Dos Hermanas Sevilla 08/30/10

What's uncle Gilles' number? He should come for a visit. lol. By the way, my first pair of shoes died, like completely!!! It's no longer GOOD. Unfortunately I can't find shoes my size over here, but I should be fine. I will send more pictures on another P-Day.

Mission work is doing pretty good. I'll be Senior companion starting tommorow for pretty much a week, which I'm excited for. All the zone and district leaders in the world are having a big meeting for 4 days and I'm being paired off with an ELder who's only been here for two weeks. It will be an adventure.

We didn't do too bad last week. Our 2 Nigerians investigators Top & Samuel are getting baptized on the 18th of September and hopefully at our new stake center which I had the opportunity to visit when I did some splits in downtown Sevilla. During that splits, I was paired with an italian Elder who didn't speak English. We somehow managed to communicate with each other. When we stayed in downtown Sevilla, it was so impossible to get some sleep with sirenes going off every hour and all night.

I like being companion with a zone leader whenever I have a chance, cuz zone leaders have so many contacts which is different of what I am used to. The ward that we visited during the split was so cool. We had the priviledge to attend a big birthday party at the church for a young woman who was turning 12. The whole floor was littered in confetti afterwards. The Ward is just a tight knit group you know and it's just awesome.
Elder Bennett

Dos Hermanas Sevilla 08/23/10

We experienced heavy rain for the last few days. Anyway, after the big success of our concert, we had an unsuccessful week. Everyone bailed on us on almost every appointment or activity we have planned or they simply forgot.... oh well.

Where is everyone????

We randomly ran into a woman from the Domincan Repubblic who is a member. She was looking for the LDS church in Dos Hermanas. We happened to be around so we gladly helped her.


Last week, we met a less active member lady on the street in a bad part of town beeing yelled at by someone from Moroco who was drunk, violent and heavily drugged. Not only the guy was yelling profanities at her but he also beat a guy and a grandma with a chair. The police was called but came 20 minutes later to the scene. There are not that many policemen serving in Dos Hermanas. Even though the city of Dos Hermanos is huge, there are only 4 policemen serving the city all together. After everything was squared away with the police, we got the ladies' number for future references.

Read the sign, it says it all.

I's good to hear that brother Johnson & his wife are back from serving in Greece. That's too bad about missionary work over there. I heard that right now only three missionaries are allowed to proselyte in all of Greece. They're all hard headed people and more so in Greece than here. Most of our investigators & potentials are from South America. The missionary work here is all good.
Good bye for now and hope all is well with you.

Dos Hermanas Sevilla 08/17/10

Oh yeah, here's a picture of my bad hair cut. I tried doing it myself, and it failed. I made Isabell (the landlord lady) fix it, not only she failed but I had bald spots. So I Started to give myself a buzz cut and I got big bald streak, so we had to cancel an appointement to get my hair done properly. Anna was able to save it. I totally look like a Spanish chico though. lol. It will grow better.

Dos Hermanas Sevilla 08/17/10

We couldn't use a computer on our P-day cause david (he lives in our appartement building) was home and was using the lap top....ALL DAY, and everywhere else was closed due to a holiday celebration.

Anyway...We canceled the baptism of Samuel and Top and it's gonna be on september 25th. We made them realize that they have to be clean before they enter the water, not repent afterwards. So they gave us that date and told us that they'd be ready by then. We dropped Fidel. We straight up said, you know everything, you understand everything, you've received multiple witnesses that it's true. Do you wanna live with your family forever? Will you change your life and be baptized? He said a flat out NO, and then we expressed our regret and dropped him. It might work for him in the big grand scheme of things. He'll probably come back.
Elder Larsen, Samuel, Elder Bennett, Top & ?

We finally had our concert. It was super successful, especially for Spain. We had like 100 people who showed up. All the musical numbers went smoothly, and everybody loved it. We had a ton of non-members and almost all our investigators came. We also had members who traveled from far away to be there and to show us their support. It was just fantastic!!! We had a return missionary who was on his honeymoon and his wife just happens to be a profesional swedish singer, so we squeezed her in for a few performances. It was just incredibly fantastic.

Transfer happened for many but as for me, I'm staying again in Dos Hermanas Sevilla with elder Larsen as my companion still. Good bye.

