Making lots of friends in Palau!

Esta Illuminado!!! (It's Lit) Another good one out here in Palau! 

My second week out here in Palau went pretty solid! Last week we found 23 new investigators, so we had so many appointments this week, so it's been crazy busy out here ha. The cool thing is that we have a bunch of people progressing! We set two more baptismal dates and had six people come to church. We still have a long ways to go; however, our goal is to have a steady 10 investigators coming to church every week and at least one baptism every week! We have also been helping a lot with the branch. A couple weeks ago we only had an attendance of like 20 but this week we had just over 50 people. The other day we were actually talking with one of the less active members we have been working with and they want to do like a spiritual carne asada or something like that we can invite all our investigators to. 

Last Monday we ate lunch with this Christian family and then we emailed at their house! They are a way good family and they always invite us over to eat… haha. After we emailed we went to an appointment., but the person wasn’t there, so we contacted the house next door. Anyways, we went into this guy’s house and started taking to him and after like five minutes we invited him to be baptized and he said yes!! We had two other really good lessons with him this past week, however, he wasn’t able to make it to church this week. Hopefully we can get him to church next week so he can be baptized on the 10th! When we were teaching him on Thursday the Spirit was really strong and I remembered this part of the *Ricciardi Letter* where it says we should always acknowledge when the Spirit is present during a lesson. I told him that the Spirit was really strong in his house and he said he felt it too, and he was so happy that we were able to feel that in his house! 

Wednesday, we went to Barotaron which is another little city that we have in our area but it’s like an hour away from Palau in a bus…rip.  All of our cities are small, but we have like 6 of them and they are all spread out, so I actually have one of the biggest areas in the mission! Anyways, there are a lot of less active families in Barotaron with kids that need to get baptized so we should have some success out there, it will also help the branch as these families start coming back to church! 

We have a way cool family here, they have been coming to church for the past two months and all five of them want to get baptized! However, both of the parents need to get divorced, so they can get married. They all want to be baptized together so we can’t just baptize the kids... Anyways, I called a bunch of people, so I could get a hold of a lawyer that I met in Monclova. I talked with him and he is a really great guy, he was a former missionary and he said he would divorce both of them for free!! However, they still have to pay like the mandatory acts to like the government which is going to cost 8,000 pesos for each so 16,000 pesos (800 dollars) They were really sad on Sunday because we were hoping the guy would be able to make it cheaper, but it doesn’t really look like it. They still want to continue coming to church and everything as they gradually save the money to get divorced. 

My comp Elder Villarauz had his birthday this week! So, the Christian family invited us over for a carne asada and we ate some tres leches cake! 

Yesterday I gave another talk! It went really good haha I was looking at the talk I wrote my first week and my Spanish was horrible hahah. It like didn’t even make sense now that I’m fluent... Anyways, my talk went really good I didn’t really plan anything I just went up there with my Book of Mormon in my hand and it all worked out! 

This week I hit leg day really hard with 30 min straight doing lunges on Friday... and I still can’t walk hahah rip... Shout out to Cory G for the motivation! 

Today for p-day we played some volleyball with Elder Smith and Elder Sabey and the Christian family and then we went and got some free haircuts hahah! 

Hope everything is going good at home! Thanks for all the love and support / Much love 

Elder Ceb

*The Ricciardi Letter is the letter of the experiences an Elder had with his Italian Trainer (Elder Ricciardi) serving in my older sister's mission (England Birmingham). This has now become a famous missionary letter and has been shared in conference talks, etc. When I left on my mission my sister gave me a copy because she had learned a lot from studying it throughout her mission.*

1. Elder Villaruz's birthday party 

2. Some of the best chicken I've ever had (protein)

3. The Christian family dropped off this corn at our apartment the other night!

4. Some members gave us this other cake at lunch!

5. Elder Villaruz birthday party with the Christian family (by the way their mom wants to be a pastor...haha she is a great lady!)

6. We ran into her Sunday night and she said she always cuts the missionaries hair for free.. so we stopped by today after playing some volleyball 

7. Another from last week:)