Well, nothing new to report this week. Later!
Nah, I’m just kidding! There’s always something interesting around here, even if it only means eating wierd fruit. See my picture below.
If you ask me, it’s basically a cross between a banana and a caterpillar, and if you mix that idea with a little bit of lemon you also get the idea of what it tasted like!
This week was a little sad because we gave away Ashly. She can’t live with us because we’re missionaries and we’re always gone, so we’ve been looking for a home for her and finally found one. It’ll be good for her, but this week it was a little weird to open the door to our apartment without something attacking our pant legs. Elder Rodriguez was the most sad because she’d lived with him for about a month.
But, it’s all good and we’re pretty much used to the life around here.
… Well, we were until Tuesday, when we ended up as life consultants for seven people!
It started after we came back from lunch and passed by a family to see how they were because we’d received a call from them. When we got there, we discovered:
* one drunk person (Kathy)
* one absent person (German)
* one crazy drunk person (Angel)
* one normal person (Kathy’s mother)
* and then, several hours later, one dying person (also German)
Turns out Angel, Kathy’s brother, had come over to visit and he and Kathy had been drinking a little. When German, Kathy’s husband, saw this, he got angry at Kathy becuase she’d promised to stop drinking (but obviously hadn’t kept that) and then left the house. So we got there to find Kathy crying, Angel trying to confort her by saying he’d perform an exorcism on German, and Kathy’s mom trying to help them both. We got there and, with the help of Kathy’s mom, tried to get everything straightened out, and a few hours later German came back… and then had a fever so high he was dilusional. Soooo… that was kind of new!
After that we went to visit a mother who’d asked us to come to her house to correct her 10-year-old son by teaching him about the Bible (That was pretty much how she phrased it (Obviously NOT in English!)). The funny thing is she’s not even Mormon! So we taught her son a part of one of the lessons and I guess we’ll go visit her again or something! (I’m still kind of wierded out about this…)
The last lesson we taught was the longest and also kind of funny (In a not-funny way). We went to visit an investigator to find that she’d been yelling at both of her kids because they weren’t doing well in school. (They both refused to do their homework and didn’t pay attention in class, so they kind of deserved it) So we had a talk with them and then told them to go and apologize to their mother. Elder Rodriguez and I both thought it’d be great: The mom would accept their apology, they’d all hug and cry, and then we could leave them in peace.
So the kids slowly went up to her and one of them said, “Mamá… ¡perdóname!” …Then the next part did not go according to plan. The mom yelled, “¡No!” and then proceeded to rant about how she wouldn’t forgive them until they actually started to behave and listen to her and do their homework and how much she was sacrificing for them and how they never showed gratitude and… ON AND ON SHE WENT! It got to the point when one of the kids looked at us as if to ask if we were sure this was a good idea, but we didn’t really know what to do because she was in full rant mode. When she finally calmed down we talked with her and the kids and finally got everything sorted out: with the family hugging and crying and all that.
Not much new that happened besides strange problems like that. We helped one woman make shoes (Everything here is made by the people, and it’s actually pretty interesting: The woman took some pre-cut shoe material, sewed it up with some super-duty thread, folded it and twisted it a bit, and in the end it was a shoe!) and we also had some drunks fighting in the street outside our cuarto at 2:00 AM (That tends to happen a lot around here). So life’s pretty good here in Peru!
— Elder Schroeder