Elder Justin Grigor : I am in Uruguay !!!

Hey everyone,

So I left the MTC last week and a lot of the feelings I had when I left home came back. I felt like I wanted to go home and not be here. This week I have been pretty home sick though.

I went out my first day with Elder Brumble my godfather - they are the people you tract with on your first day. He’s the short one I have a pic with. We taught a man whose right side of his body didn't work. He was so spiritual it was awesome, he started crying when we gave him an easter hand out card with Jesus on it. The next day I met my new companion Elder Pierce. He’s awesome!

I am in a place called Santa Lucia. It’s a pretty nice town, very small but the people are awesome, they all say hi to you before we do. We started teaching people and there are 2 inactive people that left the church for different reasons. One is a returned missionary who left because someone wasn't going to show up for prayer in church, and the bishop asked her, then the person came and said she didn't need to do it anymore and now she is inactive. Another man is super strong in all his beliefs in the church, still wears garments and everything, but left because the ward isn't doing anything to help others in the community. He got in some fights with the presidents here and now he doesn’t attend anymore. Oh and we taught him and we stayed there for 3 hours because he wouldn't let us leave, we tried to leave but he would say oh just one more second then talk for 30 minutes.

We have a couple investigators that we taught. One is a 15 year old girl with a smoking addiction. Her friends were actually there when we taught her, and they started asking us if we had girlfriends and or wanted one. Another is an older lady who has her house open to lots of kids, I don’t know if they are related or anything but their awesome. We have another investigator another who’s about to set a marriage date so then they will be baptized after that. We have a family of investigators and they had a couple lessons with the missionaries maybe 2 months ago but we’re teaching them now. We also have another guy; he was in a bad car accident and all his friends died and I think he’s inactive but we’re teaching him. It’s funny a lot of these people would never let missionaries into their houses, but now their inviting us in. Elder Pierce calls it “oro magic”. Basically when all the new americans teach, they don’t speak in complete sentences so when the investigator thinks about what they are saying it just hits them.

I forgot the keys to our house in the lock on Saturday night after conference; which was all in Spanish so I didn't get anything out of it. We heard knocking and our doorbell at 5:00 in the morning and left it because we thought it was just some kids. But then we noticed the key was gone, so all day Sunday we were stuck in our house doing nothing because we couldn't lock our house to leave. This morning at 5:00 am again we heard knocking and our door ringing. So we got up and answered it and it was the guy who took it, but he said he found it in the street somewhere and somehow knew it was our key. He was asking for money for finding it so we gave him 30 pesos Uruguayan which is like a dollar, but we got our key back!

Oh also the person that just went home that lived in our house left his dvd player, but it doesn’t work, so I bought one with my birthday money because it also plays music since Ty’s speaker doesn’t work. Now we can watch the district videos from it, which we need to watch to train. Anyways, I need to go now but that was my week and a half!

Love you

Elder Grigor