Week 90 Elder Ochoa

Hey everyone!! Once again it's your friendly neighborhood Elder. Elder Hironaka. This week was a great great week!! Elder Ochoa of the 70 this last week visited the mission. It was a 3-day visit and I was very honored to be able to work closely with a strong spiritual leader.  This week was full of preparing for his visit, reunions, and baptisms.

We have been preparing for his visit for a week. Day by day we organized who is going to speak, and what zones were be attending what day. It was a long process. When a general authority comes for anything the church prepares everything and sets up the church nicely and has all the audio and visuals set up. Well unfortunately there was a miscommunication and unfortunately they didn't prepare anything for his visit. Which meant Plan B; plan B is when we have to do everything, which includes, setting up the computers, microphones and projectors.

So, I was in charge coordinating that. I learned a lot and quite frankly enjoyed the crazy rush of getting everything ready. The secretaries are really a good bunch of Elders.  They did an awesome job helping me set up everything for the conference with Elder Ochoa. 

We had two days of instruction from Elder Ochoa. The first day was 5 zones and it went well except that the power went out and we lost the AC, which was terrible. I realize I have been in a 3rd world country now for to long, and I’m wondering if there is and I phone watch type of thing in America right now? The reason why I bring it up is Elder Ochoa had something like that and it was awesome. He plugged his phone into the computer and from his watch started a presentation. It was sick. Anyway, the 3 days of instruction was not super planned out. He really didn't tell us to prepare anything so we had no idea what to expect. I ended up having to practice how to teach someone to repent. It was fun and went well. However if you were to ask me to do that a month ago I could not do it. I think from the experience of being an assistant I have learned to be confident in speaking in front of a big group of people. In the meetings we talked about the sacrifice of our loving brother Jesus Christ and how his death made it possible for us to repent when we commit errors. I really enjoyed the conferences and it was an honor to meet Elder Ochoa and Sister Ochoa.

Another big part of this week was baptisms!!!! We ended the month really strong in my area. And it was a great day for us as a companionship. I'm sorry the photos are really really bad. (No photos were sent)

I'm starting to get a little sad though. Everyone when they talk to me is like, “when are you going home.” Or they say, “Elder Hironaka, how do feel to be going home.” Or “Elder Hironaka, the day is coming soon.” I never talk about how much time I have left, but it's a little sad for me that they know it's coming.