3/3;

Well this week in Cuenca was great! We met a lot more members and have a good pool of investigators now. Honestly, all of our investigators have come from the part member families of the branch and area book work. We have done some street contacting but not enough. But I feel like this week we can work on that because now we have a better feel for the area and just kind of know what we´re doing now. We started teaching a man named Elvis. He got baptized a few years ago and never got confirmed, so the branch president wants us to proceed with teaching him all over again and baptizing him again but this time making sure he seals the deal, so to speak. So we are excited to work with him. He was a lot of desire, but he is very wishy washy when it comes to acting. We had one lesson with him and he failed on us the second time and didn´t come to church. So we´ll have to see where that goes. And we had a total miracle last night! We found an investigator, again through one of our less actives. He´s a friend of one of the members that just moved here from France about a month ago, he´s retired and speaks no Spanish. But he´s been coming to church and is very interested. So we set up a lesson with one of the members, he´s from Utah but he´s working here at the university teaching English and speaks French as well so we had a lesson with him as our interpretor. And the lesson went very well. Marcel brought up that he wanted to be baptized so we put him on date! It was so cool! We also had a whopping 22 people in church. 2 of which were our investigators so that is very exciting. One of our less active ward mission leader that we have decided to reactivate haha we want to have correlation so we are working with that! I really love Cuenca. Its a really great little place.

This week we also got the chance to attend our mission tour. Elder Texiera from the Eurupe area seventy came and spoke to us. It was awesome. A spiritual feast. haha we talked about our purpose as missionaries, how to recognize the spirit and finding people to teach. He said something that really stuck with me, he was talking about how we couldn´t be doing anything more worthwhile right now in our lives than serving missions. ¨The world has a lot to offer, but nothing like this¨ its so true. And its crazy to think that this week I´ll hit a year... Where has the time gone? Honestly, there is nothing I would rather be doing right now. If I could sit down and talk to me a year ago, I would tell myself to just go without any fears because I was scared out of my mind this time last year, I had no idea what was waiting for me here. But now I know, what was waiting was work. Hard work! But an abundance of blessings as well. There´s no need to fear because the Lord will take care of His missionaries, I´ve seen it countless times. I love this work, I love this gospel. I don´t care how cheesy it is to say but its true. My mission has changed my life for the better and I would never regret my time out here. I mean that wholeheartedly. Alma 26:1-3 :) 

Hna Palomino