we baptized her! 6/4/2012

So yesterday we had the best thing ever!! I feel so good to have been able to have baptized Janet Gonzalez! She is probably the strongest convert that I have had in the mission yet!! Holy shnicks! It was definitely the most powerful baptism that I have been to. Janet was super prepared for her baptism! Probably over prepared!! She was a Jehovahs witness gone mormon yea!! It was crazy!! I wanted to have a JW as a convert but she was so prepared! The first time she went to church she presented herself to everyone in the ward everyone knew her so fast!! For her baptism all of the organizations got her a little gift, like hymn book or church magazines and all! IT was great!! Janet brought some of her JW friends to her baptism too! Her family she was great!! The heater in the baptismal font doesnt work, so the water was ice cold oh my gosh it was the coldest water but it didnt matter to us!! Janeth was just so happy! She had the biggest smile on her face!! She was seriously jumping for joy literally haha!! She told me because she cant hold missionaries she just jumps while she shakes our hands haha! She is great! She enrolled herself in mission prep. haha! she is stoked she wants to be a missionary! After her baptism she gave her testimony of coming into the truth and how great it is to hear a converts testimony. so pure and sincere. They dont have a patterenized testimony, one really felt from the heart! IT was so cool!! She's a 21 year old lady from Santa Marta. She's into fashion and all, shes done some modeling, but she is like a little girl, still she is great!! What a great convert she will be!! She is really set in a firm foundation!!

We had a good stressful week this week! I am gonna be in Bogota til the 15th I believe and then i am going to Ibague tod ie haha!! I will be home 4 months from tommorrow! WOOW!! I got 4 months to work my booty off!! I am excited to go to ibague. My comp is great, Elder Pesado, i am stoke! Elder Acuna is cool and all but stress me out alot!! But all is well! He's a great friend but stress me out when it comes to gettin to work! But i love him!! Right now we are doing some hardcore work with the mission! Alot of changes tryin to prep for the new mission president! But all is well! I am happy being busy and workin hard! I love P'days! They are the best. I wake up do my normal routine and then by 930 I take a good huge nap! I love nappin! I dont sleep in the week but pdays i love to just sleep! Today we went to monserrate the catholic church on the hill again! It was fun! We took some cool model pics and all! IT wa a beatiful day in bogota today! I love the way that the church is moving forward!! IT is amazing!! I love the church website, the new message and videos about the savior! It is great!! I am loving the mormon messages! We teach alot using the mormon mesages they are so great! I love them, They are such great boosters. How great it is to have this technology! I love ya all a ton! I am loving serving the Lord!! I am learning so many things that i couldnt learn in anyother place, or any othe time!! Love Elder Hammer

the week of assistance 5/28/2012

Well this week was a super busy stressful week. I am grateful that it is pday! We worked alot this week with little bit of sleep. Well last week I went to Girardot with President!! It was the best trip ever!! We got to stay in a hotel, eat with president, and president loves to eat good food! I loved it, we got back thursday afternoon and then we had a turkey dinner with president and his wife! We had thanksgiving in MAY!! haha!! I loved it! Then on Wednesday we had to go to Fusa. Their area was havin a lot of problems there so we had to go and interview the Elders and do some work with them and i felt more like a Cop than an AP. At times we have to do some weird things. Its sad to see when a missionary has a struggling testimony and see how it affects alot of people!! But we spent all day Wednesday doing that, then on Thursday i was in Kennedy, then Friday I was in Tunjuelito!! There was an Elder that got sick on Wednesday and then we went to the hospital and President took care of that, but the hospital kicked the Elder out of the hospital at 3 in the mornin, so he calls us terrified as heck cuz he only has 3 months in the field as a gringo! haha! So i went and picked him up at 3 in the morning! but I had to be up at 5:30 to travel again the next day!! Then we sent him back to his area in the hotlands and then he called me on saturday saying he still was sick so he came back to bogota, he got lost on the bus ride, had to go find him haha!! It was easy to spot out a tall blonde hair blue eyed gringo with all of the short colombians haha! So i spent all day Saturday taking him to get tests done. oh ya and ever since Thursday my comp was sick he has a high blood pressure disease and he was knock out haha! SO I had to do all this basically hauling my dying comp haha!! But he is a good sport! So i got back late Saturday night, then yesterday we had problems with an Elder he was beating up his comp. so he came in from the hotlands and he is with us right now! He is an interesting Elder, he was with us last week for the same problem haha!! We dont know what to do with him haha!! We like to mess with him though haha!

