Teaching, Training, and Learning

Found this great photo of Dallin on Facebook!

April 21, 2014

Caramba this week was a tiring one.

So last week the mission baptized 10 people.... it's unacceptable. The weekly goal here is 50. So President is trying everything he can to reboot the mission. That means that the Zone Leaders have to do a ton of stuff too. So basically the whole week we were going to leadership meetings and having meetings with our own missionaries. Let's just say we have a lot of stuff to apply in our work. Tons of new(old) techniques that the missionaries need to learn. I think sometimes as leaders we forget there are some new missionaries who don't really know all the tricks because these things have just become who we are. I think with how much time we've been here we've probably taught over 1000 lessons, and knocked about a billion doors. So sometimes when we're training the missionaries we forget about the little things and the missionaries end up asking a ton of "what if" questions.

The main thing we're trying to change in the mission is the follow-up. President wants us to have a follow up that's more thorough so we know exactly what's going on with the investigators of all the areas in our zone. It's gonna be tough because there are 7 areas and usually an area has about 15-25 people in their teaching group. We also have to know who's been to church and if the people who went to church have been invited to be baptized. It's a real business-like deal we've got going on here and it's hard to check up on everything while we're trying to baptize and teach the people in our areas too. We have leadership meeting with President and all the Zone Leaders and talked about the issues going on. Then we had another meeting with the assistants, District Leaders, and Sisters Treinadoras (Sister Trainers) about the follow-up and problems going on in each area. I feel like as The Zone Leaders in this zone we have a good respect for the missionaries and they respect us too. We gave an awesome training this week and everyone got really excited and it reflected in the numbers from this week. In the zone we have 6 people marked to be baptized.
This week in our area was normal. Well not really. So remember Ricardo who busted his head open and could have been baptized 2 weeks ago at conference?? So we have been preparing him to be baptized for 3 weeks.  This whole week we were just checking up on him to see how he was doing since we since we had taught him everything. Every day we asked him, "You excited for your baptism on Sunday??" ..."Yeah I'm excited..."  So we were just super ready to baptize him and then we went to his house with Elder Quispe to do the interview on Saturday and he had left to go to his girlfriend's house in another town.. What?? We called him and he was just making excuses telling us that he wasn't going to church because he was gonna stay at his girl's house... We got pretty mad. His member neighbors said that every time they saw him after that he kind of hid. He's one of those super quiet kids who doesn't have the courage to say no so he just kind of ran away. We'll talk to him later but it doesn't look like he wants to get baptized after all. It happens. We can only hope that the people accept when we present the Gospel to them.. unfortunately there are a lot of people who waste the missionaries' time and run away at the last minute.

So in our area we have 3 people who can be baptized this week. Roberto, Welrilaine, and Márcia. Roberto hangs out with the young men in the ward. On Good Friday we taught him when he was playing soccer at the church. We went to the church because on holidays everyone in the world is either drinking or traveling. We taught the Restoration and asked him if he doubted that this is the church of Christ. He said, "No because of the name of the church."  If only everyone could be that humble haha. So we challenged him to be baptized and marked him for this weekend. But one thing I've learned with quickly-marked baptisms is that something will happen that will make the baptism harder to get than usual. We'll see... haha.

Well people. It's been real. I hope y'all had a great Easter.. People celebrate Easter here pretty much the same way... except they have HUGE chocolate eggs here with stuff inside.... I mean huge. Maybe I'll get some and send them to you guys. They'll be on sale this week haha., .I hope you all remembered Christ more than usual this past Sunday. He is the Master and our Savior. Love you all. Have a good week!

Elder Dallin Stephen Carroll

I found this picture on one of the Sister missionary's blog from a while back.  This was Dallin's district at Christmas time and they were all dressed in blue because they were performing a Christmas musical number at their Zone conference.