Elder Samuel Holdstock

  What's up everyone! Woah, starting this one a little different haha Bolivia has been a wild ride this week. The work has been good and we've always been busy teaching someone. The problem is that about 87% of the people we've been teaching over the last couple weeks don't have interest in progressing, but love to talk about "la palabra de Dios." Well this week things had changed. We went from like 2 solid people, to now 22 solid people and it makes things things much more fun.  9 of this solid people come from one huge family and we had such a gnarly experience with them. We had taught the mom and two brothers a couple weeks ago and were finally able to teach them again, this time with the entire family of like 12 people. We taught the plan of Salvation and they loved that they could live together forever. Afterwards a couple of the people were asking so many questions that the Restoration answers so we set up a time to come back the next day. In my personal...

  Hola hola a todos! How's everyone doing? This week has been a pretty normal week in terms of being a missionary in Bolivia, Cochabamba. I wake up in the morning at 6:25 and it is a freezing 32⁰ and sometimes colder, then we're working and mid-day we have to hide in the shade as we walk or it's just too hot to handle. It's a fun little game Bolivia likes to play with us.  The work here has been going good though. Our family of Oscar, Nely, and Elia are ready to be baptized! They just don't know when they'll be able to. With Oscar's big heart problem a few months ago, it's left them all without a job. Know that he is better and his wife Elia can leave him alone with his sister, she's always gone "en el campo" to work. Also half the people here work in "el campo" but no one knows where it is. They just point in a direction and say "por alla." They also are already ready to come to church each week because they've been...

  Hola hola a todos! This week has been so weird. We called it our summer break because it was literally a week of activities and only missionary work in the afternoons. We also had transfers on Wednesday and I got my new companion Elder Ramírez from Ecuador. I'm finally gonna learn Spanish haha. He's brand new from the MTC so its been fun to see what i used to be like and how the mission changes you in such a short time.  We had a mission conference with Elder Held of the seventy for a couple days and it was awesome. Then we had a P-day with President on Saturday. Each zone got to design their own jerseys to play a bunch if games in which was awesome. And to finish of our Pday with President, we had a baptism for our friend Alan who finally has gotten in the water and made the covenant. Hes someone who everyone thought would be an eternal investigator because he has had more than 14 fechas and was supposed to get baptized last november, but God's timing is perfect and it w...

  Hola hola a todos! Looking back at our daily plans, this week was really all over the place. We have an awesome problem where all of our awesome people either recently got baptized, or are getting baptized this week. That has meant that we need to find some good new people to teach regularly. A problem here is almost 80% of the time people will want to talk to you and hear all your messages, but dont care about going to church. So we gotta weed through those guys. But were seeing progress slowly but surely. Highlight of the week for sure was being able to baptize our friend Gabriela Flores Bentacur. We've been teaching her almost the whole time I've been here in Bolivia. She has quite the conversion story and has changed so much from the day we met her. I found my seof audibly saying "what the heck, how did we get here" as we were taling pictures.  The other day she wrote us on WhatsApp as we were talking about something and said "Siii   m ahora creo que lo mej...