Conference Week, and Bugs!

I have felt a little bit sick this week, I got a sore throat, but overall it has been a good week. It is hot and humid. I still managed to exercise every day even though it was difficult. I went running 3 times with my companion and 3 days did pushups. My companion knows how to run, like, he could possibly beat me in a long distance race, maybe.

It is a nice fun area though, the people seem to be less catholic and the members are awesome, they are very humble people, there are a lot of bugs. I have big shoes to fill, Elder Webb, whose shoes I am filling speaks great spanish and has a lot of charisma. 

Elder Webb (the big shoes to fill), and Ben's companion Elder Martinez from Veracruz

I was richly blessed with the gift of tongues this week, as in, by far the best spanish of my life. I even am beginning to be able to say the double r´s.

I  am district leader now, we are 6 elders in our district. 4 of us are here in San Blas and 2 are in Villa Hidalgo. I enjoyed the parts of conference that I understood. I understood more than 90 percent of the saturday morning session, and not quite so much in the other sessions. There are many awesome less active members and recent converts here.

It gets dark early here, like at 7 at night and that is when the bugs really start to come out, so we try to be in lessons during that time. We had some good lessons this week, one in particular when we were teaching  several investigators, we spent the first part of the lesson with them just talking and gaining their confidence, upon doing so we then began to teach very directly, I have found that that is one of the best tactics. If you get to that point, you can tell the people exactly what they have to do and they take it the right way.

The branch president and his family are awesome and she did make the cake for us Tuesday, for all of us and not just for me sadly. I ate bread and jam this week and the members gave us a lot of food. This is my first area where the members feed us every day, even on Mondays.

We are going to go an climb up a hill with a couple of members today.

I ran 3 times with my companion this week. The first time, he really wanted to run on the sand at the beach, and I do not think that we can do that, and I did not know where we were going, but I felt like we were running towards the beach. We ended up running parallel to the beach, but far away from it and not on the sand, when, all of the sudden we were running on the sand. We eventually got back, and I was just a little bit irritated. But, overall, we had a good week, and the heat and humidity was not as bad as I thought it would be, and the members are great.

We eat a lot of seafood here, the majority of which tastes good, and some of which, such as oysters does not taste so good. Actually, I have loved everything that we have eaten other than plain oysters, which we normally eat with chile or lime. I ate a lot of chile this week just because I can and the members like it and think that it is cool. We go and run around a soccer field right next to a school in the morning.

Oh,  and we are on the same time schedule as you guys here, just so that you know. And I think my favorite conference talk was Elder Uchtdorf´s Saturday morning one, because it was the one that I understood best.