Saturday, April 30, 2016 -- Month #14 - Week #63 - Day #439 - El Dorado, La Entrada, Copan

Acabamos abril! It's the end of April! And we're now 14 days without water and Hna Cruz doesn't have clean clothes.

So tonight we were big girls and hauled six 5-gallon jugs of water from up the hill to dump into our pila so we could have washing water. We each carried a jug and we took 3 trips. I carried mine on my shoulder like a man, so that was fun.

It kinda hurts your neck because we had to carry them upright, instead of on their side, as we borrowed the jugs from the neighbor lady that sells purified water and they didn't have caps to hold the water if you tip the jugs on their side. But, nonetheless, we have a few gallons of water to hold us over. The firefighters are also going around, giving water, but we're never home when they're passing by. So that's fun. But we met some really nice people that have water right now and they offered to give us some. We had to haul it all, of course, but we were very happy and are blessed. There are good people in this world!

But this morning we went up to the Church early (with all the asuntos of getting the building keys) to make the banana bread we were going to use in our activity. So we did that all morning, then ran and had lunch with Hna Aide, and then the 3 of us went back to the Church because she had an interview and it was almost time for our activity, and then we ended up helping out the Relief Society serving food and doing cleanup and PR with their Mother's Day activity, and then we finally got prepped for our activity of la Obra Misional! Which actually was a good success, to be honest, we didn't really think it would turn out well. But it was great! We had about 30 people stay to help us, and we divided into 4 groups by organization (YM, YW, RS and EQ) and Hna Cruz and I split up to go with the women's groups, each of the groups was led by an RM (haha, lots of acronyms!) or our Branch Mission Leader (in the case of the EQ), and we each had a plate with 10 pieces of banana bread and 6 folletos of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (really weird to say in English!) that they had to hand out in an hour. But it was good because the members just had to introduce themselves, offer the bread, have the people try it, explain that the bread is like the Gospel and that it's something that they want to share, explain a little about the folleto, and invite them to Church with us. And, if the person seemed interested, write down their info so Hna Cruz and I can visit them. And it actually worked really well! Next time we'll use another treat and make smaller groups. But this was a good first time around and we could see who are good people to have come on visits with us. And gave the members a little more exposure to our missionary life. But it was awesome because our Branch President, his 1st counselor, and 2 of the auxiliary organization's presidents were there, with 2 counselors in place of the president. So we had a lot of the leadership in the branch. And Presidente Montes had never done something like this before, or actually any of the members, but they ended up liking it. And we got some more confidence with them, so that was even better.

And, at the end, of course, we had made a batch of banana bread for the people who had come, and we gave them big squares of that with soda (as always) and thanked them all for coming and participating and let them share some of their thoughts and experiences about the activity.

All in all, good day. Really tired from the pre-activity stress and then hauling water up and down all over creation, so we're ready for Sunday!