It’s official: I forgot what week I’m in any more. So I’ll just stick to months and stuff.
Soooo… What exciting stuff happened this week…
Well, really there’s not a whole lot that’s different this week, either. I’m doing pretty well and I’ve been working hard, walking a lot and teaching so much that I’m starting to have dreams where I teach again. Apparently I’m talking in my sleep because I wake up my companion every once in a while! It’s really weird for me when I have these dreams because I’ll wake up and I’ll have no idea what happened, but I remember that I need to teach and I’m all disoriented, and then the next rooster starts crowing and I realize that’s what woke me up. (When’s the next big holiday? I’m ready for the families to start eating all the dumb birds!)
I guess I lied when I said not much was different. This week there were some problems in Brisas, the upper part of our area that’s up in the hills, because the lights went out and apparently some drug dealers moved into the area. Apparently there were some problems with people going around robbing, so we started avoiding the area in the night-time so we don’t accidentally run into some shady characters on drugs and all that.
On Wednesday the crazy service projects started again. We spent a lot of time moving a huge pile of rocks outside of Roxana’s house (That wasn’t much fun), but before that was pretty great because there were poisionous maggots in the tree outside (That’s not the great part; just wait). Because of this, she wanted us to cut off some of the branches which, in the U.S., would require something like a handsaw or giant clippers, right? Well, I’m in Peru, and they tend to do things a little differently, even though Roxana has a handsaw and an axe. What did she give us? Oh, just a rusty two-foot machete. And while it may not have been as effective as a saw, we used it. Why? BECAUSE WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD PASS UP THE CHANCE TO USE A MACHETE?! (In case you can’t tell, I was pretty pumped about that) And I thought destroying furniture with an axe was fun! I was just disappointed she didn’t have more branches to cut off! (Unfortunately, the robbers took my camera, so I don’t have any photos (Yeah, kidding! I just forgot my SD card; I’ll send the photos next week))
On Saturday I was pretty happy because we got to watch Meet the Mormons (Or Conozca a los Mormones for us, since it was in Spanish) instead of walking around trying to find people to teach. We did that since Sunday we didn’t have church — everyone was out voting for who will be the next Presidente of Peru! So that was a nice break, and for those who haven’t seen it yet I recommend it because it’s pretty good and helps explain some of our beliefs with some pretty cool examples of Mormons (Like a championship kick-boxer!).
Well, that’s it for this week. ¡Hasta luego!
— Elder Schroeder