 Well there are possiblities that this week i am going to TIERRA CALIENTE!!!! I just might leave Bogotà! What in the world! I dont really want to go. I think though i can stay here until the next transfer. I just want to welcome the new Mission President and then i will go to Ibague! so thats the plan as of now!! I think President will let us do that. I want to be the one that kills Elder Acuna!! I deserve to kill him!! Than my next comp will kill me!! AHH!! I will still be AP but in the hotlands!! Its different type of work! But it will be fun! Elder Pesado is the best he will be my next comp!! He is argentinen!! I am stoked!! He was in my second zone while i was in Patio Bonito! This Elder is a Boss!!! YES!!! We are gonna baptize the world down there!! WOO!! So this week was one of those weeks where we only were able to teach taxi drivers and the people next to us when we were traveling!! but the next letter will have baptism pictures!! Janet, the Jehovahs witness lady is getting baptized on SUNDAY!! YEAH!! She is super cool! She invited some of here JW friends to her baptism and all of her neighbors and everything, she was so prepared, it was alike it was almost too easy to teach her. She rejected the missionaries before, but this time she was ready to recieve us!! How great it was!! Well family, love ya tons and miss ya alot. Love Elder Hammer

Thanks Mom

hey mother dear!! I love this snapfish thing haha!!! truth be told I dont know what is snapfish, i think i need to install a program it says and i cant do that on the programs here! I could see like 4 pics nothing more!! If you could send them in like a different folder or just the normal that would be AWESOME!! but i dont know how to work this snapfish thingy haha!! Right now I am in the hotel cafè and I am doing my office work in the hotel haha!! Its an awesome little hotel, really its a big hotel! Its hard being a missionary in a hotel haha! Therels the pool, all of the families just chilling around the hotel and all. There's the tennis courts the pool tables ping pong all of the fun stuff and all. We dont have much time to just be in the hotel but it was a temptation to turn on the TV last night and sit and watch some discovery channel or something, but we didnt haha!! But it was fun. We did our studying today on the balcony of the hotel that overlooks Girardot it was fun. Its more of like a Honey moon type of Hotel. My comp was buggyin me the whole time like, freak, why do i have to be with you here and not my wife haha! Great ol Elder Acuna i love him to death!!

 I have realized how much I love my dear mom this past few days! Working with other missionaries i am in charge of helping the missionaries that are struggling and all in the mission and i always ask how there families are going and there relationship with their parents and all. I am so glad for you and Pops! Parents like you are hard to find these days! I find myself dreamin more of coming home too. I aint off or trunky but that home is callin me. I cant wait to just give ya all a great big hug!! I really miss you sing the goodnight song and my baby song and all. I would love it if you could send me a CD of you singing those songs!! THat would be perfect!!!I really miss you singing to me. Elder Steed is basically my twin. He lives on the 1st floor and he says that his mom would always sing the cougar shout song, so at times we sing it together just to remember our moms haha!! We are grown up mamas boys. haha I have actually become a clean freak. I will have to send a pic some time of the posters i made in our house!! It says if you dont wash your dishes, than you will find them in your bed haha!!! so if the Elders in the house dont wash there dishes, then i put them in there bed as a kindly reminder to wash them! haha!! I got sick of washing everyones dishes! I HATE IT!! I LOVE A CLEAN HOUSE!! I now realize how hard it would be to be a stay at home mom! There is a lot to do to maintain a house! We live in like a legit house here and its 2 stories 3 baths, 3 rooms a huge salon and a dining room and a courtyard! SO it s a lot to maintain and living with 4 guys, it doesnt stay clean. Constantly doing laundry, washing the hosue ,sweeping, dishes and all of that stuff! But i cant stand a dirty house! Theres and Edler from Peru that lives in the house. I am always on his case, i feel like his mom. He always leaves his dishes out, the pans all oily and never cleans his bathroom he does nothin!! AHH! We now have gringo bathroom where Elder Steed and I keep it nice clean always! I am glad my mother not only keeped the house clean, but taught me and instilled in me the desire to clean it! I aint the most organized Elder but i am actually gettin pretty organized! So basically what i am trying to say with all of this stuff is that I LOVE MY MOTHER!!! LOVE YA A WHOLE BUNCH!! and i can wait to come home and have like 3 months to clean the house and do weird projects with ya haha!! Love ya mother dear,
 your missionary son,
 Elder Hammer

