MTC Blues

August 19, 2011

Another week, another email.  Not too much to talk about this week.  It's getting extremely routine here so the days all mingle together and your memory of the week is just a blur.  Time is so strange here.

So this week Elder Maner and I had some fun experiences with investigators.  Our teaching skills are still sub-par and when you throw in the fact that neither of us can really teach anything but the first lesson in Spanish...lets just say no one's in a rush to fill up the baptismal font.  We do TRC every Saturday which is where we teach random, spanish speaking volunteers.  I failed to notice that they were almost always members of the church so I approached the lesson expecting either an actual or an acting investigator.  I was surprised he knew every principle of the gospel and I was thinking he was an investigator gold mine, so I sucked in my gut, took a deep breath, and threw a baptismal invitation at him.  The look on his face was absolutely priceless.  The look on my face when I realized that he was a member was probably even more so.

Our teacher is acting as an investigator named Pamela who is difficult to get personally involved in the lessons.  So here we are, two third weekers who can barely ask where the bathroom is located, teaching this skeptic for the fourth time.  We did fairly well this time, almost got her to church, had her read the scriptures, got her to pray, and we thought we had made at least a dent in her seemingly impenetrable armor.  Afterwards she pulled us aside, as our teacher, and asked us how we thought it went.  I saw her face go red and she told us that she had dropped us...dropped us!  Apparently in the beginning of the lesson she had told us she didn't want to visit with us anymore and we didn't even understand her!  I laughed pretty hard at that.  Now we have to "call" her and get her back along with another companionship who got the boot.  Frankly we're all doing pretty terrible except for one companionship that has tons of spanish knowledge and can sing any investigator to baptism.  But it's a great experience and I'm loving it.  Our teachers are awesome and we're slowly getting better.