I hope yáll had a great Easter and are all geared up to go to conference. I´m a little nervous to see it in Spanish because I rarely understand Holland in English so it´ll be fun. I´ve had a lot of fun experiences this week.

So I was hiking in the mountains when I saw three very old goats. That was a little weird but the best part is that they were fighting chihuahuas. I wish I had a picture to give to you because it sounds weird but it´s true. The chihuahuas were taking on the goats and the goats were like ¨What´s this little guy doing down there? ¨ 

The area here is huge. We walk so much and it is always either up or down never flat. We have an area way up in the mountains and we were working up there all week but on Tuesday we had a lunch all the way down in the other Elders´ area. All in all we ended up walking a good 23 Km or about 14 miles during the day up and down the mountain. But it gets better.

We had interviews the next morning so we were up at 500 and had to take a route to the Stake center for interviews with President. It went really good. He roasted my Spanish a little but at the end when we walked out (our interview was like 30 sec and my companions was about a minute while the rest were like 5min ) and president saw the rest of the other Elders he told them Poco Tiempo Poco Pecado. So that was good. 

I was so confused this week. So many weird things happened. For instance, we were contacting a reference that we got. We went to the house and it had a room close to the street and the door was further back. So it looked like an L but the van was parked so it was a square. Ok now you know the set up. There was a really suspicious dog at the door so we knocked the window. We knocked but no one answered. That´s cool so we stood there thinking what to do. Then a kid appeared out of nowhere. He wasn´t even by the door so I have no Idea where he came from. We talked and he said she wasn´t there. Cool, but I was so confused. The only conclusion I came up with is that he was sleeping under the car or one of the three Nephites is like 6 years old. 

We did an awesome service project this week too. So you know how I was tired from walking half a marathon and how we had to wake up early to go to interviews. Well we had to wake up at 500 again to go to service which was tearing down an adobe brick house and moving the pieces across the street in wheelbarrows. We chilled in our street clothes but we didn´t have gloves or really tools. So I used my bear hands to tear down the adobe wall. It was like the berlin wall but bearhand wall. We then sifted through the rubble, chucked it in a wheelbarrow and took off down the hill. We got a tool to break the concrete blocks down a bit, I was like a giant nail. It was super heavy but it worked. 

Sunday was a lot of fun. We had to give talks. Mine was going to be awesome but they scheduled 10 people to talk so I bore my testimony instead. Afterwards we were leaving for the food and a beggar asked us for money. We said that what we have has no price. So he asked us to smuggle him to California. We politely declined. But it gets better.

Sundays everyone is drunk... I have to go. 

Have a great week. I hope yáll have a great time in general conference. 

Love yáll 

Elder Nelson

Cambios! I got changed out of Satélite and now I´m serving in Azteca. This is my first change so I didn´t really know what it would be like but so far it has been great. 

Azteca is in the south stake which means that I´m up in the mountains all day. I´m with Elder Gardiner who is also a güero so we’re two super big celebrities here. He´s a bit older than me because he went to BYU before the mission but we have almost the same amount of time in the mission. We´re just two white guys here in Mexico trying to learn how to be missionaries and speak Spanish all at the same time. He always tells me: It´s the blind leading the blind. My companion is super chill. He´s from California and he says a lot of stuff like Rad. It´s all really funny.

We´re up in the mountains like I said which means that we walk up and down a lot of hills. It reminds me a lot of Colorado with the dry mountain terrain. It´s like the AF Academy but we are walking not driving around. It´s probably one of my favorite places to work especially at night because it has a beautiful view of the city. At night we see a line of lights stretch through the city which is the fence they have between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. It´s really cool too because the big mountain with the words on it is right next to us (you can see this while driving on I-10 through El Paso). We work on the mountain with the face of Benito Juárez but I doubt that you guys have noticed that one before. 

Whenever I tell new people where I´m from they like Los Spurs and then they tell me who they play and all kinds of crazy stuff. 

This area is really poor. I think that as far as the stakes go we have the poorest. It´s rough because the poor areas are where the dead dogs are and the sick kids and lots of trash. There is a lot of running water in Juárez but it usually comes from overflowing sewage and things like that. The good news is that in the poor areas is where the cheap segundas are. Our district leader found a tie with two missionaries on bikes and I´ve heard other crazy stories of things found in the segundas. 

Funny stuff happen in the streets all the time. The other day we saw a homemade dune buggy driving through the streets and we were like whoo, we´re in Mexico. Then like 2 seconds later we saw a police truck with men armed in swat gear on the back and we were like Confirmation we are in Mexico. Just this morning we saw a horse drawn buggy in the streets and I think that he might of been a Mennonite (the ones who speak German and are kind of Amish) but I´m not sure. 

We don´t really have any progressing investigators but sometimes people just show up to the church and I guess we turn them into investigators. Hopefully well turn this area around and baptize.

I hope you guys have a great week.

Elder Nelson 

This is a reference we got and contacted this week.

Yesterday we were contacting references of the church all day so we went to a door and would say Does this guy live here? but usually it would be an abandoned house so nobody would answer the door.

That´s super exciting for Heidi (She is interviewing for student teaching). I hope she gets a cool school. If she wants there is a neighborhood here that is just for teachers; Las Arcadas. If she wants I can buy a house for her and she can live in my Barrio. 

I hope you guys are having a nice spring. I´ve really enjoyed this week because it has been cool and I fear that soon it´s going to get really hot, but this week it felt great. 

I have really cool news. I got changes this week so I´m leaving and going to Azteca in the south stake. I don´t know what it will be like but we change this Tuesday. Hopefully, we have a lot of success there in the south stake.

We have an investigator that we are teaching who is really funny. We talked to him about baptism and he said that he wants to get baptized. So we were really happy to hear that but then he told us he wanted to be baptized in Texas because his cousin who doesn´t have papers can´t come here but he still wants to be baptized by him. So we talked to him about and we fasted this week to know what to do. Then he told us that he wants to be baptized in Texas with his illegal cousin and wait until July to do it. We were like no!, why? I think we need to stop visiting him because every time we go back he has a different problem. No just kidding.

It has been super windy these past couple of days. Some days the sky is grey and it looks like it´s going to rain but it´s just dust in the air. This week we were walking to the food and we saw a dust devil in a football field. I looked just like a tornado but it was just dust and it died as soon as it left the dirt field. 

I have to go. We have to fill out all of our references that we had to contact this weekend. I love yáll lots and hope you have a fun spring break if it hasn´t already past. 

Love,

Elder Nelson