Pictures from April 2022-June 2022 - Calarcá, Colombia

 https://photos.app.goo.gl/3FigoF2NPMxkiWPQ9

More pics and videos

I ate expensive food for free, also baptisms - Calarcá, Colombia

HI! How are you, I'm doing great, thanks, ok good to know, yep, ok, bye.

No clue why I wrote that but there it is. Ok this week was good, lots of stuff about food, some of the stuff, good, some not as good. For lunch one day, a member gave us fish soup. by fish soup, I literaly mean FISH soup. there were two whole fish in it. they had the bones, skin, teeth, toung, fins, and EYES. Yes, I ate fish eyes. Also there were these weird shrimp looking things with eyes and legs too. I ate thoes also, not a lot of meat and the eyes tasted funny. Pictures below and more in the google photo thingy I sent last week or something. On the good side, this week I ate some expensive food for free. Not sure exactly what it is but a member cooked it for us. It's from Peru and I think it's called lomo salteado. It was pretty good tho. Other cool thing for the people that like avacado, thoes things are huge here. The normal ones are like 5" by 3" and if you look a bit you can find ones a lot bigger. They eat it a lot here.

WE HAD A BAPTISM THIS WEEK!!!

Juan Pablo and Valeria, the two kids that I talked about got baptized! We convinced the dad that he should baptize his kids because he was kind of scared and feeling bad because he was really inactive in the church for a while. After the baptism he was sooooooo happy tho, he said that he felt the spirit so much and that he hadn't felt the spirit like that in a long time. Now his goal is to go to the temple with his family and be sealed to his wife and 3 kids.

Ok I'm already out of time so I'll just send this here. :)

OH YA! My brother Evan graduated so congrats! Ok ahora si.

Elder Crenshaw :)

I FORGOT TO SAY,

cambios ate this week and I stay here with my comp Elder Saenz

Ok bye

Cambios *are* this week

And *I'm staying*

I'm already forgetting english, sorry lol

Hola I bought more ties :) - Calarcá, Colombia

Ok solo 4 but still, they are super cool. Not that cool, but still. They were like $3, like actualy. I like el hueco :)

ANYWAY what happaned this week? No clue, also, no clue what happend last week or if I wrote last week. So you're getting the usual random nonsense that I end up writing. De nada :)

Okey dokey, what did we do this week? It was a pretty good week, all of our work contacting the last couple of weeks is starting to pay off. We have seen so many milagros this week. Most of them small, but all together, the week was amazing. It was a little tough at times, but great. One of my favorites was when we were walking to an appointment, I was in intercambios (not exactly sure what thoes are called in Ingles but with another elder, not my normal comp) and I felt like we should take a different path than normal. We were climbing the bajilion stairs that we have in our area when an old man stoped us and said that he was a member, but couldn't go to church because he had a bad leg, right about then, his ministering brother showed up and said that he had come to visit because the guy hadn't been to church in a while. We were able to give him a bendicion de salud and the next week he was able to come to church! It's absolutly amazing how the Lord uses us to fulfill his purposes, even when we don't know.

OH YA, Thursday and Sunday were borring becuase we had to stay in the house all day because there were these protest thingys going on. Not exactly sure why, it's just kind of a thing here. I didn't actualy see any protesting, it's normaly more in the center of Medellin, and our house is in a farther part, but it's ok. We just called a lot of people.

I like DyC. It's cool, I read a ton of it this week and there's a lot of cool stuff there, but the 2 verses I want to share today are in DyC 88:81-82, I found it yesterday :)

"81 Behold, I sent you out to testify and warn the people, and it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor.

82 Therefore, they are left without excuse, and their sins are upon their own heads."

SHARE THE GOSPLE

ok yep

What else happend this week? No clue but just so you know, I'm not spell checking this or fixing anything so if no one understands this oh well, I wrote this in like 5 mins :)

OH YA! I only have 14 Jet stickers that I still need, 15, 19, 25, 26, 43, 57, 78, 89, 180, 207, 215,  217, 226, 242

Other random scriptures that I liked this week:

DyC 1:19, DyC 93:36, DyC 101:16, DyC 130:20-21, 1 Nefi 4:6-7, 1 Nefi 11:22, 2 Nefi 2:45, 2 Nefi 2:25, 2 Nefi 17:20, Alma 8:18, Alma 32:23-24, Alma 46:40, Helaman 12:15, 3 Nefi 11:11, 3 Nefi 13:34

Ok I'm out of time but anyway, mi punto es, the scriptures are cool, read them, enjoy them, study them, live them, all the other things, amen. :)

Adios!

