Merhaba.
Solid week, very solid week.
Last week when we had interviews with President Fingerle he told me pretty straight up that once I was gone the window would pretty much be closed in terms of more Spanish speaking missionaries coming to Jena in the near future (it's actually kind of a headquarters for Chinese speakers because there are tons of Chinese students). He told me a missionary from Hong Kong would be replacing me and that I'd need to use time effectively to work with Spanish speakers. We'll ever since then God's been blessing us with quite a few opportunities in that field of work.
On Monday we visited a less active family from Peru. The Mom is really set on coming back to church and bringing her two sons along with her. Super cool family, sadly the sons can't really speak Spanish, they just understand it so I can't really practice with them 😞
Tuesday and Wednesday we were on exchanges in Hamburg with our mighty Spanish group leader, Elder Castillo and his faithful deputy Elder Wride. It's always a party with those two, sadly our Spanish experience consisted mostly of getting rejected by a contact from Nicaragua, chatting with some uninterested Ecuadorians and shopping at a Latino market.
Friday we met with our new friend Mario from Mexico. It went pretty well and he's definitely a fan of the church, he's just still unsure of how necessary religion is. But he came to church on Sunday and is interested in meeting further.
Saturday was the annual volunteer day in Jena, which I had actually attended last year as well in my days in Werdau. It was an awesome experience then and it didn't disappoint this year, either. We had 28 missionaries split up in 11 or 12 groups going to different service projects throughout the city. At our project was a lady from Argentina who has been living here for a couple months. There's always something fun about Latinos' reactions when a white kid from America in Germany starts talking to them in Spanish. Our group built a hedge and pulled a ton of weeds in this kindergarten playground type thing. I talked quite a bit to the Argentinian lady and was able to teach her about the restoration of the Gospel and she seems interested in learning more and coming to church, so that's perrrrty exciting. It was a good confidence booster in my testimony of the gift of tongues, because it was legitimately hours straight of only speaking Spanish and while I'm sure my grammar wasn't terribly up to par we were able to understand each other. Pretty cool stuff.
Jena continues to be awesome, it's starting to scare me how fast the clock is ticking. I have one more German sacrament meeting left...where on earth has the time gone by. Life flies by too fast, really got to enjoy every moment of it. Fortunately the Gospel gives us everything we need to do exactly that.
Life's awesome, thanks to all of you for your prayers and support, ich habe euch lieb!
Elder Larsen
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