Cinco de Mayo

Hola,

Ok to answer questions first:

Tell me ALL about your apartment: It's small.  Our main goal was to find an apartment within our area that we could move into quickly so we weren't very picky.  It's clean and has A/C so that's all that really matters for us.  The only annoying feature is that there's a residual funk that stinks pretty bad and we can't figure out where it's coming from.  We're on the top/third floor so we don't have to worry about noise above us.  Moving in was a hassle.  The mission owns a couple garages where they store everything that missionaries would need, so we had to go there, pick out the stuff for the apartment, move it to the other side of town, get it up three stories (not too easy when we had a bench press set and a 60lb kettle weight along with everything else), and set up before our evening of teaching began.  It feels nice though and it's more convenient to our area, whereas at the last place we had to drive five miles before we could begin working.  I'm pretty sure we're the only white guys in the complex.

What's your new ward like?  Same ward.  There’s only one Spanish ward in the city for all Latinos in the surrounding area.

Mother's Day phone details please!  Not sure when or where, the limit is 40 min. I met a less active the other day who is our age and would love to have us over to use Skype.

Cinco de Mayo was a bear.  I am exhausted from this last week of trying to figure it out.  Elder Samuel and I weren't getting much help from anyone else in the mission so a lot of our time was spent begging and reminding elders and sisters about what was going to happen.  Hopefully all the hard work pays off.  We had three handcarts pulled by sister missionaries from the trail center and elders in pioneer outfits.  We had two custom banners done to advertise the trail center and mormon.org that were carried before and after the carts, along with two smaller signs waving on the side of the street that had info about the Spanish ward and an invitation to come.  Along with that, Spanish elders were walking along the side of the street passing out mormon.org cards that we had taken and added stickers to the back that had all the information about the Spanish ward on it.  I was working with an English elder from Council Bluffs walking along the sidewalk and contacting as we went, getting addresses and handing out cards.

In total, all of us easily handed out more than 1000 cards to the crowd.  Our main goal was to get public awareness that a Spanish ward exists.  A lot of members will move from other areas to Omaha and then go inactive because they didn't know there was a church.  The parade was huuuuge!  I felt like I was in the middle of downtown Mexico City with tons of music playing and what not.  Although it was well worth our efforts it was till exhausting.  The sun was painfully hot and everyone I believe got some form of sunburn. 

We've found a new promising investigator.  His name is P and we've met with him twice out of the past 3 days.  He has a lot of questions that relate to the plan of salvation and the nature of deity.  One of his main concerns is the question of why do bad things happen to good people, so we're trying to explain the purpose of trials the reason of this life to him.  He’s really interested in learning more from us.  He doesn’t understand a lot about God and he wants an opportunity to practice his English so we're able to see him frequently.  We just need to slowly but surely teach him more and help him pray and receive a testimony. 

Other than that there’s not much else to report.  Essentially trying to figure out what members and less actives we have in the area, the apartment, and the parade have taken up our entire week.  Love yall,

E. Harker