Week 9 or the 59 Steps.

This week was awesome as always. First let me tell you some more about the country and the people and the food. Everywhere in my area Prado 1 you can be walking and see someone running a store out of there house and there you can buy pretty much anything. They do photo copies to selling eggs to selling toilet paper. These stores are awesome because they are everywhere! Also they sell empenadas everywhere and they are usually really cheap and really good.  I don't even know if I spelled that right but they are amazing. Usually like 200 pesos. The people are great, contacting is usually really easy because everyone is really nice. Even if they reject you and say no they are very nice about it. Medellin is beautiful as usual. We have an awesome view from our apartment. And that's some more information about Colombia Medellin. 

Me on the roof next to our appartment.

Silks in the street. There are all sorts of arts and cool stuff in the street.

The first few days we didn't have warm water for our shower, but now we do for the most part. It's not too warm at night to sleep. The city is super safe pretty much everywhere. There are some sketchy areas but mostly safe. There are 3 Latins living with me and my comp. We have a crap cellphone. On P-Days we can go on hikes or go explore. We have a lot of tourist stuff in our area. Today we played Risk. For breakfast I eat eggs and a piece of bread. Pretty much all the time. Every now and then I get homesick, but I have been doing pretty good lately. The water is great here so we can drink it and don't have to buy water bottles. This week we also saw two people from Arizona here vacationing!! They came to our ward on Sunday.

Food at a members house.

Amazing views.

      

In other news - we had a busy week this week, and Tuesday started off with some of the hardest service I have ever done in my life. It almost killed me and the other missionaries. That is why this email is called the 59 steps. So we woke up at 4:30 to walk about a mile straight up the hill into the mountains where there are still 8 billion houses. But we got there and saw this pile of rocks and bags of rocks. We then had to carry these bags of rocks up 54 steps and around a corner and then dump the rocks onto a larger pile of rocks. After about an hour of this we finished and I thought oh yay we are done. But then we found out they were making concrete on the street that we had just dumped these rocks. So after about an hour they made this huge pile of concrete. It looked like so much fun to look at, and nothing else. 

  

The 59 stairs down.

But guess what? We had to carry buckets of concrete down 59 steep stairs and then pass the bucket to someone else and they poured the bucket onto a roof (the point of this was they were making a second floor for a house, well we were making the second floor.) 

Me and my comp after our service

So we did this for about an hour and a half and then we finished. We were all dying of pain and it was about 10 people as all, doing this. We rested and drank some strange juice that was very yummy. And I was like oh yes we did it, way to go team high-fiving everyone. And I turned around to see that they were making another very large pile of concrete. Oh boy here we go again. And three times they made this pile of concrete. I would assume that these buckets of concrete that we would have to pick of and throw on our shoulders weighed about 50-75 pounds. And every time you took a step down the stairs a shooting pain would just go through your whole body. And every step I would just pray and hope that I could get another step. It was the most physically draining experience that I have ever had in my whole life. 

Our service group.

Our service group.

From 5:00-1:30 we were working and carrying this concrete down and up the stairs. Every one of us was just dying and almost felt like crying. I remember a few times me and my comp would look at each other and say, its not possible to do this anymore. Because we didn't have the strength left. But somehow, and I have no idea how, we finished. After about 7 hours of working we finally finished and then we had to walk down back to our house where we passed out for about an hour instead of eating lunch. 

Anyways what I learned from this experience, I learned that through prayer and dedication its possible to overcome situations that seem impossible. This situation for us should have been impossible, we were out of energy the very first pile of concrete. But somehow we pushed through and made it to the end of this service. It was only possible through heavenly father and Jesus Christ.

Out on the streets looking for investigators!

In other news. Our investigators are doing great! We have 9 new ones this week and another baptismal date and we had 5 people go to church with us. We have a family that is really awesome and loves our message. We invited to baptism but they didn't accept. We figure if we can get one more really good lesson that they will accept and that would be awesome. Our list of investigators is getting bigger. We are working so hard and really trying to invite everyone that we come across. 

We have an investigator that is a bit strange and he loves us over. Quick story, our very first visit I was a little sick and he said he wanted to heal us. So he healed us and told he is a prophet. And he has seen god 7 times and the Virigin Mary. Also he says he has telekinesis powers. He is strange. 

Our investigator Gabriel is doing awesome, he has a really cool story and a really difficult life. But he loves our message and is ready for his baptismal date on the 17th of February. We taught him the word of wisdom and he was very interested. We told him about coffee and it was hard for him because he drinks it every day. We told him that he didn't need to quit right away because it is hard to cold turkey and quit. He then said, no I want to. If I am not supposed to drink it I wont. He has an amazing testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He also only makes about 15000 pesos a day which is about 7 dollars a day. he works from the moment he gets up to the last minute of the night where he cant see anymore. So from like 6 to 7. He is so dedicated to this church and cannot wait to live the gospel. He is ready for it. Anyways I have some more cool stories about him but I don't have time to tell them right now. So next email I will include more. 

Well, this is my email today. I love everyone and there are so many people that need the gospel here. There are so many people that need the gospel in their lives here and we are here to give it. I love you all! Hope everyone had a great week. 

Elder Goudie

All the views of the beautiful city.