This week started off with a trip to Madrid for a zone conference! Elder Santiago and I got up early to catch a 6:50 train that got us there on time, then our train on the way back our train arrived at Salamanca at 10:20 at night on the same day. Even though it was nice to not have to pack an overnight bag to stay the night with some missionaries in Madrid, it was a long day. It was worth it, though, because it was a really good conference. One of the first things that was talked about was the Easter video that the church came out with a couple weeks ago. It's a super cool video and if you haven't seen it yet, I recommend that you go to mormon.org to find it. It's called "Príncipe de Paz," or "Prince of Peace," if any of you don't understand Spanish.
They also talked a lot about finding people to teach, which is something that us missionaries here in Spain struggle with sometimes. The main thing they focused on was working with the members, and looking for ways to serve the members and to help them share the gospel so that we can find their friends who are ready to hear the the gospel. The other thing they focused on was finding people through our own efforts, by talking to people. Something that we need to improve on is being able to stop someone on the street and find a way to naturally start a conversation by talking about something like soccer, and not saying things like "we're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ..." because the people who are really prepared for the gospel will ask us before we need to ask them, once we start talking to them. The cool part was at the end when President Pack bore his testimony and said that he had thought of Elder Rasband's latest General Conference talk where he talked about his first apostolic blessing he gave, and President Pack felt impressed to do something similar to all of us missionaries at the Madrid zone conference. It was a super spiritual experience as he gave us that blessing to help us be able to talk to more people and to be able to find the ones who are prepared to receive the gospel. It's definitely hard to get out of a routine, but it's something that we're working on so that we can have more fun while talking to people and also find more people.
We have a baptism coming up this Saturday! Our 28 year old Ecuatorian friend David had his baptismal interview a couple days ago and he's good to go so this week we'll be planning everything and making another trip to Valladolid to use their baptismal font. He's a quiet, shy, and kind of awkward, but he's a very good guy. Very decent and polite. He's been coming to church pretty much since I first got to Salamanca. Just recently we started pushing a little harder with him to help him understand the purpose of baptism and a week and a half ago he decided he was ready. He already knows the members really well, and they all know him. His mom was baptized last October in Ecuador, but she lives here now, and she was really happy when she found out he was getting baptized. More on that next week.
Besides that, we've had an average week full of other lessons and other fun activities. We have a new friend from Germany (he speaks English fairly well) who came here to learn Spanish and is living on the street, but we've taught him about the Restoration and he came to our weekly English class to hang out with us and came to church yesterday as well. Spain is also celebrating la Semana Santa this week. We missed the first parade yesterday because we were at church, but we'll probably see at least a part of it. From what I can tell, it involves a lot of Catholic parades with statues of Jesus on the cross and people in costumes that resemble KKK members. We got some sweet free posters and next week I'll send a picture of any procesiones we see and the poster.
For our p-day today, we got together as a district with the missionaries from Zamora and went bowling with Ivan, a member who was baptized recently, then went out to lunch to an Italian buffet. It was a fun day, and pictures are included. Until next time, my friends.
Love,
Elder Dobbs
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