Week 68 Chorrillos

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD AND TRENT!!!

I hope that you both had (and will have) a great birthday!  Thanks for having been born and I LOVE YOU BOTH!!!

We are still seeing progress in the area.  A new investigator came to church!!  His name is Frank.  He is a young man that practically approached us.  He is super interested in the YM activities so we started to teach him.   He's gonna get baptized on the 20th I think.  Then Cesar is going to get baptized on Saturday he passed his interview and is getting ready now!!  We lost all contact with Malvis, we are going to have to try to pass by in the mornings to see if she is there... somethings up.  Then we have Beatriz, still pressing onward with her repentance process.  Then we have Henry and Sol.   They didn't come to church, we will have to see how they are doing.  Their baptismal date is the 20th of April.  Then we have Luz and Adriana, they didn't go either, they are getting baptized on the 13th of April.

That's how the area is progressing, we had a P-day in a place called Barranco.  There we ate at a super expensive restaurant, BUT the owner is a member and offered us a price we couldn't refuse.  We ate there as a zone. This week we are FINALLY going to the temple. I've been in the south for almost the past year and they can't go.  Here in Lima we can go every other transfer.  The news with the new temple in Rome is incredible.   They are saying it's the biggest religious building in Rome.  And there they have the Vatican and other huge cathedrals.  The Pope asked for a meeting with the President of the Church of Christ as you all know.  One missionary jokingly said that "the Pope is dressed in white all ready for his baptism!!"  Hahaha, they really are incredible advances, I love what the Prophet said about all of this, (sorry for the Spanish haha) "Las cosas van a avanzar a un ritmo acelerado, la Iglesia va a tener un futuro sin precedentes, sin paralelo. Simplemente estamos construyendo para lo que está por delante ahora."

Well that's about all of my time, we gotta get back to work until the we spend the rest of P day Saturday for the temple.  I love you and pray for you.  Thanks for all you do for me.  I'll include some pics.


Con mucho amor,
Elder Olsen

Week 67 Chorrillos

Happy Monday!

It's been a party this week in Chorrillos, well Chorrillos-Campiña.  They divided up the stake!!  We are now in charge of the missionary work in two different stakes!!   We are two busy ducks this month haha.   We have to set up an appointment with each stake President. We actually had a good amount of investigators come to Stake Conference!!!  Usually it's a bust but we actually had a lot come! Elder Falabela of the Seventy talked on the will of the Father and the Atonement of Jesus Christ.  How Jesus didn't have to suffer but he willingly did it.  He willingly died.   He also willingly got resurrected.   Super cool witness.

First off Malvis, the Venezuelan, she has an interview this week for her baptism the following week!!  She is reading in Alma now!!  Never seen an investigator read so much, that's true conversion.  Later we just have Cesar, his mom kinda stopped investigating haha.  But he is still going strong!  He is really seeing the effects of true repentance, at times he doesn't understand why with the commandments, but his faith is so strong he just buckles up and says "I will go and do."  That's conversion.  Then we have Beatriz, she is still going strong with her marriage,  We have her document, her birth certificate, and her medical certificate. We just need the documents of her witnesses.   And dad, I've learned so much about marriage haha.  You need; 1 Your IDs, 2 The IDs of your witnesses, 3 Birth certificate, and 4 a checkup certificate.  You learn a thing or two that you don't in mish prep haha.  Then we have Adriana and her mom Luz.  They came to church and loved the stake conference.  We have new investigators that came to church!!!!  We have two other Venezuelans, Sol and Henry.  They will need to get married before their baptism in April, but we are excited with their progress up until this point!

Well that's this week.  We are excited to work with a new stake!!  It's gonna be busy but rewarding.  It'll be a great time to learn about stake organization.  It was fun to see how they do it.  We are excited to continue in the "lap of luxury."  The room was actually pretty bad when we got here, but we started with projects.  First we deep cleaned everything, then we got the pamphlets organized (thousands and thousands of commandment pamphlets!) then we got everything moved around for space, now we have plans to paint the walls again.

Love you guys. Thanks for everything you do!!! have fun at "Didneylan"! :)


Con amor,
Elder Olsen

Week 66 Chorrillos

Happy Transfers!!

