It's been another good week here in Guadalajara, even though it was a little shorter than normal since we had our last preparation-day last Wednesday. This week I went to Azuqueca de Henares again for exchanges, and I spent a day there with Elder Jones, who came here from the Northern part of Spain four weeks ago. It was a pretty good day, and not much happened. We worked hard and had fun.
On Saturday, we went and played soccer again in the morning. We were able to bring two people that we're teaching and two other members of our ward so we had our own team, and we played against a group of Romanians who usually come. It was a lot of fun, and we barely won (thanks to the other members of my team, not me). Then that night the Guadalajara ward had an activity called La Fiesta de los Paises (countries), where different members of the church brought food and did a short presentation of something from their native country. Here in Spain there's a lot of people from Central and South America, and for the people here, your nationality is really important to everyone. Also, I've learned that if you say you're American, some people from South America are like "hey, I'm American too!" so I've had to get used to saying that I'm from the United States. Anyway, different members performed different dances or songs from their country, and some showed a short powerpoint presentation. To represent the United States, the Hermanas in our ward taught me and an American lady in the ward a quick dance to the song "Cotton-eye Joe" which we had to perform in front of everyone. Surprisingly, it turned out well and all the ward members loved seeing us dance like a bunch of cowboys.
Yesterday, Sunday, we had a cool experience where we were talking to people on the street and my companion stopped two women who were walking together, and as soon as one of them saw us, she looked at me and in English, asked me to talk to her in English. She said she was Bulgarian and her friend was Chinese and they've been living in Spain for a while now and she wanted a chance to practice her English because she said she was forgetting it. They each had a son who was walking with them and their moms were like "come here!" and made them listen to me as I started talking to them explaining the Book of Mormon and the restoration of the church of Jesus Christ and how we have our church, and even though they were mostly trying to understand my English, they were really interested. The amazing part for me was that I hadn't talked about that kind of stuff in English for almost four months, but somehow I was able to explain it all clearly, more clear than I normally could talk in English. For me it was an evidence of the fact that the Lord will give us the words that we need to say in the time that they're needed when we're preaching the gospel. At the end of it all, we gave each of the women a Book of Mormon in Spanish since that was all we had, and invited them to our English classes that we give and told them we could give them copies in English and their native language so that they could practice their English. The only bad part about that was that the next person we talked to, Elder Molina started talking to her then when he looked at me to talk, I accidentally talked to her in English for a few seconds until I realized what I was doing. The poor girl had such a confused look on her face until I realized what I had done.
Lastly, today to celebrate Halloween we had an activity with our zone of missionaries. Halloween isn't very popular here. People know about it but not many people celebrate it. More popular is tomorrow, el Dia de Todos los Santos(All Saints' day). We had pizza and all carved a pumpkin with our companions. That's where the picture I'm sending was taken. It's us and the Hermanas from our area.
Anyway I hope you all have a great week! Keep on going strong with everything!
Love,
Elder Dobbs
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