Dos Hermanas Sevilla 08/10/10

Our P-day this week has been changed to Tuesday due to interviews. My companion & I met with the mission president's wife (sister Clegg) yesterday for our interviews. All went well.
P-day today wasn't too exciting. We went shopping at the factory outlet mall. The fashion here is super cheap.You could find silver tuxedos for 20 euros when it's on rebajes. One store had 1.99 shirts, 3.99 hoodies, and 2.99 pants, but the pants are like size 32 at the biggest. I bought myself a soccer jersey.


We asked Samuel and Top our nigerian investigators to be baptized this week. They agreed to be baptized this saturday. Unfortunately, we may have to cancel the baptism and postpone it to another day cuz we have nowhere to perform the ordinance. The Sevilla chapel has been broken for a long time and our chapel lost our blow up pool, which sucks. We want the baptism to be in Sevilla, cuz it means we could invite lots of Nigerian and this could also translate into furture investigators for us to teach. There are millions of illegals that sell napkins on the street corners. It's basically the only job they're allowed to do for 2 years. After that, if hey have good behaviour, they can become citizens. I think we'll be ok.


The poster below was made for one of our investigator named Fidel. Elder Larsen gave him a way hard message, pretty much saying you know everything, get baptized or make progress or we'll have to drop you. Things are going well, i'm alive.
goodbye

Dos Hermanas Sevilla 08/02/10

We went to Sevilla again. We were able to get into the Sevilla Cathedral for free cause we're residents. It's the biggest Cathedral in Spain. It was intense! We also went to a Pirate Muesum. It was so cool. They had real maps, diaramas and model pirate ships, cannons, swords, guns, and all sorts of stuff. They had a video that explains everything. The place had 48000 volumes of the spanish presence in the new America. It's awesome but we actually have this amazing BOOK called the "Book of Mormon" that explains better the history of the people who lived in America!! hahaha.


We ran into one of the Ukraines at the same park and we invited her to attend the church in Sevilla. We hope she went. It was crazy running into one of them again. But, you always seem to run into people you know around here. it's pretty fantastic.


This week was pretty exciting in the regard of missionnary work. Tuesday, we had a great noche hogar (Family night) with two Church members and one non-member who lives with them. She's actually considering singing in our spiritual concert, cuz she has an incredible voice. Right now, she's on vacation but we gave her a Book of Mormon to read before she left. she told us to be prepared to answer many of her questions about this book when she gets back. We almost jumped for joy.


We had another noche hogar with two Africans, and it was incredible! One of them name Samuel gets the gospel, he understands it and he's pretty much golden, but his buddy unfortunately just doesn't get it. He asks weird questions that aren't questions at all but are his mixed doctrines of evangelical teachings and stuff. At the end of the noche hogar, he changed. He started to accept more of our teachings.
We taught both of them about the Book of Mormon, modern day prophets and asked them to pray about it and be baptized. I think there's a chance for a baptism but not quite sure yet. HOPEFULLY!! They both were like: "can I be baptized again? I was already baptized in another faith, can you baptize me again?"

Thursday, we had another noche hogar at a member's apartment. The parents can't become members til they get proof from South America that they are married. They've been waiting on their paper work for a long time, but they act and are consider as members though. They have duties in the Church and almost all their kids are baptized. Jorge, the dad of the family, and Fabian, invited a ton of people at this hogar noche. We probably had 16 people there including us. There were also 6 new investigators there. It was awesome. We showed them the movie "testaments" and ate food. It was super cool. It's such a corny film, and I was praying they wouldn't think we were too weird..but supringly, they actually accepted it well, and one of them even came to church on Sunday.


In spain, nobody lets you serve them. They are hard headed people. But on Friday, we had a rare service oppurtunity. We helped a guy in our ward move. He was an American working for the army at the army base. it was cool cuz we got to see american stuff!! The quality is so much better than spanish stuff. He said the military paid for all that stuff to be shipped overseas. I even saw a Hobby Lobby bag, and I'm like "WOW"...useless Hobby Lobby junk made it into spain!! I thought it was quite comical. His wife said their daughter was baptized the day before, and we were like "awesome"... but then she said" "into the catholic church", which was a funny twist. We still congratulated her and went off.

We've been practiing a lot for our concert, hopefully many people will attend.
thats pretty much it,

yours truly,
Elder Bennett