i have been cured! [email from last week]

I HAVE BEEN CURED!!! Unlike in Nacho Libre i was Cured from my illness on Easters!! I have neglected to share with you my lovely changes that have been going on, not only the changes of my heart but the changes of the body! For 3 weeks now I have been suffering from a deathly disease of Dhiarea! It is a serious thing, I have been taking some Suero which some drink medicine here for these 3 weeks and my lovely Easter present was that i have been healed!! Oh the blessings of Easter!!  My other Easter presesnt was amazing! please put some attention into this part!! Jay, remember when i cut my hair by myself one time and had a lot of holes in the back part of my hair and you thought i got attacked by a bird! Well yesterday i got attacked by a FREAKIN PARROTT!!! yes a parrott attacked me in broad dat light!! When went to a members house yesterday for lunch and he was taking care of his uncle Parrott while they were traveling this week. we are actually teaching this guy right now and i have seen this parrott before and its pretty fun. He told me to teach the bird some english. I was obliged to! so he passed me the bird and it was chillin in my had and when i started talking english he started nibbling on my hand, not hard. and then it went crazy and started flapping all of the place and then almost bit my thumb off!! haha! not really but it bit hard enough to draw some blood. Then the hermono came and punched the bird and then the bird attacked him and then some how he put it in the cage haha!! It was the weirdest thing ever, now i got a nice little scar where my thumb used to be. haha! ya i still have my thumb but i got 2 marks from the beak of this killer bird. apparently it doesnt want to learn english haha!! 

This week was a lot better! we have contacted into some awesome people! One family that we contacted is uper prepared to here the gosple!! It was Saturday when we were contacting. This week i contacted alot about how this week is the week that we celebrate the death and resurreccion of christ. I then would testify of the Book of Mormon and how this is another testament of Christ and that this book testifys that Christ came to the Americas after is resurrecion. This was a very successful week with contacts we picked up 16 new investigators from contacting this week!! There was one family that we contacted that is super special. When i contacted then i testified that our message is based on the same principals and organizations of the Chursch of Jesus Christ when he was on the Earth!! I testified of the truthfulness that we have a living profeta and 12 apostoles in the Earth in these days! THe guy was like please enter, meet my family, please tell us who are these 12 apostoles and this profeta! I want to know who they are please tell us! We basically gave the whole first lesson in this 45 minute time zone that we had and picked up a family of 6! These people are awesome! Another family that i contacted the other day already had a BOM but they didnt know what it was. This area is very poor and one day a bookstore was closing and giving out free books. This lady didnt know how to read and picked up a BOM from the book store and she reads a little bit now from this book but she doesnt really understand it, she lost this book about 4 years ago, she didnt know what it was or anything really. But we contacted here, and we are now teaching here her 2 kids her 3 nephews and her cousin now, they all live in the same house!  So it is interesting how the lord places people in our paths to teach! We now have 78 investigators that we have!! We have 8 with baptismal dates! we will have a baptism this Saturday of Sebastien Diaz and Santiago Diaz they are little kiddos and we are working with ther parents but they dont want to get married! AHHHH!!!!

Well seems like the fam and all had an excellent time this week and a very spiritually uplifting weekend! Here in Colo,bia its called the Holy Week! the catholic church does a re enactment of the last week of the life of Chirst, they do a live re enactment of the crucificion and all, it is very intereesting to see this they act them out in the churches or in the parks. it was interesting this week, all of the pastores were are preaching on their stools and all out side in streets corners and everythin, it was pretty interesting, it was nothing like i am used to but it sure was interesting. 

Last night i had apretty humbling experience. We are teaching a family of 10 right now, we have baptized 3 of the 8 kids and the rest of the kids have baptismal dates for the end of May. Last night we went to there house for a lesson and instead of teaching we helpded them get water into their house. THey dont have running electicity or water or gas, for lights they hook up car batteries and jimmy rig some thing up and for water they go down to a canal a pump water into 10 gallon drums and carry them back home. So last night we helped them get their water! These things are heavy and the water is about1/4 mile from their house , its a pretty difficult task, but the fill up a 100 gallon tank every week, so this week we helped and it was ridiculous!! There was a little 11 year old girl carryin here little 5 gallon bucket of water to the house! The life style here is way different for sure!! So ya this was my week here in Colombia!! We are all stoked here to call home for Mothers Day!! I will see if we can call home a bit later then i dont know the time difference now since the hours have changed back home. Check it out in the interent or something. but i think i can call at 4 or 5 our time too, so look it up to see what you got going on at these times, i dont know what time it is there.

Today was pretty fun we hooked up 3 zones to play soccer, i am the worst in the world and soccer oh my gosh! I fell every 2 seconds and can kick to save my life. There are 7 Gringos within these 3 Zones and one of the Elders brought a ball ot shoot hoops so we all played together and had a much better time with the hoop then the goal haha! Its fun to get all the Gringos together its a bitter of Fresh air we all talk about the weird  things that we are doing. there are 4 gringo from my same group there today so we all talked about the good times in the MTC and the big change in the Mission field and all the weird things we eat and do. We all agreed that we all love and hate the joseph smith video because it reminds of of trees and the good ol states haha and we love it cuz its a power full movie but it brings back memories of home and all haha!! Im glad that the other Gringos are in the same boat as me! 

So this was my productive week working hard and the Lord is blessing us with success!
Love Elder Hammer