The Story Continues........

Hola Familia,

Thank you so much for the emails. I love hearing from you and your emails always help me a lot to keep working hard and to help me to keep doing what I need to be doing. Keep them coming! Tell Sister Wise thanks a ton, as well as Brother Martinez for the emails, I appreciate them a LOT! I´m printing them out and i´m going to study them in a little more detail. Sorry there aren´t any pictures, I have the COOLEST picture from Santiago Atitlan here I want to send, but I can´t because my camera memory has a virus from one of the internet places and I can´t open the files. I´ll fix it though, hopefully yoú´ll be able to see. It´s me with a bunch of the guys in their special clothes just hanging out on a bench.

OK, I don´t even know where to start. This week has been jam packed - full of so many awesome stories and things that I really want to share. Of course, the weeks like this are always the weeks I barely have any time to write, SO i´m going to make this quick but the best I can.

First of all, we had a meeting with our district this morning, and Elder Lanham came because he´s the Zone Leader. I had the chance to hear his testimony again, and I can´t even begin to describe how much he has helped me, in his advice, and just everything he has done for me.

So you all remember the guy that we carried to church right? Well, we went to his house to visit him, and see if we couldn´t go teach him the lessons. The people he lives with were very cold and didn´t want us to go in and visit him... They were making up excuses and stuff and we left, but he came out and sent some kids to find us( There are three things i´m really growing to dislike: Pride, Dishonesty, and Alcohol). But we went back, and went in to his house. We were walking through this nice house, where there is a sign outside saying that one of the people that lives there is a doctor. I thought to myself, how awesome that he lives with a doctor to help him with his problems, and he is being taken care of!

Well, I found out REALLY quick that that wasn´t the case. We got to a little tiny room, with the door hanging off of the wall. We had to force the door open to get in, and almost tore it off just trying to get into the room. Once we got in I could not believe what I was seeing. He didn´t have ANY light, just a little night light to light up the whole room, hanging over a catholic picture of Mary. One step closer to the door and the STENCH hit me. It smelled HORRIBLE! We got in there and there was garbage EVERYWHERE. He told us how his family doesn´t help him and he just lives there alone in the dark. We couldn´t even stay in there long enough to teach it smelled so bad, and knew we HAD to do something.

We made it our service a few days this week to go help him. We found little bags of throw up, cigarrettes, cans of water that he drinks that had rotting, dead cockroaches, and a HUGE pile of clothes that smelled TERRIBLE! We went to the hardware store and got a light and switch and stuff, and set it up so he could have some light. We cleaned his room, and took just about all of his clothes out of his room and started washing them in the sink outside. We washed half of it, even down to his whitey tighties. OK so I washed some nasty whitey tighteys by hand... I guess you have to experience a little bit of everything to learn. haha He has HALF a toilet that he uses to go to the bathroom(It´s broken in half and he only has part of it) and we´re going to see if there´s anything we can do there... Not sure though. We just couldn´t sit down and not do anything, watching this guy slowly dying while his family just ignored him as they had their own nice little rooms, and lives completely different. We´ll see what happens, but that´s been the project. I still smell like his room I think, I can´t get it off me!

Ricky, I played basketball with some kids in the street last night and my team beat Elder Cunningham´s team, I just want you to know that you better watch out. haha jk.

Next week I won´t be writing until wednesday, because we have changes. The homecoming of my companion is on the 30th of August in West Valley. I´ll try to get the info.

We put a baptismal date with a new guy! I´m really excited, it´s for the 30th of August. Listen to number 7 on the Peter Breinholt cd it´s good.

I love you all so much and i´m so thankful for the plan of salvation. See ya soon!

Elder Micah Melville