Número 15 Esteli

Hollaaaa a todo! 

Another good week here in Rosario! This week was a cool week because I had my last new persons meeting! I cant believe I am getting close to 4 months in my mission. Time is going by fast. The one sad thing that I am going to miss is I get to see all the guys from the CCM at the news meeting, and now I wont be able to see them. I am super close with all the guys.

I am loving Rosario though. I am getting super close with a lot of people here. The members here just love all the missionaries and just make me feel so loved. Also, we have investigators that are the same way. We are teaching this family of about 6 people and they are so cool. They are the type of people that I will want to come back and visit when I get done with my mission they are so cool. I always feel so comfortable when I am in their house. 

Also this week, we had this crazy dude who was drunk come up to us and scream at us for about 10 minutes about how we are wasting our time here and that we are going to hell when we die haha I have never seen someone be so mad at us for just being missionaries. We just gave him a pamphlet and told him to pray and he threw the pamphlet in our face. Usually all the drunk dudes just ask us for money, but he was just screaming in our faces. I thought it was pretty funny so I let him go on his rant, but I just felt kind of bad for the guy. There are so many guys here that just have no life and either drink everyday or sniff paint all day, its pretty sad.

Elder Bickmore and I are working pretty hard here. We are getting to know eachother pretty well and teaching well together. He is a cool guy. He is so goofy and cracks me up all the time. We are working hard with a lot of families right now and I hope these investigators will know that our message is true. Elder Bickmore and I are showing a lot of faith to be able to help them out as much as we can. 

I just love the people here and love how nice a lot of them are. They are so humble. A lot of people struggle to get food on the table but seem to be happy. 

I know that Thanksgiving is coming up and I just want to say that I hope everyone can be able to spend some time with their family. I want everyone to know that the family is so important and should not be overlooked. Enjoy it, laugh, have fun and be grateful. Just think about some of the people that are not able to be with their family for Thanksgiving.

I love you all so much and I hope everyone has a great week! Thank you for all your love!

"I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me"

Adio

Elder Sherle

Numero 14 ~ Esteli

Buenas a mi familia y mis amigos! Como estan a todo?

Good week up here in good ole Esteli. I am working hard up here with my new comp, Elder Bickmore.

Something cool happned this week that was super crazy.....I had my first dream in spanish this week! It wasnt anything crazy, but I was just talking normal in my dreams to my companion in spanish. I felt pretty cool when I got up haha. That is a stepping stone in the mission for me! Pretty beasty. I am so much more comfortable here than I was my first week here. I feel comfortable talking to anyone now. I still dont have a super strong vocabulary and dont understand everything, but I can understand the gist of what people are saying. I still have so much farther to go, but I am so happy at where I am at right now. Elder Bickmore has ten months in the mission so he can talk better than I can, so he helps me out a lot too.

Elder's selfie at lunch
Apparently John didn't get the "casual" memo

The new comp and I are doing good. He is a cool kid and we work well together. He came from Leon and is our district leader. I might get changed in three weeks so we might only have a couple weeks together, but we will see!

This week was a little difficult for me because I am still fairly new in this area and dont know everything here and Elder Bickmore was new here so it was a little harder having to remember everywhere we needed to go and find all of our meetings. In other words, I pretty much had to put the team on my back this week and I feel like I did pretty well. We taught some very spiritual lessons and were able to find a bunch of people this week.

One thing here that bothers me more than anything is the people here are just too nice to tell me the truth. There are a lot of people here that just lie to my face because they are too scared to tell me no. I dont know why people cant just tell the truth. I had like 10 people tell me they were going to church this week and they never went. I have definitely had to learn to have a little bit of patience (which is definitely not my strong suit). But, I guess that is something good to learn.

All in all, a good week here. I love this place and have such good relationships with some people here.

I hope everyone has a great week this week! I love you all!

Adio

Elder Sherle

 

 

Numero 13

Hola a todo. Como estan?

This has been such a crazy day for me. Last night at about 11:30 we got a call from the AP's and we found out that Elder Jacobsen was getting transfered on an emergency change. So we stayed up all night packing and had to go to Managua at 6 in the morning to get our new comps.

I am pretty sad that I had to say bye to Elder Jacobsen. I have a new companion and his name is Elder Bickmore, he has about 10 months in the mission, and thats about all I know about him. He seems like I cool guy though.

Anyways, this week was another good week. We found a super cool family that we are teaching and found some other cool people to teach. We are working hard here to help these people here.

There wasnt anything super crazy this week or anything out of the ordinary. So this week I dont really have that much stuff to write about. The craziest thing that happened was I got a new comp and now I have to teach this dude about our area and show him all of our members and all of our investigators. I am a little nervous for that because I have only been here for like two months and I am not super comfortable with my area yet. But I think I will be fine.

