an exciting week!

Well we had a very exciting week! We finally rescued a sister named Flora Vasquez. We are so happy and feel very great about the work we did with her. She is an older women, 70 and she is now so active that she walked all the way from her house on the day of Penaton (it´s just a holiday of the country. I think they have about 150 different holidays here :D haha there´s always something)! (She lives quite far away too) She lives by herself, and has felt so much love from our visits with many different members of the branch. She is an active visiting teacher and is now bringing other less-actives to church! She has plans to go to the temple in December with the rest of the branch and to bring the name of her grandmother. :) 

Being able to serve Flora really helped me learn about the needs of the widows in the church. They are so lonely :( They just want someone to talk to. haha I think she cried in half the lessons we had with her, but we really love her a lot. She´s still kicking though! She visits her families every week as a visiting teacher. ahhh yeah also the Day of Penaton was a day where nobody could use their cars in all of Bolivia. The police were out all morning to enforce it :D so all the members had to walk to church. and we had to walk for all the lessons. haha

We are currently working with lots of less-actives. We have about 4 other people we are planning on rescuing in the next month. We also have one investigator who is progressing very well towards baptism! His name is Alfredo Chumacero. He is a university student who never went to church growing up. We have had contact with him for quite some time, but nothing really solid until last week, We taught about baptism, and we knelt together and he offered a prayer to Heavenly Father, asking if he should be baptized. After he finished, we sat and just listened to the Spirit. Alfredo said that he felt like this was the path he should follow with his life. It was such a powerful lesson! He came to all of church yesterday, and is going to go to a service activity with us on Tuesday. So we´re pretty excited! The next transfers will also be this week. I´ve been with Elder Villegas now 2 transfers, and we are going to open about 25 new areas in the mission due to a huge group that´s entering. We´ll see what happens!

About the picture:

Those were the branches of Camiri and Vallegrande. To the left are the elders with me, the next two were in vallegrande with me before, so we´re good friends. In front is president Willard, his wife, and three of their daughters. So everyone of the kids of President Willard have served missions or are about to.Two of those daughters have finished their missions, one in the Phillipines and one in chile and the other is going to Ecuador in a couple months. I haven´t met their only son, but he served as well. Their family is incredible!! They are all so strong in the gospel. And their testimonies are incredible. What a family!!