Hola Familia!

Thanks for the emails, good to hear that Grandma Bonnie is ok, that´s super scary...

This week was crazy. We are both so tired, we feel good because we did just about everything this week. We planned two noches de hogar, a HUGE activity on saturday, we talked on sunday and taught gospel doctrine, went to Veracruz on Wednesday, and did divisions on tuesday.

The Activity was amazing. elder Herron and his other companion had been planning an activity for saturday but hadn´t really planned any ideas, just told everyone that we were going to have a huge activity. So we had to come up with everything, plan it all, organize it, invite everyone, and buy the food. We planned for about 80 persons, we decided that if we were going to do it we were going to go all out. Because all the members had been planning on it for a month and supposedly were inviting all the less actives and everything. So we bought A TON of food on saturday morning to feed everyone. We are talking like 10 kilos of tomatoes and 3 kilos alone of chile. This was serious business :) So we were in the chapel cooking everything and setting up our activity. We cut out pictures of church related stuff and made puzzles, and hid the pieces everywhere with clues, and made it into a scavenger hunt type deal. We were going to start at like 2, but 2:45 rolls around and basically nobody showed up... we were panicking a little because we had put sooooo much time and effort into this to help the branch be more unified and invited less actives. Then we thought, "wow, we are being super dumb right now, we haven´t even prayed yet" so we went in the president´s office said a prayer, and left to go remind some people. When we got back, there was like 50 or 60 people in the chapel. Not exaggerating. We did the scavenger hunt, everyone had an absolute blast with that. The adults were crazier than half the kids, trying to look for all the pieces. Then we ate and even though we bought a ton of food, enough people came that we used every last bit, and everyone was super full, it couldn´t have gone any better. We had lots of inactives come, only a couple investigators but they had a good time. After the activity we returned to the president´s office, this time to give thanks to our Heavenly Father for his help. :)

We found some good people this week, we put some dates and the people are really good, they just need to come to church. We still don´t have anyone who has really progressed a whole ton lately but there are a couple of news who are really good, they really want to be baptized. Speaking of church, we pretty much ran the show this sunday. We talked for 20 minutes each, and then the hermana who was going to give the sunday school lesson didn´t come. So we just kinda winged it but had tons of participation from everyone and the spirit was super strong, it turned out really good. The branch president came for the first time in 3 weeks, and was really excited to be there, the class and talks that we gave actually applied perfect to what is going on in his life right now. We are already good friends and we are going to do all we can to help him come and stay excited. The hermanas who were kinda iffy about having another american are doing better with it now ;) I just had to really really open up and show no fear and we are all getting along really good, I love the branch. It´s hard sometimes but the members really are amazing.

We had a zone conference in Veracruz on wednesday, we learned alot of good stuff and it was sooo good to see a bunch of the Elders from my distict!

Well, I´m out of time but thank you all for the emails and the prayers!!

I love you all soooooo much and hope everything is going well!

Elder Eastmond Jr.