The singing missionaries: Coming soon to a chapel near you?

Dear Everyone,

This week has been transfer week. I´m still here in beautiful Bilbao with the same companion, Elder Slauson. This week we had a missionary Sunday. We had all the recent converts in the ward bear their testimonies and we (the missionaries) sang a musical number that everyone seemed to like. As a ward we also watched the Work and the Glory on Friday as part of our weekly ward night. We have a weekly activity for the whole ward that we bring investigators to. Also a highlight of the week, we met with this man named David who is from Ghana. He speaks English, one of the first English-speaking people I´ve taught in a long time. We contacted him in the park last week and finally met with him again this week to give him a Book of Mormon in English. He said he´s looking for the truth and he was so excited to get the Book of Mormon that it was the first thing he asked about when we met with him, and he kissed it when he got it. We emphasized the importance of reading and praying to find out for himself, so as soon as we left, he started to read right there on the bench. He is a miracle in and of himself. We also had a really great family home evening with a member family and we are working with them to help bring back their less active family members. A young man in our ward who often accompanies us to visits got his mission call to Lima Perú (he´s originally from Perú). So we´re pretty excited about that. It´s exciting to hear about so many missionaries leaving from home, it´s great! Make sure you invite the missionaries over for a family home evening, and not just the sister missionaries either. 

Love, Élder Coleman

Itsasargi? No, it's a lighthouse!

Dear Everyone,

This week has been crazy. There have been parties everywhere. People in this country find absolutely any reason to party. Also, my companion had to go to Barcelona on Thursday to renew his residency, so I was with a temporary companion. Then he must have caught something while he was there because he´s been sick for the last couple of days. We´ve been teaching a few really good people. There are 2 girls, one from Colombia and one from Venezuela that we have been teaching every other day. They want us to teach them English, but they are also super interested in the Gospel. There is also a couple that have been coming to church for over 6 months now, but they won´t get baptized. So we´ve been working with them a lot. This week we also had an eating visit with a member from Paraguay and there they drink a lot this drink called mate (pronouced mahtay). It´s a huge thing in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Think of how big of a cultural thing coffee is for us in North America, well mate is way bigger there. It´s just an herb and it´s totally fine to drink. Well I tried it for the first time. It´s kind weird, but I like it. You have to use a special filter straw and everything or it doesn´t work. I really can´t think of anything else we´ve done that´s really interesting this week. 

Here's an old cannon we found.

 This sign says "lighthouse", first in Basque, then in Spanish.  The languages are so completely different!

 Here's a photo of the Basque men's choir, complete in their traditional clothes.

Party party everywhere! Finally some pictures, but no time to spare!

OK so wow this week I have like no time at all. We have to be in a visit super soon. We went on a zone activity trip to somewhere called Bakio. It´s super cool and I´ll send pictures. This week was crazy. We had a member come down from Norway, call us up and ask us to teach his girlfriend who lives here English and about the Gospel. It was super random and out of the blue. Also it´s been a constant party here, which is super cool. Everyone is dressed in tradicional Basque wear and there are lots of random singing groups everywhere and concerts and parades. There was a really cool old men´s  Basque choir that sang the other day and they were super good. Today we went to a cool hermitage up on a mountain on an outlet in the sea. I´ll send pictures and I´ll write more next week.

Love Élder Coleman

Conference, Christmas, and contacts.

Dear Everyone,

Wow, Conference was great! I hope all of you got to watch it. I loved being able to hear the voices and counsels of our apostles and leaders! General Conference is so much more exciting on the mission. We invited a lot of people to come watch it. Turns out no one came, but that´s life as a missionary. This week it has been getting a lot colder and I heard from a member that it might snow! Bilbao is about the only place in Spain it ever snows, so I´m hoping it does while I´m here. I love a white Christmas. Christmas is just around the corner right? I´m really coming to love the members here even though I just got here. I am practicing my Guaraní (the native language of Paraguay) with a Paraguayan member here and were are going over to eat with the members here more than before. You have no idea how much eating visits mean to the missionaries, especially if they aren´t getting any. Invite the missionaries over to eat! Especially if you don´t know them really. Something interesting happened yesterday. A couple from Sandy, UT (which happens to be where my companion´s from) walked into the church last night after General Conference. Apparently they just go all over Europe on vacation and they always stop by the church. We just happened to be there. It was interesting to hear a little bit about them and my companion really related with them. It was an unexpected surprise. There are a few amount of tourists in Spain. The other day, a young man from Germany stopped us and said he was a member of the church, his dad was the stake president in Munich Germany, and he was just on a class trip to Bilbao. It´s always interesting to meet different kinds of people from different places. 

Love Élder Coleman

(I'm just going to start posting photos of Bilbao because Preston keeps promising pics but none are forthcoming.)