Elder Crenshaw :)

I remembered to write agian :) - Calarcá, Colombia

OK I'M BACK. As in I'm writing again. Because I remembered again. Yep ok. What happened these last few weeks...

OH ya, I actually do have an excuse for not writing, we didn't have a phone so that was fun. Ok story time, we lost the phone on Monday 3 weeks ago, well, I lost the phone. We were dropping off my companion at the terminal to go to his new area, then Elder Cardozo and I went back to our apartment. In the taxi I had the phone in my pocket, we got to the house, went inside, and I reached into my pocket to find out when I could talk to my family. And the phone wasn't there... mini panic attack there. We looked around the house and it wasn't there so we called it with the phone of the other elders. At first it rang and no one responded, later in the day it was shut down. We called the offices to tell them that we don't have a phone and ya, case in point, no phone. We didn't have a new one for 3 weeks because there was a bunch of problems with sim cards not working and phones being weird, and the mission office being slow. Oh well, we finally got a working phone yesterday. 

Ok so what else happened, we contacted a lot these last few weeks because when you can't confirm appointments people forget. We knocked on literally over a thousand doors, talked to who knows how many people, and shared a lot about our message of hope for the world. In the end, we found lots of new people that want to hear our message. Last week we had 12 new people we are teaching and this week we added 18 more. Almost all of them have heard from the missionaries before or have friends that are members, and almost all of them that have heard from the missionaries lost contact during the pandemic. It was amazing to see los milagros come after we did everything we could. 

     

This week was super cool for the mission as well, our goal as a mission is to have 100 or more baptisms in a month, I don't know if we'll reach that goal this month but this week the mission had 37 baptisms! One was in our ward, the other set of missionaries baptized Katy on Saturday. Her story is super cool, she found the missionaries through ticktok (i think that's how it's spelled) about 2 years ago. At that time she lived in an area of Colombia named Chocó. The thing is the Chocó area was closed for a long time because it is not the safest area. The last missionaries there were captured and tourtured because some people wanted money and they were dressed nice and gringos. There still aren't any missionaries that live in that area, but two transfers ago, the assistants to the president of the the mission (APs) were assigned to work in that area, 100% online. They found Katy's reference and called her. She had moved to Medellín at this point so the APs passed her to the missionaries here. She has a great testimony. I don't have much time left so I'll end it here, I'll try to sent pictures later if I remember, if not I also might make a google photos album thingy and put photos there.

BYEEEEE

Elder Crenshaw :)

IDK what to write here but a seventy visited so thats cool - Calarcá, Colombia

HIIIII I'm here again. I know I know, I'm actualy writing more than one week in a row. I'll be waiting for the congrats in the return emails lol. OK so what happend this week. Elder Becerra of the 70 visited our mission this week. It was super cool and I learned a ton. One of my favorite parts was his use of scriptures. He had a scripture for literaly every question. Like for ALL of them. He also gave us a challenge. Durante the three days of the gira, we needed to find 3 new personas y extender 2 fecha. He promised that if we did it, we would see the miracales in our lives. It was amazing what came from it. The last day when everyone was sharing the miricles that happened, he asked us how it all happend. He shared that we always can have miricles in our lives and in our missions. It wasn't his faith that made everything happen. It was ours. That is a very important principle in our lives. The blessings in our lives come acording to our own fe, not the faith of a leader, or of our parents, or leaders. It's our fe. When we really commit and have the fe to act, even when it seems imposible, thats when we can start to see the blessings in our lives. 

En general, the conference was great, even tho we had 12 elders in our house. That was a little packed. Definitly worth it, but lots of people. Pero esta bien because we got all of the extra food that the elders bought and didn't eat :)

Apart from that nothing much happend, after the conference I got sick, I think the fruit guy gave me an old piña. I didn't sleep very well that night and the next day at church I only gave half of my talk because I had to leave really fast. Yep that was fun.

OK times up, adios, hasta luego, chao, nos vemos la próxima semana.

Elder Crenshaw :)

Okey dokey, I'm writing again :) - Calarcá, Colombia

 Ok so I'm writing two week in a row, I know, loco, when has that every happened. lol

OK so what happened this week. We had a few intercambios where we are companions with another missionary for a day. Other than that I can't think of much. A pretty normal week overall. BUT this week we are going to have a conference with a member of the 70, Élder Becerra! The whole mission will be coming to Medellin so the apartment will be a little packed. Normaly we have 4 people here. Durring the conference there will be 12 :) Everyone arrives this wednesday so we'll see how that goes. I really cant thing of anything else we did, with my family normalmente hablo sobre mi semana but today we just talked about english grammer so ya. Thats about it, unless you guys want to hear about the subjuntive :)

SPIRITUAL THOUGHT TIME!!!