family 7/14/2012

Dear family of mine! It was great talking to you all! I love my family so much!! I am so grateful for all of you! My heroes are you guys, my family rocks!! I love Colombia, I love the mission, but this past year and 1/2 has helped me put alot of stuff into sharper perspective and i am excited to put my new perspective into plan after the mission. But as of now, i am loving the mission life!!

Wednesday morning I am going to Villavicencio, you should check it out on google maps or something, its a cool little town and then next week we got multizone conference so more time to do training. The thing about the mission is that we do a lot of training every week we train. It is a good reminder about how in our everyday lives we also need training on how to fight off the adversary and also to build our relationship with God. In the mission alot of people think that the only thing that we need to do is just not do harm to any one, but how wrong of a thought is that. Our purpose is to become like God, not because he casted off evil, but because he created good, that is what we are to do here. Create a place where we can feel the presence of God - create God's kingdom here on Earth! Its not just to not fall into temptation but so much more, to let the Light of Christ on earth shine. Understanding the gospel I feel as enabled me to be able to love deeper, understand and know me better, get to know God more and Have a greater respect for the Family and my Family in particular!! Love ya all tons, Elder Hammer

Call at 6 7/7/2012

Alright dear family of mine, i will be calling 6 my time. I ain't too sure about what time that would be back home, but if you need to i can change it. Like between 5 and 6 i will be callin. If you cant, email me tommorow while im in the office so i can arrange it with my comp.

Well this week was super stresful!! AHH!! I was dying of stress. There were tranfers and I was without a companion so the whole week I was at the airport the terminal traveling doing it all!! We had problems with the new elders coming in. There were 18 new missionaries that came in!! AHHH! So it was a lot of work and with little basically no sleep. Like i would get home super late and then have to get thing ready for the next day and wouldnt sleep until like 1 or 2 then would have to wake up like at 5 to go drop someone off at the airport or pick someone up. Then on Thursday I had to go to a little pueblo outside of Bogota called Fusa. We opened some new areas so i had to go down there to get all of the new Elders all situated down there but it was fun. It is a beautiful little town. I loved the trip. It's a pueblo high up in the mountains so part of the road you are in the clouds and then when you go down the otherside you see into the valley and see the little pueblo, it was super fun! But i was super stressed this week, but we got everyone situated and all!

I am glad and I now have my companion!! FINALLY!! I was like 2 1/2 weeks with out a comp!! It was terrible! I really need a companion!! the Lord knows why a companion is necessary!! I also have a child!! there was an unexpected new elder that came to the mission. he is now my adopted child! o he has been with me ince wednesday and he had helped e with some of my stres and helped me alot!! But he leaves tommorow for Bolivia to serve his mission there he was just with s waiting for his visa!! So y comp and i are his adopted parents we say that he is our child and he calls us his parents haha!! We are going to take fmaily pictures today! haha!! But i want to tell about the BEST EXPERIENCE EVER!! on sunday i gotta tell you all bot my new friend Jorge!!! WOWOW!! Its an awesome story about our amazing investigator!! Well Love ya all a ton and ttyl!! Talk to yall sunday! Love Elder Hammer