One thing I learned this week is that being missionaries we can talk to anyone. We found a guy this week who we would never have even thought to talk to, but because we were looking for someone else we asked him for some help and turns out he has been super curious about of church and had wanted to read the Book of Mormon. He came to church this week and participated and everything. It is pretty cool to see that some people are just ready to hear this message of the gospel. I hope he continues to progress, I will keep you guys updated on him.

Soccer Fields

Like I said this week there isnt much. So sorry if this email is super boring for you guys. Hopefully I will have a better one next week!

I hope everyone has a great week and know that I love all of you guys!

Until next week

Les amo

Elder Sherle

Numero 12

Hola a todo de Esteli! Como estan??

This week was a really weird week. Usually the weeks here fly by, but for some reason this week was pretty slow. I think it was because I was super sick in the beginning of the week. I dont know what happened but I just had this super bad tempurature and super bad cough that I felt like I was underwater for like 3 days. It wasnt fun. Especially when I need to be at my best while I am out here, being sick makes it pretty hard. But I am better now, I only have a cough now.

Elder Jacobsen and I have started the process of moving our house. The lady that is in charge of our house wants us to pay 25 bucks more a month. I know that doesnt sound like much, but for Nicaragua money it is like 600 cordobas and we dont have that type of money to pay so we are moving. We think she just sees that we are both white and she thinks we have a ton of money so she wants us to pay more. So we are looking for new houses to more into. We found one that a member here owns and it looks like we are going to move in there but we have to wait because he has 2 teenage girls living in the house right now. So we have to wait until they move out in a month.

Oh it was Halloween on Friday right?? Ya, the people here dont celebrate Halloween. We totally forgot about it until like halfway through the day haha. I am so excited because Elder Jacobsen and I celebrated with a bag of skittles. Which I know that doesnt sound like much, but they dont have skittles here so it was a pretty big deal for us! I was so happy that he shared with me because if any of you guys know me well, you know how much I like my candy...especially skittles.

We are working really hard right now because we have a goal in our zone that if we get 10 people ready to baptise on the 22nd, we are going to baptise the people in a waterfall! So we are working super hard for that goal.

Not much more this week, like I said, it was kind of slow. But we are working hard here. The language is coming along and I am starting to become a lot more confident when I speak to people. It is a pretty cool feeling being able to actually communicate a little bit. I have come so far already.

Thank you all for all your support and all your love towards me. I love all you guys so much. I hope everyone has a great week ahead of them!

¡Les amo! Hasta la proxima lunes.

Adio

Elder Sherle

Numero 11

Holllaaaaaa. Como estan? Yo estoy super super animado por que yo tuve mi primera bautismo este sabado!

If you can read that, it means that I am super happy because I got to take a little swim this weekend (I had my first baptism this saturday)! I baptised an 18 year old dude named Pedro and Elder Jacobsen baptised two girls. It was such a cool saturday! It was a pretty crazy story because we had been teaching this dude for awhile and he was totally interested and open to learning and wanted to change his life. Then we didnt see him for a week because he left to help his grandma out outside of our area. Then on friday, we went to his house and he was home. We taught him a little bit and asked him how he felt about being baptised the next day, and he was ready. So we baptised him on Saturday and confirmed him a member of the church on Sunday. Pretty cool feeling being in all white!!

Pedro is such a cool dude. He is 18 and trying to provide for himself and help out his family. He doesnt have any work and doesnt have any money, but he is so positive and knows that through the Lord he will be blessed and find work. He is going to be a great member in the church! Before my mission I never really thought about baptising someone. I only thought about how I can give my love and serve with all my heart. So the coolest thing for me was I have been working pretty hard for the last 6 weeks and I really hoped that I could baptise someone, and I did. It was a good reassuring feeling that I am actually doing something right and someone can understand my spanish hahha.

Also, I just finished my first change here. All the white missionaries serve 16 changes and I just finished my second. So I am an eighth of the way there! hahaha.

Right now I am sick and it sucks so bad. I am coughing and got a bad headache. It is the worst being sick here because we still have to go out and be at our best even if we feel like crap. Everyone is getting sick here because it is cooling down a little bit into the 70s.

All in all, it was a good week. Like always we are working hard here!

Oh and on a side note, no one celebrates Halloween here. Everyone thinks it is like super bad or something, idk. People are weird here. So no candy for me:(

Okay thats all I got this week. Thank you for your emails and I hope everyone has a great week!

Les amo

Adio

Elder Sherle

 

Numero 10 ~ Esteli

Holaaaaaaa everyone! How is everyone?

