Elder Taylor Moulton: Week 16: Hutanos, Stinking Dirty Yogurt, the Firing of the Camaroonites, and the Clapping Game

Hola Family!

Wow this week has been weird but super fun nonetheless. Elder Turner
and I, and a few other missionaries from the Provo MTC group that I
came with went this last week to Barcelona to apply for residency. We
also ate kabobs at a shawarma joint(avengers anyone?), which was pretty
great. One thing that we focused on during our zone Enfoque this week
was goals, so I made it one of my goals to do three acts of random
service each day. I definitely put that to use as we ate at a menos
activas house, and after eating a bite of the yogurt, I found it to be
very chunky and not so fresh haha. So, knowing that they weren't the
wealthiest people ever, I ate it to be polite, but after seeing my
shivering after the first bite, elder Turner was a little reluctant.
So I quietly grabbed his yogurt and downed that to avoid the taste.
Definitely not the best thing to do for my health, but we do anything
out here to show that we love the members and investigators, even
eating dirty yogurt haha.

Another cool service thing we did this week was helping an 86 year old
Spaniard man with one leg to decorate his Christmas tree. This guy is
super old, so he only talks loudly, and sounds like Yoda since he
grunts wherever he goes. But it was a super fun and spiritual
experience since we sang him Christmas hymns and ate some steak he
made(he was a professional cook before so it was pretty good)

On a quick note, hutanos, aka gypsies, are weird and scary, as Elder
Heymeyer found out on splits. They stare at and follow you out of
their neighborhood, even if you're just walking through... So yea
avoid the gypsies.

This week has been a little bit of an emotional roller coaster with our
investigators. The main miracle and story that happened with our
investigators was with the three Camaroonian sisters that we found a
few weeks ago. We had invited them all to read the Book of Mormon,
in their respective languages of French or English, they all had
accepted baptismal fechas, and we even were able to bring one of them
to church last Sunday. But last night, we were hit with the hard news
when one of them handed us the Books of Mormon that we had given them.
That's when Maria, one of the ladies explained that because they live
with a charity group that helps African refugees, they can't have
personal items, like Books of Mormon. But the cool thing is that they
explained that they had been trying to find places to hide the books
outside of their apartment, like in an African store right by where
they live. Eventually though they were told that because of health and
safety reasons that they could only leave at certain times of the day,
and now they can't make it to any lessons or Church meetings, leaving
them no choice but to fire us. But the miracle of the situation was
that even though we wouldn't be able to teach them anymore, which
they were really sad about, Maria accepted a blessing of health as she
goes though the procedures at the hospital, which for a fairly new
investigator who's never seen one is pretty great! She left the
blessing, crying a bit, and we know that even though we won't be able
to meet with them anymore, we still made an impact on them with the
restoration and the part of the Book of Mormon that they read. We’ll
still call and check up on them to make sure they're good though, so
we haven't forgotten about them yet.

I also found out that I can be pretty crazy when it comes to dancing.
At a stake activity on Wednesday with investigators, we did a game
where a person who was not in the room, has to come into a circle of
people, and present their talents to make the circle clap, who copy
everything the person does. It's really easy if you think about it,
since you just need to clap to win... But I had some fun doing the
frog, the dinosaur(I literally made dinosaur noises and ran around),
which got everyone laughing so hard they could barely copy me haha. I
even made this old man almost fall over with laughter haha. Definitely
a fun game, and the investigators had a pretty good time haha.

Overall a fun and busy week, and Elder Turner and I have had some
pretty great lessons with some of our investigators. All we are
focusing on now is getting our news to progress... Which in Spain is
hard haha, but we'll get there!

Love and miss you all!

Elder Taylor Moulton