I'm so lonely 4/30/2102

Well I have been without a comp for over a week. Ive just been all over the place. So I just told the zone leaders last week that I would be doing some surprise interchanges. So I would just pop up in areas throughout the day, helping some of the areas out abit. I went to help an area to help them get a bit more pumped up for the work and all, they had nothing planned that day!! I was like elders why are we not planning, why are there no investigatores. So I told them if there are no investigators lets go get some. SO 7 HOURS KNOCKING ON DOORS!! AHH!!!I never had done so much contactin in one day! But I wanted to show the missionaries how to work. There is a new missionary there with his trainer. It was Elder McEntires first time contacting in the mission. He has 6 weeks in the mission field. So I trained him a bit and they were like, wow contactin really can be fun. I really like to talk to the people contacting. I dont just give them a card or be mechanical. I like to try to get into their house and teach them. So in that time we gave out 5 book of mormons and we were able to get into 3 houses in those 7 hours! We worked our tails off. The other day i was in a taxi and i was talking to the taxi driver and he doesnt really care if there is a God or not. He doesnt really look to the future just to the present what happens happens. So I didnt get mad at him. I let him talk. We actually had a great conversation. At the end I ended up giving him a pamphlet of the restoration haha!! When i left the taxi he told me hey thanks for not judging, usually people get all mad at me and try to condemn me for not being Christian, but you never told me I would go to hell or nothing like that. I felt good to talk to you!! I stayed for a little and kept talking to the taxi driver even after i got out of the taxi and we just alked about being a true disciple of Christ!! It was great!!

SO we are teaching a Jehovas Witness right now. She is super prepared. She even came to church yesterday and she loved it!! I presented her to a sister in the ward the same age as her, and they became instant friends!! Then our investigator, Janet, went and introduced herself to everyone. She was all over the chapel saying hi to everyone getting to know them she loved the church!! It was great!! And the end of the day like the whole chapel knew her and they were giving her magazines of the liahona, proclamation to the world and everything, she was this is so great! She loved it!! So we have an appointment with her in like an hour and we are gonna put a baptismal date with her! She is progressing so well!! She even went to a baptism on Saturday with us.

The sister missionaries in our ward had a baptism! It was hilarious!! This guy is great that got baptized. So the guy invited his dad to the baptism, so after Carlos gave his testimony the dad asked if he could share some thoughts, he is not from our faith but a great man. SO he gets up there and just started yelling out in a prayer as if he was like some black baptist preacher haha!! And throwing his arms in the air. and all. I tried to keep reverent. I looked at the stake president to see if he wanted me to intervene but he told me to let him finish so we got a big ol sermon at the baptism!! I was worried cuz i was like ahh we had investigators at the baptisms, we dont want to scare them away. But we stay strong with our investigators thank goodness.

 So President got back on Sunday night. It was nice to have him back and all. We had transfers this week so i am busy with all them. We have 16 new missionaries that come in tommorrow we got a lot of transfers and i am with out a companion until Wednesday. But I will get it all dont dont worry. My comp Elder Acuna comes in on Wednesday!1 It is super tight he is 26 years old a bug teddy bear and speaks perfect english. I am going to kill him too, he goes home in June. and then my next companion will kill me ahh!!! But all is well here!! Workin hard in the lords work!! We are gonna work on getting 5 baptisms thius next transfer.!! WE have been working hard, It will be great, its been over a year since the assitantsin Tierra fria have baptized!! So we are gonna step it up!! We dont take a full pday, we do the nessasary thing and then we go an work!! Got an appointment soon with janet and we will be gettin her baptiszed soon hopefully! But in 2 weeks i can call home, how does like 6 sound like for everyone on mothers day!! You will get to meet my new comp Elder Acuna he speaks perfect english He is the bomb!!! Love ya all tons! Elder Hammer

