Monday, April 24, 2017

Week 19 - Sanitation Missionary!!!!

Hola Amigos!



This week I can officially say that I have worked as a garbage man. This week here in El Milagro we did a service project for the city of El Milagro with about 14 Elders. Because of all that has been happening here in Peru in this part of El Milagro (My area) garbage services have not been running for a little over 3 weeks... cue Elder Vassau the Garbage Man. Basically for 4 hours I was standing inside of a giant pickup truck as other elders through bags of garbage at us. To make it that much better, we had to open up all the bags and sift through them to look for recyclables and let me tell you peruvian trash is nice and nasty. It is full of chicken parts and dead animals sooooooo to say the least it was a bit gross, I enjoyed my shower afterwards, and I have tremendous respect for anyone that works with garbage as a living... 

Along with the service this week there were plenty of great missionary moments. This week I did an interchange with the other Elders in Milagros. I was with Elder Maddocks all day saturday. It was the weirdest thing proselyting with another gringo... everyone just looks at you a little funny. We had a great experience knocking on doors. Basically the whole time we were thinking about a conference talk by Elder Rasband which talked about following our first impression which about 9 times out of 10 is the Holy Ghost trying to guide us. Well we were walking around in some random alley and I had the strong impression that we needed to knock on a purple door we saw... so we knocked... and knocked again... and of course we knocked a third time because we are missionaries and tend to be persistant... and nothing. It was so weird. Well we were just leaving, we walked about half a block and I had the impression that we needed to go back. We went back and knocked one last time and sure enough Hermano Ciro Helaman answered the door and invited us in. We had never met him before but anyone who is familiar with the Book of Mormon knows that Helaman is a name from the Book of Mormon. He immediately invited us in and we began to talk to him. He had not talked with missionaries in over 30 years, but he was baptised when he was 8 and was recently looking for something to invite more peace into his families life and then we showed up. It was awesome and we are going to visit his family this week. Always listen to those little impressions of the spirit. 

This week we also today had a guy run out of his gym and basically chase us down the street yelling at us. Sometimes people do this to annoy us but we turned around and talked to him anyway and the first thing he said was "Where can I find a Book of Mormon". For a missionary this is basically the greatest thing ever hahahahaahaha. We will see what happens but we are visiting this guy tonight. Everything is great here in El Milagro and things are just about completely back to normal with people starting to take down their sand bags and dirt piles they had put up because of the flooding. All is well here in Milagro. 


Love, 

Elder Vassau

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