September 13, 2010

Hola familia,
Sounds like a busy week, and sounds like it ended bad with the falling apart of the football team. If Air Force, of all teams, racked up over 400 yards and 35 points, hopefully it´s not an indicator of how the the rest of the season will go.

That´s a bummer that Mikayla lost, but it sounds like fun (Mikayla's first volleyball game was last Wednesday). I have a little athlete sister.

This week was really good. We found some really good families to teach and we have 3 baptisms Saturday. Bartolo and Felicita, the parents of Soledad and Diana are going to be baptized! They´re the family that struggles with understanding Spanish, but we took out a baptismal date with them like 2 weeks. They were kind of struggling, but just like Soledad, Felicita is really sure now, Bartolo also. Also a woman named Patricia is going to be baptized. The missionaries had already been teaching her when I got here, but she needed to be married, and this week we had her marriage on Friday. It was kind of weird. They do it in the civil register office, and sign a paper as the ceremony; odd, but good. Her husband doesn´t want anything to do with the church for now, but he supports her in her decisions. Their 3 kids were all baptized 3 weeks before I got here. So we hope everything goes well with the baptism Saturday. It´ll be really good.

It´s been getting warmer but we had a storm Friday and Saturday so everything got all wet again. I still have the habit of unlucky things happening to me. I stumbled into 3 sanghas(sewer diches), and slipped and fell flat on my back in the mud twice. The mud in our area is so thick and bad, but makes life more interesting. The soles of the shoes I had fixed already fell off, but we started teaching the shoe fixing man, and he said to bring them by and he´d fix them. I don´t know how they died so fast.

We had transfers this week and Elder Fernandez Paz and I are staying here in Nueve de Abril. We had more exciting food this week. We ate with a family from Bolivia for lunch and they gave us a mountain of rice and pieces of stomach. It wasn´t super bad, but it was super chewy and I was able to eat it all. But I think my companion offended the hermana because he just ate the rice and left all the stomach. It made her sad, but she cheered up a little that I liked it. I can eat anything, but some things are definitely better than others, and other things have more devasting effects on the stomach than other things. But normally we just eat lots of rice with sauce, or noodles with meat or chicken. The food here is really bland. The taco seasoning you sent me is spicy to them. They do not tolerate spicy at all. The food here is really good, they just don´t have extremes in taste.

I hope everything goes well this week with you guys. Hasta la proxima semana.
Love, David..