12/18

Hey I'm alive. No time to write today. Zone P-day in Gran Canaria. Skype on Christmas should be good. Let me know a time and well see if we can sort it out. Love ya sorry this is short.

Because this is all I received today, I'll post some other pictures he's emailed home that I haven't shared here yet.

Christmas Lights

"Those Christmas lights, light up the street; light up the fire that's in me. Then all my troubles will be gone. Oh, Christmas lights, keep shining on."

Coldplay put it best in their song. Christmas time is upon us. They turned on all of the lights here in Los Llanos about a week ago and we've been listening to all our favorite Christmas tunes nonstop (special s/o to my mom for all the music). This is easily one of my favorite times of year. We also out here serving others as a part of the Light the World initiative. If you don't know what that is, check it out on Mormon.org. It's super legit.

This week has been brilliant. Javier made a big leap forward a few days ago. As I've mentioned before, he's always told us he wants to wait to be baptized when he moves to Tenerife, so we've been teaching him the lessons and preparing him for it then. But the other day we went over and that changed. We were going to read a certain chapter in the Book of Mormon with him, but Elder Lowder and I both felt pretty strongly that we should read in Mosiah 18 instead and talk about baptism again. I think it clicked for him that it's something that shouldn't be delayed because of his circumstances and he accepted a baptismal date for the 30th of this month at the end of the lesson. We hope we can get everything together by then!

We've also been getting everything together for the group's Christmas party here this Friday. It's been a bit of a bananza trying to figure everything out since my companion and I have never planned something like this before. I'm confident that it's gonna be a great time though. We're gonna have a talent show, so we gotta figure something out for that. It'll be legendary no doubt.

I'll be sure to let you all know how everything goes down with the party and such. All that and more, coming up next week. Love you guys!

Hasta luego,

Elder Penner

Pictures:

1+2+3. Views

4. Empanadas with the Guasinave fam

Greek Tragedy

I'm honestly too lazy to be creative today and think of a song that works with this week, so I just went with one of my favorite songs: Greek Tragedy, by The Wombats. This week has been great, though. With Elder Lowder's arrival, we've decided to try and change the way we do things around here a little bit. 

Our mission president has said that by the time he finishes his mission in August, he wants a member to be leading the group here. We've been praying to be able to find someone that can fulfill that. It looks most likely that we'll have to find someone to teach and baptize that can be the group leader. With that in mind, we're trying to delegate more of our leadership responsibilities to the members so we can have more time to do actual missionary work and find the people we need to. As I mentioned a couple weeks back, we've been passing by all the members on the records here that are inactive in the church and seeing if there's any potential there. We hope to have some luck in the weeks that come. 

ISLAND LIFE:

It's officially December and I'm still wearing short-sleeved shirts every day. More fun facts about the little island I'm on coming up. A member who was living in Madrid before moved back here this last week, and has promised to take us to all of the places we should see on our P-days. You guys can expect many more pictures in the weeks to come. The Canary Islands are huge for banana exports, and from what I've heard, La Palma is number one for banana production. We went on a hike today over by a national park here called La Caldera (the cauldron). It's a valley/canyon sort of area and was formed many many years ago after a huge earthquake caused a massive chunk of the mountain to slide into the sea. As opposed to most of the last couple of months I've been here, the air has been super clear this past week, so we've been able to see neighboring islands, El Hierro, La Gomera, and Tenerife, nearly every day.

That's all for this week. Hope you all have a better idea of what's going down here now. I fell like I haven't done the greatest job at explaining it. Have a brilliant week everyone!

Hasta luego,

Elder Penner

FOTOS:

1. From Tenerife last week (others are on the phone - I'll send them in a seperate email)

2. Hike from today

3. La Caldera de Tubierente

4. A rare raven which is only found here (so I'm told)