Birthday Week

 Happy birthdays. My zone leader is from a Carolina, and a new elder that showed up four weeks ago is from the same ward and now the same zone. But they're about 6 years apart. I've decided to work at the temple when I get home. But everyone will be older and you'll have a new presidency. 

We found out that Elder Uceda changed his mind and we get to go to the temple at the end of this change, so in two weeks!!!!!!!!! I'm so excited!!!! I miss the cold mom. I can't enjoy the heat. The weird thing is it's hot but I don't notice it, I only notice that I'm sweating all the time. I'm NOW excited to go out with the elders and do the work of salvation, there is so much I didn't know, and now I'm ready to make things happen! But I'll first spend a little time with these guys down here. 

Make sure everyone knows I miss them and think about what I learned from them. I was just thinking about a talk Sister DeFreese gave about the sabbath day and how she didn't have her daughter buy the things she needed. If we can do everything on Saturday, we can more fully sanctify the sabbath day. Love you Mom! Good Luck with the job and the talk! And Happy Birthday! I remembered as we walked out last week... And I can't type and spell anymore. It says everything is wrong and I'm running through this!

Worldwide Transmission

 Yes, we had the transmission on Wednesday. They even said in our meeting that the 30 gringos could watch it in English! But that was a lie. Nobody showed up to set it up, so we spent some time fiddling with it and only could get it in Spanish. So we just dealt with it. We did accomplish one thing: Segregation. But of what I saw, it was awesome. Loved the way they did it and how similar it was the last time. Learned a lot which is good at the beginning. But other than that, we had a busy week. We had the Assistants over for our meeting and then they came to our area to do splits. I learned a lot. He was a gringo from Oregon, so he was chill. I finally got the taxi ride with the one Jetta in town. Its a mark 4 Black hunk a junk, but it was awesome. I felt right back in the back seat of the red Jetta. 

It's been a crazy hot week more steadily in the 30's. And our neighbor had a pool out for their kids. We went over to pick up on the the returned missionaries to make visits, and I watched this kid sitting in this pool at 2pm eating ice-cream! Needless to say, it was a tough day. We also had a few minor difficulties with some electricity. A member of the mission presidency came to install thermas in our showers so after two months out here, we could take warm showers. But he installed them and left. So we got up in the morning all excited and accidentally had them both going and completely fried the wire and then we had no electricity for about 3 days. So we took a nice cold shower that day. But the next day, we ran out of water and went back to the bucket showers of 5 gallons a day. I love it. But we got it all fixed, we just have to take very fast turns.

But it's been a great time out here! We're having lots of success and still finding new areas that we didn't know existed. There use to be only two elders in this area and they are thinking about putting in two more. That would be six elders in a ward. The members just need to be a little more supportive. So please support the missionaries at home, I wouldn't know anyone without members. So take the missionaries to everyone you know, This isn't me saying this, it's the scriptures! Good luck with everything you're doing.  Love you all and hope you're staying warm! 

Cerro de Paz

 We went to a hill of peace last Monday as a zone. It was quite hot and eventful, I'll send pictures. We had a good week. We were proselyting with a returned missionary from Argentina and went to visit an investigator. When we got to the door, the neighbor was playing that sax song that everyone knows on their speaker. Then we started teaching. And this was the most difficult lesson ever. They played in order these songs: Total Eclipse of the Heart, Hotel California, and Sound of Silence! The RM wasn't helping either. How can you talk about prophets in Spanish with that in the background. It was hilarious though. We've been moving a long nicely. Until next week.

Flashback

 So on Tuesday, we had to take a bus at 6 in the morning to Trujillo for a meeting with all the missionaries from my group. They are all the same. But we had pizza and talked about stress. Then got back for about 3 hours of proselyting. It was a long day. Those buses don't have windows and they shut off the air when we start moving, so you can't sleep, and you get dripping in sweat. We went to the house of a member with four daughters. One got back from her mission in Argentina about 7 months ago. And her sister had her mission call. So we went over to watch at the end of the day. She was very emotional. She got called to serve like one mission south in Lima Norte. There was a lot of tears. Then she read she is leaving in three weeks, and there was more tears. But then I realized, she will come home before me. Then I laughed a little. It was like I was right back at home opening my own call. But there was less crying. But that's  about it. Love you guys, Happy Birthday Howard.

New Year's

 So we had an eventful week. The people here really like to blow stuff up. They have a tradition of making a life-sized doll and burning it. Out with the old kind of thing. So now there's just a ton of burnt corpses all over the place. We couldn't sleep all night and the next morning there was a nice thick layer of smoke in the city. But that's not all. We tried to teach on the 1st of the year, which was a mistake. People like to get wasted outside their front door at about 10am to 10pm when isn't time to party. But that didn't stop us from trying. Sure I got called a few more names, sure they were a little more grotesque, but I don't care. 

Then in the evening we had an English class in the chapel and invited a ton of people. But the only people that showed up were 10 kids from age 5 to 10. And they didn't want any of it. Their parents, who don't know the church, just dumped them off and left. So that was a lot of fun to deal with. But everything is moving along. Now the party season is over, we should get back into the grove of things. Anyway, love you guys, make good choices and work less hard then me, because this is pretty hard work, but satisfying!