Letter from July 16

As you know I was in Tarma last Monday when I wrote you getting ready to head to Lima.  After emailing you, we went to buy some souvenirs.  We got a call from the other missionaries telling us the bus was there that we needed to catch to get to Lima.  We quickly headed to the bus station.  When we arrived I realized that I had forgotten my Book of Mormon (on the mission we always have to have the Book of Mormon). We asked the bus driver how long it would be before he left.  He said 5 minutes.  We ran a few blocks, found the book, Elder Norris also bought another souvenirs and we took off sprinting for the bus station.  While we were running we received a call from the missionaries that were on the bus telling us that the bus had left the station and was on its way.  About 20 seconds later we arrived to the bus station, looked down the street in the opposite direction and saw the bus about 3 blocks away.  We were already tired, but the only thing we could do was run.  We took off again, but this time breathing pretty heavy, because it’s not too easy to run with a backpack and stuff in your hands.  It was definitely an experience seeing the bus slowly advancing as we were just dying trying to keep up.  At last we saw the bus come to a stop where it was waiting to make a turn. We picked up the pace just hoping to catch it before it made the turn. Happily we made it to the bus right as it was making the turn.  I pounded on the window of the bus driver as he was making the turn.  He looked at me a little confused, but pulled over and opened the doors. We stepped on like we had just finished a marathon, but we were pretty stoked for catching the bus.  Well after the bus continued for a couple blocks more, it made a stop where people got on for a time period of about five minutes.  In other words, I don’t know if the running was necessary haha!

This week we baptized Ruben.  He made the decision to be baptized and his whole family is now coming back to church.  We have been working a lot with inactive members, one of the families that we have activated or we are in the process of activating is Rubens family. They are a family of 7 that have been inactive for quite some time. The good news is that the whole family came to church for the second week in a row and they were all in Rubens baptism except for his older sister.  Activating hasn´t always been my favorite thing to do as a missionary, but I am really starting to enjoy it, because we have seen some great success and we are seeing some baptisms from it. We have Judith with a baptismal date for this Saturday, she is the Hectors niece. She is 17 and is excited to be baptized this coming weekend.

I wanted to let you know out of about 200 missionaries in the mission, Elder Norris and I are the only Americans together.  I have to say it is pretty cool. He will be finishing his mission here in about 2 weeks, can you believe that? Well that’s about it for this week. Things are going great here!  I think with more and more experience and more and more time the mission gets better.  Every day that goes by I seem to enjoy it more.  I hope you are all doing well. Take care!

Elder Riggs