Elder Samuel Holdstock

  Hola hola a todos! What is up everyone?!  This week has been wild for me. We had transfers on Wednesday and I finially left my area of Amancayas. It was the only area I'd served in over here in Bolivia so I'm excited to learn a new area, but it was a little sad to leave. I love that place and the people there.  I am now serving in the area Villa Moscú which is the area with the temple and we can see it from our bedroom window. It's so awesome! With only one temple in Bolivia, and we are lucky enough to live right next to it. My new companion is Elder Nóbrega from São Paolo and he's so cool. We've both been in Bolivia for 4.5 months, but he's only got two transfers left in his mission so we're going to make sure he finishes them with a bang.  The other day on Friday we were walking back from visiting some missionaries in a neighboring area and this girl was crying on the phone and sat down on the curb, we kinda walked past, then I felt like we needed to tal...

  Hola hola a todos What's up everyone how's everyone doing? I'm just still out here in Bolivia grinding everyday because that's what the mission is.  Our teaching pool is full of awesome people and we are running with like 5 people that want to get baptized and a couple more who are so close. The only problem with these 5 people is that they have problems that are getting in their way and won't let them get baptized. Various reasons, and it's a little sad to see one little thing stop these people from receiving the true joy that we can find in the gospel, but we keep grinding. We did have a really good week of finding though and have met a lot more people who have had the missionaries in their lives a looooong time ago, but they "stopped coming by." I would be willing to say that these people are a lot more willing to accept Jesus Christ into their lives now than before. And that always gives me motivation to keep going even when the people don't ...

  Hola hola a todos! This ones gonna be short and sweet because it was a little bit of a slow week. Here in Bolivia all the kids are on "vacaciones" from their school so all our families have been traveling and unavailable which is just a little bit unfortunate.  We were able to meet with two of our people who are pretty cool and know that baptism is something that they'll have to do, but are scared to make the commitment that comes with it. One of them is scared to make big changes in her life, and the other is scared to make a decision that her family isn't going to like. They're both awesome people and will one day join the church, I just gotta keep loving them and show them all the blessings that they'll get by being baptized and hope its in a matter if weeks, and not years. On Saturday we got to hop on over to a neighboring zone because my little homie Paolo was getting baptized! He's the best friend of the son of the family we live with and one day o...

  Hola hola a todos!! And Happy 4th of July! I hope everyone is shooting off fireworks and going to be partying it up with your families. Luckily I'm in Bolivia and we're going to have road blockades today so we'll have some fireworks or loud pops to make it feel like a real 4th of July over here haha This week was pretty cool with one of our friends in particular. We met the hermana Gryselda last week while trying to find her mom, taught her the Restoration, she came to church with one invitation, and loved all of the above. She had mentioned to us how she'd always wanted to walk around the temple, but she can't because she's not a member. Well this week we made her dreams come true. We got permission to go to the temple with her and we walked her around and taught her the Plan of Salvation and it was awesome! We also took her to a baptism and she loved it. The part she kept saying that she loved is that all the relief society came up and was just being so nice...