7 Jun 10 email

Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 4:48 PM

So this week here was pretty fun, especially today. We had another super Pday again. We went up to the the volcano of Masaya which was really cool because it is active and smoking. We went on the hills all around it looking around. My district leader told us we didn´t need to bring our Pday clothes because we wouldn´t need them. Well it turned out we were the only ones that didn´t bring pday clothes and everyone else was wearing theirs. So our district wore our normal missionary clothes up there. I got to use my boots. I took a bunch of pictures up there but we didn´t have time to stop by the house on the way back so again you will have to wait another week to get them.

On the way back on the bus I finally met the other missionary that Wendy told me to look for. He was sitting right behind me next to the other missionary from Yucipa. Elder Harrison and Elder Thorpe. I guess Elder Harrison is good friends with Brandon Ochs before they left on there missions! This is such a small world. We talked about that for a while.

So also this week it rained like crazy this one day to where there were miniature rivers going down the streets. We were walking home after a choir practice, for this conference we had with area seventies, in this storm. We were soaked head to toe like we had jumped into a pool. We went and got haircuts also after this storm and I was a little afraid that their electric shavers would shock my wet head. I got the lowest haircut ever because President Fraatz said it was too long. 1 on the sides and 2 on top.

We also did two service projects this last Saturday. One was moving a pile of stones out of this shed to another place because this girl said she saw a snake and it ran in there. So we moved all of the stones and never found that snake, only a bunch of huge cockroaches. So after that we went to a house that has a bunch of inactive members to fix this door of theirs and paint it. We had to realign the door and hinges and everything so it took forever with the supplies we had to work with. For some reason my companion mixed the paint with gasoline, good thing they are members because if any of them smoked that door would go up in flames. The hard part was that they kept bring us soda and cookies that looked really good while we were trying to fast haha. We just put coke in the dirt by a tree and the cookies in our backpacks.

So I read Our Heritage, Our Search for Happiness, and started True to the Faith? this last week which was really cool. They are so interesting and they really helped me strengthen my testimony. My testimony has grown crazy a lot here. Constantly we are having these spiritual experiences that you can´t really have any where else except for in the mission. I have especially been watching missionaries here that are going home soon and what they are like. There are attributes I want to develop they have and others that I need to avoid. I feel like whatever bad habits I have now I need to take care of before I leave here or else I will never be able to get rid of them. The mission is the time to become the person you want to be for the rest of your life and in the eternities.

Thanks for all your encouraging letters and support for me on the mission. Love you all and Big Hearts.

Elder Ochs