We had an excelent week.  Transfers came in and I'm still in Chorrillos!!!  My companion stayed as well.  We are excited to work in Las Villas some more.  So remember the new stake that's opening, Campiña?  Yeah it's just going to be a division as far as the church goes, the zone boundries are going to stay the same, meaning that we are going to be in two stakes haha.

Well it's been a great week as far as our investigators go.   Beatriz now has her papers in-hand to be able to be married.  We are going to schedule the wedding ASAP.  Cesar and Mariksa are hangin in there, they slept in for church :(  We hope that they can get reading a little bit more to get their conversion by the Spirit going.   We also have Malvis, we lost contact with her, but I'm sure she'll show up soon.  We just gotta keep our eyes peeled haha.  Adriana is progressing now, she's reading the scriptures, is well fellowshipped and has a plan to come to church.

To answer questions, I haven't spoken too much in Church, we might steal the Elder's idea over there and make our own devotional.

Other than that it's been a pretty slow week.  Some dude stole my lunch yesterday in a clever way.  Wasn't even mad haha.  I love you guys a ton, keep going each and every single one of you.  The Church of Christ really is a true church. Thanks for reading this letter.

Ethan, sorry about your pinched nerve, those are horrible, hope it's better now.  Love ya dude.


Con MUCHO amor,
Elder Olsen

On the Holy Ghost street!!

Week 65 Chorrillos

Happy Monday!!

Well next week is transfers already, I'll be writing on Tuesday.  I'm probably going to be staying here in Chorrillos but we'll see if they decide to pull a Pisco on me and throw me out after one transfer, it's actually very possible haha.   It's been a super great week though. We had all of our investigators with a baptismal date come to church and one member, Ariana, decided to invite her friend, Adriana, to church.

Beatriz is still pushing to her baptism, we are still working on getting the papers necessary for marriage from Venezuela to here.  We are going to be helping the process out with another member we found that's a lawyer.   She can help us out to get everything sorted out.  We are also still working with Malvis. She is progressing super well, this Sunday she came with her new dress on, that's usually a good sign she is going to make it haha. Cesar and Mariksa came again.  Cesar has Schizophrenia so we kind of took a step backwards when Cesar had an arguement with Mariksa's grandma about his search for employment. They still came to church and want to keep progressing.  We assured them that the majority of their progress with their change of heart will come after the baptism and they just needed to keep going.  The Madsen family invited them to dinner and they really did enjoy it, seeing as Cesar is fluent in English.   Mariksa just talked to Mark Madsen and Cesar talked to the rest in English.

We didn't do too much last P-day, we watched Narnia and then called it good haha.  We ate Little Ceasars, that was a kingly United States meal!  It was nice to have good ol cardboard pizza again!  This P-day we probably won't do anything other than buy things and get hair cuts.  If we have a little extra time we might go to the church and play the piano.

That's about all for this week. Thanks for the support I receive from all of you.  I love you all so very much and pray for every one of you.


LES AMO.
Elder Olsen

Week 64 Chorrillos

Changes!!

We will start with the changes.  We have the choice to do a video call for 15 minutes additional to our hour of internet.  If you guys are ok with it, I won't video chat very often.  But I will probably get a group chat set up with the brothers ;) I will still be sending lengthy emails.  Basically it's all the same.  We can also do a video chat on my birthday, parent's birthday, and other holidays I guess.  But yeah it'll basically be normal.

We have had a super great week here in Chorrillos.  We saw a lot of success in the church attendance for a change haha.  We set more specific plans to get them to church and taught with more clarity the Sabbath Day.  We are adjusting to the new rules with our communication time, we have the majority of it figured out but there are some things that are still mysterious haha.

We are seeing a good amount of progress in our area.  Beatriz is still coming to church, we saw a miracle in one of her lessons.  Her and her 'to be' husband want to get married, so we called up a lawyer I knew in Chincha and had Beatriz talk to her.  The lawyer, Milagros, agreed to help her out with her paperwork.   Malvis, another Venezuelan, came to church this week.  She is loving her experience, she is reading in Jacob now, she's read Nephi 1 and 2 already.  Her progress is incredible.  We are also with Mariksa and Cesar in the pool now. Mariksa and her son Cesar are suffering quite a bit with family problems.  Cesar had a birth defect that left him with little control in the right side of his body.  He has a lot of doubts about God being good.  He is a miracle find because we taught him and assured him with the Spirit that God loves him.  He is feeling the Spirit and knows it's true, all of it.  His mom knows it is helping his son as well.  We are excited to see the progress of that family blossom.

