to stay alive. And Yes. i am alive.

Lesson for the week:

2 Nephi 4:15-35. im not going to give my thoughts on it because its pretty self explanatory but it is awesome and i have used it ocuntless times in my life.

well sorry this email wasn that great this week, i spent about half of my week in bed , i´ll do better next time haha. i Love you all and thank you for the examples you´ve been. It literally means everything out here.

Elder Brown

Elder Brown's Casa