19th Birthday!

Hi everyone!
I'll mention just a couple things that happened this week, because we're traveling to Madrid today and we have less time to write.
This week, for the first time, we went and volunteered in a homeless shelter. In Spain, the Catholic church has an organization called Caritas, which has a bunch of different branches. A couple weeks ago we went in and told them we were interested in looking for a way to do more service, and we planned a time to help out at the homeless shelter in Salamanca. It's a bit different from homeless shelters in the U.S., because they have the people go to the main caritas office and apply to be able to stay and eat at the homeless shelter. There's only about 30 spots available there. Well, last Thursday we helped serve lunch to the people there. It was a pretty easy job; a catering company comes and drops off the food and all we do is set the table, put the food in serving platters, and walk around the tables serving the people. All the weddings that I worked at with Patty Cioffi paid off for the practice I had with serving food at tables. It was a cool experience. All of the homeless people there were gracious and kind, and a couple other volunteers there with us helped us out with our first time. Once they finished, we got to serve ourselves, then we cleaned the kitchen and set up a time to come this week. While we were eating, we talked to the volunteers and had a good missionary opportunity as they were asking us why two college age kids were so far out of their country, nicely dressed, and volunteering.
We also met a 40 year old man, Cesar, who was meeting with missionaries in Leon, and just recently moved here. He's originally from Salamanca, and has had a very difficult past, but he was telling us his story and it's too long to write out here. He had a beautiful experience where he was reading the Bible and as he was in the New Testament, he had this moment where he realized "Jesus Christ suffered for me and my sins" and as he was thinking about that, he decided he wanted to change his life and do his best to do good. After that he met the missionaries and then he moved to Salamanca. He's very humble and he wants to do what he can to make everything right in his life. He wants to get baptized and we're doing our best to help him with that, by teaching him everything and helping him make those changes. It's amazing to see the changes that the gospel has in peoples' lives.
Last Saturday for my birthday, our friend from the branch, Tiago, made a nice big meal and invited us and a few other friends over to eat. It was a delicious meal, with a cheesecake at the end. I don't have any photos but this week I will try and get any pictures of the food that Tiago took. It was a small event, but I really enjoyed it. On Sunday at lunch after church, with more members, everyone sang to me and we had a big meal there with dessert. Then today we got some frozen yogurt in the Plaza Mayor. All in all, a nice, calm birthday weekend.
I hope you all have a great week!
-Elder Dobbs