Other than that we aren't going to have too much going on.  We are going to be going to the Stake Center 

OH I FORGOT ANOTHER ANNOUNCEMENT.

I'm going to be a part of a Stake division!!!  They are going to take my stake, Chorrillos, and a neighboring one, San Juan, and they are going to create the Campiña stake!  I will be a member of the Campiña stake!  There are some crazy changes because the Stake President of both Chorrillos and San Juan now live in Campiña, so we are going to be witnessing 3 NEW Stake Presidencies at the exact same time.  It's going to be absolutely crazy because this triggers the mission split coming up in June as well.

Well thats about it, we are going to the Stake Center to play some volleyball and watch a movie of some kind, probably Coco.  Last week we did the exact same thing haha.
I love you guys and am praying for you.   Enjoy the new changes with the communication haha.


Les amoooooooooo,
Elder Olsen

A Bird

A Cake

A Present

(better pics to come hahaha)

Week 63 Chorrillos

Happy Monday!!

So we got the same little pool of investigators.  Beatriz is still trying to figure out how to get her papers from Venezuela to here.  Milagros has been studying like crazy, but she is going to be good this week to visit and invite her to church.  It was a pretty great week.  We also had a little Open House in the Stake Center.  It was kinda a mess.  They told us about it on Thursday, confirmed it on Friday, we had to prepare it on Saturday, and then Sunday was the big day. We had prepared everything with assignments for the 22 missionaries, even in our crunch of time.  BUT they completely roasted us because the fact that we prepared it according to the manual, but the manual was outdated!  Then they were super mad when my companion and I wouldn't budge because we had already prepared it like they initially told us to.  The member who organized us publicly burned us in his closing testimony.  With some things you just gotta be a gentleman and just take the heat humbly even when it's not your fault hahaha.

We had a great week, not last week but the week before we went to Barranco.   I forgot to tell you.  It is a lot more rich than Chorrillos.  It is a cool little tourist area, there's a lot of things to see.  The cool buildings, the beach, the grafiti, the public musicians.  It's pretty sick.  This week we are just gonna do some zone volleyball.  Not too much going on this week.

That's about all for this week, hope you all have a great week.  Thanks for everything I LOVE YOU!!!

Me in front of bunch of faces

Me next to a mamita from Ayacucho

Me next to a negrita from Chincha

Week 62 Chorrillos

Happy Birthday Gramma!!!!

Thanks for having been born Grandma I love you!

We have had a super great week here in Chorrillos, we just got back from the mountains.  I'll have to send you some pictures, it was pretty sick.  They are called the mountains of Paraíso, they are in San Gabriel.  It's been almost a year since I've been to them, I'll send some pictures, I'm sure you will remember them.  We also went to eat with that one family from Utah, the Madsen family, to eat.  That was a super great lunch, they live in a mansion and have a grand piano haha.

We have had an excellent week with the investigators, we got Juan Jhong into the water a couple of days ago!!  It was an amazing baptismal service.  It was so organized thanks to the Elders, also the room was clean thanks to the Elders, and also the chairs were set up thanks to the Elders, and also the font water was clean thanks to the Elders, and to clean said water it had to be drained out with buckets thanks to the Elders it was done!!   Haha, we'll have to ask the ward a little bit more directly so they can help us out next time haha.
We have two other investigators that are starting to speed up progress as well.  Milagros Castro is a referral of her roomate who recently got baptized.  She is reading the Book of Mormon and coming to church.  We have high hopes with her!  We also have in the progressing category Sister Beatriz.  Her and her husband Jandry came from Venezuela, man Venezuelans make some mean bread.  Super tasty.  She just needs to get married but we are working on that right now, we are getting it set up for the 14th, Chorrillos is going to have a mass marriage.  Always are a wild card with the convivientes.

Well we gotta get out to the battle now, thanks for your birthday wishes!! I love you all and pray for you guys. Thankkksssss!!!


LES AMO.
Elder Olsen

BAPTISMMMM

Lomas

Lomas con comp

Us with Inca head statue. Neat.

Madsen family, ate a kingly lunch at that house