Curtis, Alex

Missionaries often wonder about the best way to find new people to teach, or even just meet people. The average person in public is usually a little turned off by the name tag, excelent profesional fashion sense, and exotic accent. We've recently decided that we want to help people see our human side, so we've been developing some activities where we can connect our friends with members and invite total strangers to "come and see". We kicked it off this week with something we called "Desayuno y Deportes" (Breakfast and Sports). We got a ton of people to pull up, eat pancakes, chat, make friends, see the church, play volleyball, and be happy! We saw some real progress so we've decided to take it upon ourselves to organize ward activities as much as possible! We've made awesome progress with some of our friends this week! Lorena and Leidy are sisters who are renting a room form one of our members, and have attended church a few times already. They invi...

Awesome week We ran an exchange with our DL Elder and his trainee, Elder Anderson. We decided to send the two trainees on an exchange by themselves. According to them, it took effort but they got a lot done with their combined and limited Spanish! They taught one of our member families and emphasized the importance of the scriptures with our friend José! You never know where your limits are until you trust in God and push them! Elder Dayley and I discovered that native Spaniards are surprisingly wiling to talk about the history of their city! It makes conversations on the street much more friendly and makes getting turned down on the gospel a little less sad. A couple of members referrals and English class students are coming to church and showing interest in the gospel so this week we're going to see some awesome progress!  Sorry I have no time today! Elder Curtis  Never been a better week to join the Google Photos!

-Erick, lit street contact Street contacting been good lately, but Erick was especially awesome. He's from Peru and really interested in connecting with God though prayer.  It's been a cool week with a lot of success! Our English class is growing and we're teaching the gospel to two of our students, José and Celeste, after class. We taught them the first half of the Plan of Salvation this week and talked about the premortal life and the idea that there is a plan and that we chose to follow it. Celeste mentioned that she felt something beautiful thinking about the Plan and purpose of life. We've been putting a focus on recognizing the Spirit with all of our people so that was an opportunity to call it out. "This peace and purpose that we feel right now is the Holy Ghost. This is why we ask you to pray and read the scriptures- so we you can feel this on your own, whenever you want." We're working with a few returning members and helping them jump back into t...

General Conference was awesome! Elder Allen and I worked like crazy trying to get the word out. We got a good number of our people to watch the sessions, with a couple of what Capitan Moroni would call "stratagems": We tried to help people feel comfortable coming to the Saturday morning session (at 6pm, time change lol) by holding an activity with food and games right beforehand at the church. Everyone who came watched the entire first session and had a great experience! We finally got our friend Gloria and her son Esneyder to come to the church building and meet some members too! She later watched part of the last session from home! Right before the last session, when we knew that President Nelson was going to speak, I uploaded a vlog/YouTube-style announcement to our WhatsApp story of just me inviting everyone to hear from a prophet of God. It's a small thing but a few people we hadn't invited yet tuned in for the last session! I think we lost a lot of people before...

Happy Easter! Holy Week in Spain is pretty big, so a lot of people were out of town, but it was an awesome time to remember Our Savior and testify of His sacrifice, death, and resurrection. He is Risen! It's been tough to get past "read, pray, come to church" with really anyone recently but we've got a lot of people we went to help and a great ward full of members to help out. Wish us luck! A woman we're teaching named Johanna is showing very mixed signs of progress. She's attended church twice and gotten to know the members quite a bit. While she was there she told a few members she was renting out a room and one of our members moved in, which is pretty cool because she's now getting fellowshipped pretty often. She told us a few weeks ago she wasn't sure if she'd keep going to church because her 14yo son doesn't really enjoy himself there, but the member, Jose David, got us a lesson in their house and we met the whole family and invited them t...