Elder Jensen is serving in a little town called Chalatenango. He says it is very poor and very hilly and they pretty much walk everywhere. He says that his calves are ‘huge’! Living conditions are pretty primitive. They do have electricity and running water but the water only comes on for a couple of hours each day and they are usually not there when it does, so they “shower” with buckets. He says, “Washing our clothes is definitely an experience. we do it ourselves. in our little sink. It´s fun... I definitely am missing the luxuries of the United States. I´m pretty sure this is the hardest thing I´ve ever done but it´s definitely worth it. I find that the only way to not be bitter about the challenges is to thank God in my prayers for all the trials. When I´m walking up a huge hill in the 90 degree weather, 90 percent humidity, all I can do is say a prayer and thank Heavenly Father for the trial. I´ve been trying to do that a lot more, give thanks for trials and it´s helped me a ton to cope with all the changes. I know that it will get easier once I can speak Spanish :)
“There aren’t too many gangs in the main part of Chalatenango, but if you go to the mountains there’s a lot. It reminds me of the gadianton robbers- they retreat to the hills :) But we haven’t gone there a lot. Once we went at night and we saw a bunch of MS 13, but I think they respect us and don’t kill us :)
We got a baptismal date for Javier and Hermes this week! Hermes is awesome and I´m pretty sure he will follow through, but Javier started drinking again so we´re going to take all his alcohol. I hope we can help him. This week we had a baptism fall through. Carlos. He´s 9 years old and he is awesome. He came to church one day and asked us if we could baptize him so we told him he needed to come to church for 2 weeks and that we needed to teach him about the gospel. So he did and we did and we got permission to baptize him from his grandma. We filled the font on Saturday, got all the paper work finished and invited all the members we could to come to the baptism and he didn’t show up so we ran to his house and found him. It turned out his mom, who lives in the United States, doesn’t want him to be baptized. So that was stupid. But that´s basically how it goes here. Hopefully we can get more people to follow through!