Elder Jones week 62

Hey guys! so yea I´m not in Callao any more.  I was so sad when I had to leave, I was not expecting that.  Now I´m a zone leader in the Magdalena stake. It´s not like any place I´ve ever served in.  There are more than a million people that live in our zone. We have 26 missionaries in the zone.  14 are sister missionaries and 12 are Elders.  The wards in our stake are; Magdalena, Breña, Las Brisas, Chacra Rios, Venezuela, Bolivar, and Pueblo Libre. We have a crazy strong ward, Magdalena, and it has 6 missionaries, Elder Anderson and I, and the 4 secretaries of the mission; Elder Dayton, Ramos, Hulet, and Matareco. The mission offices are in our proselyting area.

To give you guys an idea of how different Magdalena is from Callao, there's a restaurant right next to my house called Don Belisario.  My address is Gonzalez Prada 530, just so you can look it up on Google maps.  I feel like I´m serving in the United States.  I feel like I´m on vacation, I´ve never lived this comfortable before in my mission. But we still work really hard and we find a lot of prepared people. We have some great missionaries in the zone. The district leaders are Elder Dayton (he went to the CCM with me, and he´s the mission financial secretary), Elder Adams, and Elder Price.  Elder Price is in my zone again and it´s awesome.  Sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed by my new assignment as zone leader, and it really helps to have Elder Price to help me out.  Also my companion Elder Anderson is the best.  He helps me out a ton.  He´s going home to Utah in 5 weeks.

This week was honestly great.  It´s been fun adapting to the way missionaries have to work in rich areas.  We are teaching the richest people in Perú. BUT even though the people are happier with their money and tend to be less receptive to our teaching, the people that do let us in and listen to us understand sooo much better. And they fulfill with their commitments.  We met a 17 year old young man named Luis this week, We taught him about the Book of Mormon because he didn´t have that much time.  He read what we left him and prayed and  the next time we saw him, I kid you not, this is how the conversation went. "Hey, Luis how´s it going?" "Good, I read the Book of Mormon and prayed.  This is the true church, Joseph Smith was a prophet, and I´m going to get baptized." So yea, that makes things easier when people understand and they do what they say they will do.

Being a zone leader isn´t that much different, but I just have more opportunities to serve other missionaries. Sister missionaries rock. They do good work. I´m really excited to serve and learn here.  I´m excited to work in a strong ward.  All their recent converts from the last 2 years are active.  That´s something you don´t see very often in Peru.  We have 2 seventies in our ward as well and they´re awesome.  We live with the stake president, so whenever we need to talk to him about something he´s right there.  I´m really happy here and I´ll send some pictures next week! I hope you guys have a great week!