Ok so this week we've been studying stuff that Elder Becerra sent us to study. The second day of meetings we will be focusing on 3 sets of scriptures. The cool thing about the scriptures is we can relate them to both missionary and members. Your homework is to read them and send me your thoughts. Ill send you mine next week, but trust me. These always have been some of my favorite scriptures, but now they are better. 

Alma 8:18-22, 10:4-12

Alma 19:16-17,28-29

Heleman 5:35-43

Have fun, keep or gain your testimony, see you next week.

Elder Crenshaw  :)

HI AGAIN - Calarcá, Colombia

Ok so I'm writing again because why not, I have time before lunch. Ok so first things first, very fast review of the week, because I'm sending this when lunch gets here. Ok it's here

Lol it's actually was ready if I have more time later I'll write more later, maybe, but here's a summary before everyone else finishes lunch.

Me desmayè, nos robaron, cambios, medellin, uff carisimo, metrocable, el hueco, ey mono/gringo

De nada :)

OK where were we, ok poco a poco

Primero, me desmayè means I fainted, for those of you who didn't put it in to Google translate already. Don't worry it wasn't because I hit my head or anything, I just had a really big head rush. Yep, I fainted because I'm tall. No normal you don't full on faint when you have a head rush but that time I did. :) my hip hurt for a bit after because I fell on it, and we lost 1.5 mugs (one only lost the handle) but over all ok. I think in the end my companion elder Mendez was more shook than I was lol.

Nos robaron, we got robbed. Yup. I lost almost all of the money that the mission gives us to live because we happened to take it out of the ATM that day so that was fun. At least it wasn't too bad, I didn't even know that we got robbed until after. The way the robbery went down was like this. We (me and the LZs) were waiting for my companion as he was coming back from a medical appointment in Medellín. The zone leaders didn't want to go all the way to the terminal because they had appointments that they wanted to go to. So they had elder Mendez get off the bus at a random roundabout, dark, in the middle of nowhere, next to their appointment, in a dangerous neighborhood. All good so far. A guy comes up at this point and asks us where a park is, the park doesn't exist but the LZs start contacting the guy anyway because ya. The guy then says that he, and another guy that just showed up, are part of a cartel and that they think that we are going to sell drugs to someone. So they need to look over our phones to make sure we aren't doing that. The lzs say ok that's fine and give their phone to them so I do the same. Next they ask one of the lzs how much cash he has on him. He says he has about 170.000 COP on him, the truth because we took out our money that day, so they told us all to take our our money and show them how much we have. They then had to take that too so that they could "make sure that it was real or something. Still not sure on this one, they were using lots of slang and talking about drugs. As a person who learned Spanish from the Book of Mormon, I don't know a lot of slang or drug words jajaja. After that they told us to take a lap around the block while they checked our stuff and then when we got to the other side, they would give us our stuff back. I started going around the loop but after like 10 steps my companion, who had arrived at this point but didn't get robbed, starts saying that the lzs are dumb and how could they fall for that. I being the clueless gringo that I am at times, asked what he was talking about. That's when I found out that the people weren't actually nice cartel people making sure that we weren't invading their territory, and that we just got robbed. :D

Ok the rest ate faster, cambios means changes directly, but for missionaries, it means transfers. This time I actualy transfered! A little sad leaving Calarcá after 6 months, but cool overall. Ahora, I'm in Medellín! My new area is called buenos aires.

Uuf, carisimo = it's expensive here. Not crazy expensive because it's not a huge touristic place, but much more expensive than my last area, think tiny town vs giant city.

Metrocable means, I'm really not sure, but it's kind of like a ski lift. Our area is literally the side of a mountain. So at times we have to take the metrocable so we don't take 2 hours walking up the side of a mountain. Super cool.

El hueco, the hole directly but it just means downtown where everything is a copy and super cheap. Don't go in ropa de proselitismo or alone/without a Latino or 100% you will get robbed. Still half a chance, but oh well. It was fine when we went.

Ey mono/gringo. What I hear minimum 20 times a day. Gringo is just gringo, I'm used to that. Mono means blond, I'm obviously blond in an area where that is not normal lol. But mono also means monkey. So when someone says that it has a little double meaning. I don't really care, but some how, I only figured out the monkey thing two days ago.

Ok that's it for summary, spiritual thought and shout outs in another email because this is long.

Elder Crenshaw :)