Monkey Business

Dear everyone,

After a wonderful chat with President Calderon this last Tuesday, I have been feeling pretty good this week. Lots to improve (like always) but once you get it down to specifics, it doesn't seem so hard.

Everyone in Colombia is currently on a month long vacation from school and as such, we are having some difficulty finding people in their houses these days. Daniel Calao has been especially difficult to pin down, which worries me. Brother Toro decided he doesn't want to work with us anymore as far as commitments. It's unfortunate, but we wouldn't have been able to work with him much anyway, since he is going to work in Medellin until December. We talked to Neris and talked to her about what things we need to accomplish before she can get baptized, namely convincing Rafael to tie the knot. I think he is a bit confused about why we want them to get married, but we really haven't been able to talk about it with him a whole lot. Erika is giving a bunch of references, but I'm not convinced if they will go anywhere. She has some stiffnecked friends. We were also able to talk to her less active brother. He seems more like the type to progress to me, but we will see with time.

We taught Cheris lesson 1 and despite not having time to come to church this week, she ought to progress quite nicely with the great desire for the truth that she has. John Dairon had some friends over, so we got some references for the other area when we went out to visit him. Saturday it rained really hard and Elder Peterson and I went knee deep in the streets going back to our house to get the balcony doors shut so water wouldn't ruin everything. It was kind of like swimming, so I enjoyed the deluge. However, when we arrived at the apartment, we realized because of the direction of the wind, everything was completely dry and that we had brought more water in with us than had come in from the downpour. Elder Peterson wasn't too happy about that, but we still laughed about it. Eogenio came to church again, which made me sooo happy. We went and visited him again that night and had a nice chat with him. He really is one of my favorite members here and it makes me super happy to see him returning to church after so much time. Unfortunately, we have this annoying thing called "chisme" that makes progress with less actives difficult.

As far as monkey business, we found a monkey! My companion was in a hurry, so I didn't get many good pictures of him, but I did get some! Technically, monkeys are not forbidden to touch, so I really wanted to play with it, but sometimes there are sticks in the mud... Also, I bought a travel version of Clue and we played that in the house a lot this week, especially when Elder Centeno came for intercambios. Clue gets a lot less heated than Risk, so I figured it would be a good alternative.

So yeah, that's the life here in Colombia!

Love you all,

Élder King