Happy 20th birthday

Hi Gang,

It was Masen’s birthday yesterday. Our family put 20 candles in a Hersey’s Pie and sang to him and then sent him a picture of the pie aflame. Of course my big worry was that nobody would know it was his birthday and there would be no celebrating. A Peruvian birthday tradition is cracking eggs on your head and then covering it with flour. He will refer to this. He thought he would have to eat fish all week because of Easter. April is his 6^th month mark…can’t decide if it is going fast or slow.

Here is today’s e-mail…

20 years old.

Wow I am old!!!!!

ha ha ha love the pictures of the mega fire. and everyone. ha ha way sweet thanks

but your prayers were answered to the max. word got out that it was my birthday in sacrament meeting from someone in the ward. so every meeting we went to that night there was dinner for me. It was overwhelming. i went from lunch eating rice and chicken to eating tacos to eating rice and chicken in another meeting and then to family night with the bishop where he had refreshments. wow i felt so fat and sick. the miracles that happened this week. i did not eat fish!!! second i didn’t have a funny guy crack an egg on my head. if that happened i would have been mad, but all is good cause it didnt happen.

miracle that didn’t happen. . .. . .getting my package. but thats ok cause i wasnt expecting it.

oh ya another cool thing that happend was one lady gave me toblerone. i didnt think about it at first, but when i got home i remembered that in the airport they were selling this for 20 soles. That is like 7 American dollars. and for a sole 50 we can buy a coke. so thats way expensive. another cool thing is that one of our investigators gave us food.

wow. out of time. sorry for the crapy letter. im trying to write everyone a letter and send it with all my pictures of my mission. we will see what happens this week. hopefully i can send it.

love you all have to go.

sorry again.

Elder Fenn

Wasn't able to avoid the kiss but was able to avoided the alcahol. ja ja ja

A great letter from Masen this week.  He was able to tell us about a couple experiences in their teaching and the success in their baptisms.  Here is the highlights of that letter that I think he will be OK with us sharing with all of you.  It might make you laugh a little as it did me.

!Por fin! estoy 14 libres mas gordo. ja ja no, no es verdad. estoy solamente como 8 libres mas gordo. the package was awesome. The cookies were definitely a uni cookie and tasted weird, but they were soft. I don't know if they tasted weird because of the travel time or because my taste buds have changed or what, but they were still good. I have only opened the chocolate chip ones, the sugar cookies have a message on them. . . ? I am not going to be able to read that, sorry, but I'm definitely looking forward to frosting that huge uni-cookie. yum. Goal to have a happy tummy. . . . . . . didn't work. ha ha ha sorry. the whole week I was sick, not from the package.  I think I got sick from Chili's. Man this week (I) was sick.

Alright this was my week. I finished emailing you last week and then we went to Larcomar. I now know one place in Lima that I can take you. It was sick right on the beach. We went bowling and then went to Chili's. yummmmmmm but i think the chicken got me, it was worth it. Cost 30 soles. We only get 90 personal a month. ha ha ha ha worth it. Ya I dropped a lot of money but its all good. In that day I only spent like 25 bucks to bowl and eat at Chili's.

 

After that the spiritual stuff went down. The whole week we had very good lessons. We are actually having a lot of success. We got one reference for someone that has depression. We knocked the door not knowing what to expect. The mom answered and said oh your from the church right? ha ha ha ya.. hold on. She ran inside, don't know what she did, ran back to the door and opened it way excited and let us in. At first we were like alright sweet they like the church. ha ha The kid with depression is a smart kid like Einstein. We will see what happens with them or maybe not if I get transferred, but I don't think I will. I find out in a half hour. 

The best part of the week is that we had a baptism. The kid is 9 year old so that was cool. What was even a cooler part is that on the 4th of Feb. we baptised his older brother who is 16. Saturday he was able to do the baptism. It was sweet. The brother baptised his little brother. ha ha ha. In May we have a date that the mom will get married so that she can get baptised. Now because of the baptism, one of his sisters who is an evangelist is starting to listen to us. Sweet.

Bad things that went down this week. We went to visit one person that came to church last Sunday. In church his relatives came up to us and said go visit him. Ya so we went. He is Adventista (I think he was trying to say Seventh Day Adventist) or something and when we talked to him he always tries to prove us wrong through the bible. This is a good thing because he knows his bible and that makes him easy to teach. The bad things that happened was that after the lesson he kinda forced us into eating lunch there. It tasted fine, but my comp took a sip of the drink which was juice with alcohol. ha ha sucker drank on his mish but he gave me the heads up not to drink it. Thanks man. After that his daughter came down. She is 16 but looks older. It's custom here to give the women a kiss on the cheek. To defend us from this we throw out our hand for a hand shake. Usually that's it, this has never happened to me before so i threw out my hand not expecting anything. She grabbed my hand and pulled it in so that I could give her a kiss on the cheek. WOW I'm going to hell. Got my first kiss of the mission and after it happened to me my comp tried not to do the same thing, she didn't have that and he got his 5th I think. After that we explained the rule so hopefully that won't happen again here. It was pretty fast and I thought I acted fine not to offend her and get out without that happening. I failed, I'm a failure. ha ha ha

Don't worry, I've already repented. Hopefully that doesn't happen again because it was weird for both parties afterwards. We went back again to teach the dad and invited all his family to listen. They didn't want to but I think they understand better and its all good.