Hunting men 4/23/2012

So this week Elder Steed and i had an assignment to go to the U.S.A Embassy so we went to get presidents passport updated and do some other stuff down there. So while we were going there we contacted the taxi driver, he was super tight, a fun guy. We basically taught him the reswtoration and all in the ride and when we got out we asked him for his dats so we could pass by another day we was like my name is bruce willis but you can call me Bru. I died laughing! He looked just like Bruce willis! haha!! When we got into the embassy it was so cool. We were on American land just for a second kind of haha! They had the american flag going on, Mom dont worry I made Elder steed d othe pledge of alliagnce with me haha!!! And while we were waitin our turn we got talking to thep people there, they were all so cool. It was weird to contact in english, but it was fun. So we met this like hippie guy there it was tight! He the best his name is GRegory hes 65 years old lives alone and is in a PANIC ATTACK!! haha!!He told us that people were trying to hunt him! So first of all he is in the embassy in velcro sandals and sweat and a white collared shirt tucked into his pants but not ironed and just looks like a great guy! I loved him!!But he told us this whole story of how he is living in Meijing and he doesnt speak nothin of spanish and hes been here for almost 6 months!! I felt bad for him, but he is panicking cuz he thinks that everyone wants to kill him or put him in jail! He said he once heard somone asked him if he hunts. I think he heard wrong and asked if he is married (Cazar y casar) they sound a like but mean different things haha!! So he was asking us if we knew about the game where colombians hunt gringos and try to put us in jail he was warning us! He was cussing like everyother word haha!!! I was like wow this guy is from the states i forgot about those words haha!! But we helped him out a bit and he stayed talking to him for like 45 min while he explained everythin, he wouldnt let us go haha!! So we had to come back at 3 in the afternoon that day to pick up the passports and all. So when we went Elder steed was like how cool it would be if we saw gregory again! He wasnt there, we picked u pthe passports and left and as we left. gues who we saw, we saw Gregory haha!! He was so stoked to see us! So we talked to him for like another 30 min. haha! And kept warning us. we gave him a contact card and told us that we should hook up while he was in Bogota!! haha!! Then we got back into another taxi and guess who it was, BRUCE WILLIS again!! haha!! The same taxi driver from the morninÇ!! WE all busted up laughin haha!! So we then taught him the plan of salvation in the taxi!! haha! The same taxi twice in the same day!! What a grat day it was!!

Well I killed Elder Perez this weekend! He died sad. I dont like to send missionaries home! it aint fun! Elder Perez is a poet guy so he was super dramatic to leave. But i really enjoyed being his comp. He is the best comp that i have had!! Farewell my good friend Elder Perez, but he left on a good note!! On Saturday we FINALLY HAD A BAPTISM!!! We went 3 months dry without getting people wet!! So Laura Alvarez got baptized at 10 on saturday and after the baptism i dropped Elder Perez off at the airport and off he went! I dont have a companion right now! Nobody loves me!! But it is hard being the only assitant!! AHHH!!! I have 2 cell phones that ring like 50 times a minute! Everyone always calls me! I feel famous but exhausted!! President goes to Peru this week. so i gotta hold down the fort til he gets back! But i am making the most of it!! I got alot of member s to come out with me this week! So we will get the ward working in missionary work!! We gettin this ward moving now!! WE got a lot of nex investigators! The families that i told you about last weeek are awesome!! We had lunch with John last week and this week!! He loves the message we share! He is stoked to read the book of mormon!! YES! THe other family we have anotrher appointment tonight!!! I am stoked to talk to them agina! They really want to know!!

Right now i got another appointment to got teach a lady who is goin through some rough times! so gonna teach her about faith right now! Excellent!! Wow! I feel like i am growing so much in this last few weeks!! I am scared for these next 6 months!! I dont know what to do!! I want to stay in them mission. I might extend!! I am thinkin about it, but we shall see! I love this work!! I have felt the spirit so much in these last few weeks! I have been really trying to focus on teaching in a way to let the people really know the savior, not just His chirch, but develop a realcion with God. I feel closer to Him as i do this and I am opening my mouth more and more!! We arent in the area much so i am learning how to manage time better and really learn between making good and better and best decisiones. i like to teach, but had to except the fact that i also gotta help the other missionaries out so i try to be more personal with the missionaries and get to know them better!! All is well dear friends! I love ya all a ton! Love Elder Hammer P.S When is mothers day. The 1st or second sunday