Christmas Eve

Christmas eve was a day of much food. I think I ended up eating a total of fifteen tamales, two plates of beans, one of rice and one of carnitas, as well as some chicken salad dessert tamales, sweet bread, and a couple glasses of milk.  That was all just the dinners...  I had a bunch of tres leches for lunch and a sandwich for breakfast. 

Christmas was brisket, beans, donuts, rice, green beans, and fruit salad.  That was also a lot...  It's funny, there's never a consstent balance in quantity of food... We're either hungry or being given so much food we want to die haha.  It's okay though.  Kinda fun.

Nothing else really exciting happened this week.  Lot's of people were out of town or working.  We did have one of our dinners with a friend of a recent convert who is very excited t learn more, but he's going to be very busy until next week, so we won't be abe to see him until then, most likely...  His name is Juan, though.

 
Anyways, today we're on a member's computer because the libraries are closed, so this'll have to be short again... sorry.  I hope everything is going great with you, and I love you guys.

Elder Katzakian

Austin is cold but great!

So this week was interesting.  I talked to people from lots of countries besides mexico this week; cuba, honduras, puerto rico, colombia... and I think that's actually it, but it felt like a lot.  Also it's been raining a lot, and it's pretty cold today.  It's about 40 degrees

 

Last night something kinda cool happened.  Actually, two somethings... the first one is less pertinent because it was in English, so you probably won't hear about it again, but it's cool anyways.  We knocked on this apartment door kinda late at night, well... it was like seven, but it's been getting dark around six and there were a bunch of stormclouds in front of the stars, so it was way dark.  Anyways, there we were, knocking on an apartment door in the dark rain, in suits and intimidating black coats (Elder Sefcik has a longer black raincoat, and mine is a P-coat), and this scared Lady answers it thinking we're the police, not knowing what she did or what happened.  It made some good laughs when she figured out who we were, and then she got pretty serious again and started asking us questions about the Second Coming, infant baptism, eternal marriage, and other cool gospely things.  She's been getting kinda scared by all the things going on and she and her boyfriend have been thinking they need to get married seeing how they already live together and have a daughter, and had some questions about all that.  We explained to her the readers digest version of the history of christianity and that we were messengers sent by God through a living prophet to answer her questions.  She is excited to learn about being sealed to her family and how that was brought back (more in depth) and how she can more closely follow God in her life to ensure happiness and security for her family.  It was awesome to feel the spirit testify through us to help her feel that God had sent us there at that very time to help her specifically to acheive the joy he wanted for her.  Additionally, we were only there because of some other random occurrences earlier in the week and that day.

 

Second cool thing:  We were running out of time and had planned to be somewhere else, but we felt we should finish talking to the people in the aforementioned apartment building, and because we stayed for those extra couple minutes we ran into a couple walking up the stairs with their laundry, and asked if we could teach them a message about the gospel, and they said yes, so we followed them up into their apartment, where we met the three other people staying there who all turned out to be interested as well, so they turned off the soccer game and learned about the restoration of the gospel.  They are all also excited to learn more about the Book of Mormon and what that means.

 

It had been a really tough week before last night, but those people made it all worth it. 

 

Anyways, love you, talk to you next week.

 

Elder Katzakian