"That's a snake!!"

Well family and friends, another week has passed here in the green valley.

Everything has been going great. Always slow when you open a new area, but that investigator pool is growing!! As long as the pool in front of our house. It's been raining almost every day for the past week. It's been a bummer because my pants get super dirty from trudging in the mud. But hey, missionary life. Live and love it. I have a fun story to tell you guys before I inform you about the work! On thursday, we came back to the apartment to drop stuff off after District Meeting. As we were talking in our kitchen, I noticed just a tail sticking down the wall from the ceiling. So I walk over thinking it's just a gecko, and when I get close, I was like, "That's a snake!!" My comp runs over and says "It's a boa!!" So he just goes up to it and grabs the tail, but the sucker was strong and slipped away. So we look up into our roof and see it coiled up in there. And that thing was big. We started looking around for places where it could have gotten in and we couldn't find anything. So we go and talk to our dueño and tell him there's a boa in our house. He comes over and looks up in the roof and can't see it. Then he turns to my comp and calls him a "Visionary Man" Haha that one made me laugh pretty good. (Our dueño isn't a member.) So he goes and gets a hammer to pull the ceiling board out, and when he does....there was nothing there! So we pulled the whole top panel off and finally found it. It had gone to the other side of the wall. When we saw it just sitting there, we started thinking what we were going to do. My comp just said, "Well, I'll grab it!" and he climbed the latter and grabbed it. Haha so we started playing with it a bit and took a few pictures. We ended up skinning it and drying it. Now Elder Wardle has half a snake skin and so do I.

So we've started to work a lot with contacting, especially since the mission has turned it's focus to that. We found two very positive investigators through contacting this week. One is named Hernan. He owns a rock cutting business here in Zamorano. We just walked up to him and started chatting with him. (We did the sly, "Hey, does Juan Alvarez live in this house?" And he said no, then we got to talking. I asked him if he was a member of our church and he said no. Then I asked him why not. And he said, "Well, I've never really thought of why not. I have a lot of friends that are members of your church." Then I said, "Well, now's your chance! We're having a baptism date the 26th of September. Will you prepare to be baptized then?" And he said, "Well, yeah, if it's right." We then had a little talk of how he could get to know if the church was true or not. I told him, "All you have to do is pray tonight. If you ask with sincerity, you'll get the answer." Then he said, "Why can't we do it now?" I said, "Vaya pues! Let's do it!" He prayed and we asked him how he felt. And he just said he was content. We haven't been able to return with him yet, and he didn't make it to church, but I have a really good feeling about him. 

Well everyone, thank you so much for all the love and support! Take it easy this Labor Day and go ahead and drink a good ole cold Dr. Pepper for me.

Love, Elder Carter