We had a good week here. We were pretty busy the whole week, like always.

Yes, there was a pretty big earthquake here last monday. It was a 7.3 from what the locals told us. Being the great missionaries that we are, we were praying before getting to sleep and our whole room started shaking and our refrigerator started rocking back and forth. I thought my comp was moving the bed back and forth haha I was wrong. It went on for about 30 seconds, but still felt pretty cool. Up in Esteli we are in mountains so it wasnt as strong here as it was is Managua.  (below is a video John took of a river overflowing ~ I believe the video can only be seen on a computer and not a mobile device.)
 

 

This week I gained a little more confidence in my spanish. I went on divisions with the Zone Leader in my area. So i had to take him around and guide the lessons with our investigators. After the day was over, he told me how impressed he was with my spanish and how he was blown away at how much I already know. I was so happy to hear that because I have been feeling like I have been behind. Hard work is paying off!

The weird thing that happened this week was we just seemed to be the target for all the drunk people. Most people dont have work here and just sit around and get drunk and for some reason all the drunks would just walk up to us and try to talk to us, so we started to have a little fun with them and we only spoke to them in english. They were "had to be there moments", but super funny. It is always a plus to speak english here because no one can understand us, but we can understand them. Oh a lot of people here get so fascinated with our eyes. They just cant believe that we have blue and green eyes. They will just stare into our eyes in awe, it is a little awkward but it is pretty funny.

We are working really hard here teaching as many people as we can. A lot of the days we cant even get to everyone we want to talk to. But we do our best. We have a couple dates for baptism this week so hopefully they will keep to that date. We have an investigator named Eddie and he is definitely ready to take the step. I am getting pretty comfortable here. I know the area a lot better and know a lot more people. We know there are chosen people for us here, we just need to find them and give them this message.

That's all I got for this week. Like always thank you so much for all your e-mails.

Oh and a BIG shoutout to my grandma! She just got baptised this weekend and I am so excited for her!

Much love from your boy in Nica

Adio

Elder Sherle

Número 9- Esteli

Holaaaaaaaa. 

A great week we had here in Rosario!

To start off, we had our first baptism! We had a marriage for these two in the church and baptised the newly married wife right after. It was our first baptism, pretty cool! This family had literally nothing so let him borrow my suit and we found her a dress to make it something worth remembering. They used two CTR rings to be married with. Pretty crazy how different it is here. They had about 10 people at their wedding, and four missionaries. But it was so cool to see them happy. 

We did more service again this week moving a bunch of dirt and helping people connect their bathroom so they have a toilet that flushes. We were working right next to this guy who knew a little bit of english, and it was so funny because he was telling us how he crossed the border from Mexico into the United States and how hard it was to get in. But he got in a worked in construction for a couple years, then moved back here to Nicaragua. We could relate because he can't speak English and my Spanish is still a work in progress....so we had a little connection haha. 

Like I just said, the language is a process. I learn new things and new words every day, but I still get frustrated with it. I just want to be perfect now, but I need to find a little patience with this. 

We have been working super hard this week and hopefully we be baptising someone this next week, so I am praying for that. We have a lot of really cool investigators. They are all so nice and all of them are so close, we just need to make things happen. We were so excited this week because we had 48 people come to church! That is a pretty beasty number here! Of that 48, 11 of them were investigators and three families. A big test here is if our investigators come to church, that means they are pretty interested, so we were really excited on Sunday. 

Right after our baptism on Saturday, a less active in our ward was killed in an accident, so we went over to the house and were there for support. It was cool to see so many people come out to support this family. Everyone here are so supportive for their friends and families. The guy suffered a head trauma because he wasn't wearing a helmet when he was riding his bycicle, and was hit by a motorcyle. The weird thing was they had an open casket, so we got to look at him. I had never seen a dead body before and I am not going to lie it was a little creepy. But it was just pretty weird going from a wedding and a baptism to a funeral....the life of a missionary. 

The food here is still all the same. Basically, beans, rice and chicken. BUT, today for p-day we went to a pizza place in downtown. I was so happy to actually get to eat some pizza and feel full. So today was a solid day for me! 

I literally love the culture here. Everything is so simple. All people care about are three things: Family, God, and Food. It has really changed my perspective on life. Family is often times overlooked and taken for granted for. I want to tell everyone to not overlook the importance of family, yes I am talking to you too Raimee and Nathan:) 

Anyways, we are working hard here and serving the best we can! This is hard work, but it feels so good to hit that pillow at night knowing you worked as hard as you can.

I hope everyone know that I love all you guys so much and I am so grateful for all your e-mails. I hope everyone has a great week coming up!

Les ama

Adio

Elder Sherle