So it´s been a good week

Muy buenos días!

So we´re pretty happy this morning because every single companionship in the zone had at least 2 investigators in sacrament meeting yesterday! We did too and were really excited about that. The first is our friend who just got back from working in el campo (really far away outside the city) for the past 2 weeks. He´s awesome and wants to get baptized and stuff but can´t right now because he and his girlfriend need to get married first. He wants to, but she doesn´t exactly want to right now. Plus she´s sealed in the temple to a Peruvian that lives in Lima and they have to get a divorce...... awesome. But he´ll definitely get baptized one day. We´re just hoping it´s sooner rather than later. 

And our second friend that came to church is Jewish. There aren´t many Jewish people here in Bolivia, but he´s been Jewish for more than 20 years. What´s different though is that, unlike most Jews that are still waiting for Christ to come for the first time, he believes in the New Testament and that Christ is the Messiah and is now waiting for his second coming. He also believes that a part of the Law of Moses has been fulfilled, not all, but only some specific parts, so that´s been interesting. It´s been really interesting to hear his whole story about how he was Baptist, then became Jewish, then moved to Bolivia from Peru, and now he´s here and goes to the synogogue every Saturday. He explained to us the difference between his congregation that believes that Christ has already come and the other orthodox Jews that are still waiting. It´s really interesting. And as we´ve been teaching him I´ve found that I actually know more about Judaism than I thought haha. We´ve been teaching him for about 2 weeks now. He´s always praying to know if what we teach is true, he´s reading the Book of Mormon, and he came to church yesterday with his yamaca (don´t know how to spell that, but the cap thing that they wear - he normally wears one of them all of the time and then he has an extra one that he uses on top of the other for when he prays) and with his prayer shawl thing (I don´t know what that one´s called). The ward was a little weirded out because they weren´t exactly used to seeing someone with a hat and prayer shaul come to church and all of the little kids were just staring at him. But he was totally fine with it and then everyone wanted to talk to him afterwords and welcomed him into the ward. It was great and he said that he really liked how everything was very organized and doctrinally correct. He´s super smart with the Bible, he just interprets it differently than we do. It´s hard sometimes to use the Bible as we teach him too because he believes that the Bible is only correct if it´s in Hebrew, so now we have him use his Hebrew Bible when we teach him and it says the same, but that way he believes more of what we´re saying. Anyway, now that I´ve written a ton about all of that.... But ya, he´s great and is really starting to think more now that he´s reading the Book of Mormon. Modern revelation and latter-day prophets really do make all the difference. In other words, read the Book of Mormon and you´ll learn a lot more than you ever will just reading the Bible. We´ve got the both of them for a reason.

So it´s been a good week. Found some new people that are just awesome. We had transfers too. There wasn´t a single Elder that got changed haha, just las Hermanas. We sent of 3 sister missionaries to open areas in El Beni, in Trinidad. There haven´t been sister missionaries in El Beni for years, so they were really excited for that, and 3 out of the 4 that are there came from our zone haha, and we sent off another sister to Cobija, in Pando, and there´s only 2 new missionaries in the whole mission, one of which is in our zone, a sister from Colombia. The next transfer we´re getting like 20ish missionaries (pretty sure that´s Elder W**´s group right?) and thus ends the drought of missionaries in Santa Cruz Norte. Really happy that we´re still here in Mangales, Elder F**, Elder L** and I. It should be a really good transfer and everything looks really promising right now.

And Parker´s in el CCM de Mexico! Weird. I can´t even imagine how it would be for all of you guys haha. Just the twins at home haha. Probecho.

I´m sending more pictures from this last week. We went in to the center of town to buy some souvenirs because Elder L** and I weren´t exactly sure if we were going to be staying here in Mangales and it was possibly the last chance to buy stuff from the city...

Love you all,

Elder Groneman

With the flag of Bolivia and the flag of the Department of Santa Cruz

The best place to buy souvenirs in the city. Tourist trap about 1 cuadra de la plaza.

La plaza en el centro - the graffiti wall

La plaza en el centro -  the main cathedral of Santa Cruz

Orange floats with la Familia R** (recent converts of Elder H** when he was here in Mangales - they got baptized in February) It was Hno R**´s birthday so we made orange floats, which neither they nor Elder L** had ever seen before haha.We´ll probably be doing it again sometime soon.