That was kind of the big things of the week.

Bugs aren't bad around here but their are roaches and spiders and stuff. Not bad. There are more at home. got to go. 

Like always, love and miss you

Elder Fenn

 

 

 

Hello everyone

It has been awhile since I have had the time to post updates for Elder Fenn and the successes he is having in Lima.  Much of the problem is that his mother can instant message with him and there usually is no letter to post.  He is still in the north part of Lima but would like to make it to the jungle as soon as possible.  He says that he or his companion will be transferred for sure this next week and he is hoping that it is him.  I find it funny that some of the people are asking Masen about the kind of man Mitt Romney is because they know that he is a "Mormon".  Isn't it interesting that they would know that?  You never know who is watching and what they may think about who we are.  Keep the faith and work hard!

Here is some of the questions his mother asks and his reply.

What about the President and his wife...any association there?
we have training meetings with them every month so ya i see them every once and a while. we have had 2 so far and both times i got to see elder Richardson. i am blessed because i am having success. we have baptised like 8 people in the 3 (almost) months that i have been in the field. the first time i talked to him in the field was like 3 weeks ago and the Saturday before he had just gotten his first baptism. by then i had 8. and last week i saw him again and he said that they were getting more and more so he is starting to work.

this week i had 2 baptisms. they were sweet. our focus in the mission is in the family right. so every time we baptise a family its like a little bonus. the next focus is in hombres mayores, or men older than 18 years old. this is a focus because it is building the church con el sacerdocio, or priesthood.
this week we had 2 baptisms. i would send photos but my card isn´t working. . . so next week. but they were both men older than 18 so it was way sweet. one was a man that came to church with his cousins and his uncle. he is like 32 and said that it was the first time in most of his life that he has felt like that. he felt a feeling that he forgot about, the feeling of peace. the day after he went to Church we saw him again. that Monday he said he wanted to get baptised. that was 2 weeks ago mas o menos and ya he was confirmed a member of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints yesterday. sweet. the other man was 88 YEARS OLD ha ha. that was kinda a scary baptism. i thought that he might die in the font. but he was actually really smart. you could talk to him and he could understand almost all of it. but you had to shout for him to hear the lessons. we found him because we are teaching his daughter that is 55-60 years old. we will baptise here in May if I'm still here. May because she has to get married first.
Have you had a zone conference or anything yet? When are the next transfers?
the answers are already in the letter, but i have had 2 zone conferences. he is starting to do them every month because i guess as a mission our numbers have gone way down. next transfers. . . . i will find out after the next email sesh how will be transferred and where. but i am almost positive that I'm not going. my comp has 7 months in the same area. pobre-cito ha ha. por kid. but its all good. i have a lot of investigators that are way cool here and i want to see them get baptized. ha ha ha the coolest of our investigators are from elder Richardson's zone. ja jaja but not his area. we stoled them because they live a lot closer to our Church than the other church.
out of time.. never have enough..

No transfer so still in Lima

Sorry to have missed a week but Elder Fenn is doing great and still in Lima and his first area.  He has found more success but is waiting for a couple items to fall in line to go ahead with the baptisms.  It is also encouraging that the language is coming easier and he loves the people but the newness has worn off.

Fam,

What’s up. So today is the day that I wrote a tiny e-mail . Sorry about that, but hopefully this will make up for it a little.  The good stuff is that all the people are really friendly and the way the Gospel changes people. Remember Kevin, that kid I baptized who wanted to swim in the font? Ya when we started teaching him his mom didn’t want to listen to us. After Kevin’s baptism Flor (the mom) started listening and taking lessons. She really started to open up to us. Her mom said that she was changing a lot. After a couple lessons we found out they were moving. That day we asked her if she wanted to get baptized. She said yes. But first she has to get married or the Dad move out.

The family I baptized in my first week is still super sweet. The best meal I have had here was at their house. We are trying to plan a trip to the temple with them to do baptisms. We only have 2 families we are teaching and they both need to get married. We are also teaching another lady that needs to get married before baptism. We try to have 8 families progressing though. We are teaching a 16 year old boy named Luis that is way sweet. He is freaking smart. He also knows his bible so its way easy to teach him. We have the date for this Saturday the 4^th of February, but we don’t have permission from his parents yet. We have a meeting Tuesday with them. Cross your fingers, but this kids a stud he will get it from them. We’ll I’m out of room, but that’s pretty much all.

