Hello again! Almost got seven months here in Peru!
I know you’re all dying to know what interesting stuff happened this week. The problem is there’s not much that’s really interesting, just new.
Take Monday, for example. For P-Day, we went to the center of Lima to go see a (kind of) cool history museum and buy all kinds of tourist junk. Some of the stuff was kind of boring, like the Peruvian paintings (Sorry, I really don’t understand art; what’s the point of looking at a bunch of paintings of dying people? (That’s basically what all the paintings were.) There were some that were interesting, but not a lot — I could have gone through that room in about 30 seconds and still get my fill of weird paintings).
There were also some more interesting stuff, like the cool bottles of the ancient groups that lived in Peru. It must have been pretty sweet for these people to drink water (or maybe alcoholic chicha juice) out of a screaming monkey jug! (My question is if anyone sells replicas so I can have one…)
Then there was also the room with all the gold artifacts, and even if the Conquistadors took most of the gold stuff (And then lost it in the ocean during pirate attacks), there were still some cool things, like a Tumi.
Something I learned: Tumis are not little pendant things like I thought they were. They’re actually sacrificial knives used by the Incans! (I still don’t really see where they’d grip it…)
They also had a section devoted to more recent things, such as the progression of Peruvian money. Kind of cool to think that they used to use huge coins. Given that it’s about 3.5 inches across it’s probably better that they changed it.
Then it was time to buy tourist junk! I didn’t really buy anything, but I’m kind of wishing I’d bought a mask. Elder Hovenden found one in some store that I didn’t go to, but on the plus side we’ll probably go to the center of Lima several more times before I finish my mission!
On Thursday we might have been contacting in an area that wasn’t ours, but I figure it’s all good — It’s still the Lord’s work! And even though a lot of people were willing to listen to us, I learned something that made me do a double-take: Someone we’d talked with and taught about 4 months ago died recently. We only went to his casa once, but he was actually pretty cool — he prayed with a lot of intent and had a lot of respect for our message and for us — but he had a HUGE drinking problem that made it a little difficult to teach him much. Turns out we ran into his mom, who told us he died from alcohol poisoning. A part of me wonders if maybe we could have done something to help him stop drinking, and for that I feel a little guilty, but I’d rather not dwell on it too much.
Then, on Sunday, I accidentally said a bad word (maybe). See, my Spanish teachers taught me that “cinta” means “tape”, which it does. It turns out here it has a slang term that refers to a pregnant woman in a very rude way! So I guess I’ve accidentally insulted a few people when I meant to talk about tape… Dumb Spanish!
Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll try to find a way to spice it all up next week! ¡Chao!
— Elder Schroeder