Letter #14

HEY FAM i forgot to tell you all that changes were... today! i am out of michoacan... sad i know but now im in DF distrito federal... sounds so cool. im in camarones and i have a comp from peru! hes not american! he has 18 meses and im so excited to work with him. he is also the district leader here it is his first change here in camarones as well. every single one of my comps has been district leader! im just going to soak up as much as i can from him. mom the food is not the same as the states... sometimes its better sometimes its worse. scott when i get home lets just eat elotes together, all day. so mike in our mission we have a lot of wards but my last area was a rama everysingle person was a recent convert of less than a year, except the branch president he is a returned missionary and is pretty old and experienced and another family but thats it. now im in a new area so i have no idea what the church is like. so has anyone heard of the familia michoacan? i had a run in with them last night. we were contacting for central and our last contact of the night this guy called us over and we presented ourselfs and imideately started asking us questions and it seemed harmless at first but then he started asking us where we lived and was acking wierd, we obviously told him the opposite direction. then we started asking him why he wanted to know, he paused and told us he was a member. we just acked all happy and then we left and said we would talk with him later. on the way home i stopped by the taco guy at the brigde to tell him i was leaving to go to df, bc we have been teaching him and they are a nice family. but while talking this guys showed up again. he followed us home... i told the taco guy (chucho) that he was following us and who he was and we stayed at the stand for a little and the guy left so we stayed a little longer and went the super long way to our house. not the same way he went. it was really scary. i left this morning and my comp has to stay. thanks for all the talks!!! i wasnt getting pouch very often bc i was so far away but now i should get it more often. i got dear elders from leslie ashley matthew mike and emily hoffman and i got a letter from brooke woolf. this week i went to zitacuaro for two days. i worked with the zone leader for a couple days and it was a blast and i learned alot from him. i look up to him a lot. he is really powerful when he speaks and it made me want to be a better teacher. zitacuaro is really pretty. there are alot of hills there and the people were great. they had some really prepared investigators. then on thursday i rode home on the bus for two hours by myself. towards the end of the week we ran out of gas so we took cold showers it was freezing. but in zitacuaro the same thing happened but we heated up water in a bucket it our iron! we just dropped her completely in the water it was cool. im so looking forward to my new area we are close to the wal mart in a super small appartment complex that is orange. if you wanted to look it up on google earth. also i hope you looked up zitacuaro in google earth and especially maravatio bc it is really pretty country. but i have to go. love you all and i am looking forward to my package this week! i forgot my camera so ill send the pictures the next week! sorry :( Elder Clark

Letter #13

hola every one! sorry i dont have much time this week to email. they gave us survey to do i didnt get to read any of your emails but i printed them all off!!! dustin! that picture its soooooo good! so my week! so monday... we bought cowboy hats!!! they were like 15 bucks! i got a tortilla press to make tortillas! we also got panchos! they are so nice to study in the morning bc it is a little chilly and i use it in the night too as a blanket but i was lacking one. we made torillas de arina! they were really good and really easy but we dont have the time to make them. we started teaching this really nice guy but he is lost we invited him to be baptised and he was like i need to ask my sacerdote. he didnt up progressin in the end but we might drop by now and then. tuesday! we had an awesome junta as a zone! it was really powerful. they talked alot about the faith. and it was really spiritually uplifting. wednesday! we had tinga! i love it, its so tasty. especially on tostadas. we met a guy and we were going to baptise him and his family, but in his baptismal interview at the very end asked "are you guys catholic?" he didnt want to change religions. i thought he understood that we werent catholics when we told him the first vision. also when we told him the church has been restored through a profet. he doesnt want to change. thursday! so we got to this house for an appointment and there was a lady in the shade behind a tree. elder slade begins to talk to her and the lady is resisting us. and he says "what happened, did you not like our message or did we not get along?" and she kept resisting. right after that i realized it wasnt the same lady and i started to burst into laughter. we had never talked to that lady before! that morning jehovas witnesses nocked our door. they had nothing that was like doctrine. they just shared some scriptures with us and they left. i also had elotes for the very first time!!!! they mayonese corn with pepper... it is absolutely amazing!!! i love it. friday! we had our last baptism bear her testimony to her little brother and it was so powerful. he knows its true and his mother as well but they cant do anything because the oldest son is so against the church and yells at his family. their dad died. then the zone leaders came to help us get baptisms in our area and it was fun but it didnt work bc we ended up with 0 anyways saturday! so in the morning the zone leaders had a little junta and it was very good and i learned a lot. i also made beef and chorizo tacos for everyone in the morning. i woke up at 5 and everyone slept in till 6:30 and after i had slaved over everything, not a single person thanked me! we are a whole bunch of nineteen and twenty year old boys hahah. sunday! we left the mission! we went to another town to watch sunday morning conference. its called acambaro, its in guadelajara east mission. i didnt understand anything. the sound was low and it was hard to understand. all of our baptisms fell and we were super sad. in the morning we past for one family and they older brother yelled at us and told us we were ruining his family and that we can never come back. and he was going to call the cops on us. i feel so bad because the sins are going to be on his head. very eventfull week i hope you all like the pics and i hope i have more time next week