Love ya miss ya. Bye

Elder Fenn.

Sometimes it is just good to hear from him.

me gusta su español. ha ha but ya tell ej not to worry. it stunk when they only spoke spanish, but you learn faster that way. ya no worries, but put him into a language class if you can. what ever language. same with brietyn cause its easier for them to learn. and piano is sick. i can read music ha ha. elder richardson taught me how in like 30 seconds so with practice i can play a little. its funny and hard. top hand is easy but both is way hard. dont have time to practice anymore so probably will forget everything soon. i can buy a guitar how sick is that. but first i need to firgure out a way to get rid of some of my stuff so i can have it as a carry on.

no i am not cold here. it is summer and it is vary warm. no houses have a/c. it sucks i sleep above everything and wake up sweeting some times its awesome. ha ha. never had a drink with ice, but we buy drinks ice cold alot. i only sweat inside the peoples houses. its really not that bad. other than that. i like the temperature, but its way polluted hear so i don´t like the ¨weather¨. the sky is never blue and you can never really see the sun, or the stars. ha ha i miss looking at the stars.

transfers are every 6 weeks but trainning is for 12 so i have one more transfer minimum here i think. but they say that president blunck tries to get the missionarys into the jungle fast beacuse it is easier to learn spanish there.

as for families we are teaching we have one really sweet family. they always send their son to church, well the past two weeks, as they have work. they seem really interested in the gosple and they are way friendly, but we have to get them married before we can baptise them. i think we can get them. we met with one family yesterday that seems really cool, but it was only one meeting. one kid that is 16 has accepted to prepare for the 4th the only problem is permision for the parents. i dont know if that will be hard thing or not. he is way smart and knows the bible better than i know the book of morman, or any scripture. its way tight teaching him cause he teaches himself. my comp just throws scriptures at him for him to read every once and a while to help him learn.

 

 i got the stats for total nfl while i was in the ccm so i was wondering. is the superbowl this sunday. oh i miss bbq sauce ha ha. they have it here i guess i just havent gone to the store.

sorry about my spelling. i think it has gotten alot worse. ive been writing people and sounding english out in spanish. mixing up letters and everything its way funny. out of time

well thats all for this week folks

untill next time peace.

Elder Fenn had a great week!

On Monday, Wendy took the chance to get on the email and ask if Masen was there, to her suprise Elder Fenn sent back that he was and she was able to talk to him via email messages.  As she said, "it made it feel like he wasn't so far away.

The problem with that is he doesn't have the time to write a letter for the most part but it was more a question and answer session.  He wants to hear more about what the family is doing so it is nice to fill him in on the home front. 

His spirit is soaring and and you can fill it.  As a parent it is amazing to hear his stories and fill the love of Father in Heaven working His miracles through him.

He was able to write a short letter so here it is:

alright so i think i am finaly getting into the hang of things cause this week was kinda like ya whatever, or maybe because this was the first week we didn´t have a baptism. ha ha. but we still kinda did. there are 4 missionarys in our ward. and the area that the zone is in is divided into 2. the other missionarys had a kid that wanted to get baptised. my companion is the district leader and in the interview he asked who would be baptizing him. he said he wanted my companion to do it. so we had to pretty much do all the work on saterday to get things ready. so it was our baptism ha ha ha. but ya. sunday was way good because we got 3 investigators to show up to church. that was way cool. one of them we were not expecting at all. the night before we gave a lesson to an investigator in a members house. she then said that there was a family she wanted us to talk to. she pointed to some people in the street like 2 houses down. we were running late and had to get back to the house cause it was past 9. so we talked to the family for like 1 minute and only invited them to attend. the next morning the family was walking to church and passed by the house. the dad told the oldest girl to wait for his son so he could go with. and they both came. so that was a sick story. havent had a meeting with them yet so we will see how things go with that family.

thats probably the coolest thing this week. other than that life is pretty boring here. the food is all the same, but for some reason they give it different names. to me its chicken and rice, and potatos, ALWAYS. oh ya boring meaning we do the same things over and over and over. but its fun, only cause the lord blesses us with happines. thats the only reason i can think of.

well love you all, almost out of time again. the shortest hour of my life is emailing right now. never seems like enough time.

take care now bye

ha ha

Love

Elder

Fenn

Success again and fun too.

 It is good to see Masen having fun.  Kevin wanted to swim in the baptismal water, he had to carry him out! ha ha

 It says, Welcome everyone to the baptism of Kevin Chancha Torrico.

 Hang em out to dry the work is done!

 you learn to eat it. 

Masen doesn't like fish....