Well, this week was not really all that interesting — lots of walking and Superman… and walking and getting locked out again… and hiking up hills and making mistakes in Spanish… and teaching and getting chewed out by a stranger… and sweating and chasing chickens and spraying poison… and teaching and destroying and rebuilding a house… yeah. Such is the life of a missionary!
On Monday we went to tour a museum of the Inquisition — the thing where they tortured anyone who wasn’t a member of the national church until they confessed their faith was wrong — and we got to see a lot of torture methods (I have pictures!). Then we got to eat lunch! Mmmmm! So appetizing!
After lunch was kind of cool because there was Superman. Well, some Peruvian dressed up as Superman (Woof! Worst Superman costume ever!) for some TV show. Have I mentioned that Peruvian TV shows are pretty bad and really cheesy? ‘Cause they’re awful! So all us “Mormons” got on Peruvian TV and for the next couple days we ran into people that said they’d seen us on TV!
On Tuesday we got locked out (AGAIN!!!) Elder Terrones REALLY needs a better way to remember the keys! This is seriously the third or fourth time! Getting back in was an adventure; we’re just lucky our window is already broken and someone happened to leave a pole lying around (I’ll send a picture of this, too)! Needless to say, we were a little late to our next appointment…
On Tuesday I also made a pretty funny mistake in Spanish– luckily it was only during a practice! We were practicing something about the need to be chaste and I, as the investigator, said, “La Biblia dice que no debemos ser adulterios” (“The Bible says that we shouldn’t be adulterers”) — or, at least, that’s what I tried to say. In reality, I used “adultos” (“adults”), not “adulterios”! Elder Terrones took it in stride; he responded with, “Bueno, hermano, necesitamos arrepentirnos, porque somos adultos” (“Well, Brother, we need to repent because we’re adults”)! It was really funny for us, but maybe you just had to be there.
Wednesday marked 100 DAYS IN THE MISSION for me (About 630 left!), and I spent an hour of it being yelled at by an investigator named Patricia. I was on splits with another missionary and we were late to the appointment. So Patricia (who’s a little loco) chewed us out for an hour about how we should be on time and give her money (because she doesn’t have any) and shouldn’t be hypocrites. Really she just used us as an outlet to vent her frustration about the problems in her life. That was kind of new.
Thursday we chased chickens all morning. Roxana, the woman I baptized two weeks ago, REALLY needs a new house because she practically lives in a dump. So on Thursday we went over to help her move the stuff out of her house — including the chickens she kept! The problem is the chickens have a lot of places to hide in a ramshackle house like hers, and they’re fast little suckers! And then when we’d finally get all but one, another few would escape and we’d have to hunt them down! When we finally got all the chickens and her important stuff moved out, Elder Terrones and I went through her house and sprayed poison all over the place to kill the bugs; we didn’t want surprises on Saturday while we were destroying and rebuilding her house. The liquid we used was scary! It had legit white steam/smoke like those crazy sciencey concoctions in movies!
Then on Saturday came the actual destruction and reconstruction. Luckily we had pretty much the entire ward helping us, but she had so much junk in her house that it took a full day — 7 AM until 9 PM — to get everything out! I’ll send some before-and-after photos, because it’s really cool what we did. The house isn’t completely done — we still need to do some plumbing and need to put an actual floor down — but the change is incredible!
Don’t have much else to share about this week. Hopefully everything’s good with everyone, and I’ll share some more stories about walking and walking and walking and teaching somewhere in between all the walking!
— Elder Schroeder