Letter #12

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hey everyone! i miss you all. thanks mom and dad for your letters this week. mom im fine! our lights were cut because we didnt pay the bill. hahahah. but its back on now and its so convenient to have electricity. so we found out that the fast this last week was a bad idea. we made it to thursday but it was destroying our stomachs. we were hurting so bad! but its all good. so we had one baptism this week. her name is keila. we were supposed to have three but the mom and brother dropped out. but keila will be a great example for them. when we went to pick them up for there baptisms they all rejected it but we talked keila into getting baptised. and while we tried getting the mom and brother to come, keila began to bawl. it was so amazing! she was like "i just feel something so bonito". she says she wants to serve a mission(she is only 15). she is going to be a great example to her mom and brother. they will follow in the footsteps of her example. so this morning we went to make tortillas and the hermana was done! i was a little sad but she gave us hot ones as they came off the stove. they are amazing. we are going back tonight and she is going to teach us how to make masa. and we are going to go buy tortilla presses. and hopefully find a flour tortilla recipe. and we are going to make our own! it rained a lot this week and we got so soaked and on tuesday we were riding we saw testigos de jehova talking to keila(before she got baptised), so we rain over there and inturrupted them and started talking to her. i just think to myself "why do they even try, their church isnt true!" its so sad how so many people are so dedicated to satan. wednesday, we had a lot of food back to back to back. people kept feeding us and i got so sick and almost threw up at this ladys house. elder slade tried to do a front flip. i was riding my bike with one hand because i was eating bread and i hit a dip and my haddle bars turned sideways and i skid and turned into elder slade. but elder slade slammed on his breaks and only his front ones work so he flew over his handle bars and i rode off still eating bread while elder slad was on the ground. friday was a normal day. did normal stuff. saturday, keila was bawling before her baptism bc she knew it was true. and we tried for two hours to have the other two come but they wouldnt. sunday! we had 6 new people to church for the first time! we are going to try to baptise them all this next sunday. a lot of them loved it! that is the picture of what we went through to get to church. tons of mud. this next weekend is conference it conference!!!! i am so excited. but i will be working and wont be able to watch it and we dont have anything to watch it on so we will just be listening to it if we ever have a chance. but yeah just send me copies over email. 2 or 3 talks you liked and ill read those throw out the week. i can print them off if you send it throw email. i love this quote from howard w hunter "if you have troubles at home with children who stray, if you suffer financial reverses and emotional strain that threaten your home and your happiness, if you mus face the loss of life or health, may peace be unto your soul. we will not be tempted beyond our ability to withstand. our detours and disappointments are the straight and narrow path to him." i love that!!!! we are being shaped and molded by the refiners fire. when ever we have a disappointment or a trial, we should think, "what is the lord trying to teach me, what can i do a little better, or what is the one little sin i have in my life that i could give up." it is the only way we will learn and in the immortal words of gordon b hinckley: "things will work out." thanks everyone for everything! sunscreen would be awesome. im being the missionary i promised to be... Elder Clark --