Hey all! First, I just wanted to thank all of you who wrote to me for the uplifting messages I got. Maybe I need to complain more or something, because I got WAY more emails than usual! Nah, just kidding, but seriously, it was good to hear from you all and I liked the stories from you ex-missionaries! I know I’m not alone, but it’s nice to think that I’ll be able to laugh about all this after my mission, too!
Well, as the subject says, we’ve got cambios (“changes”) again! And while I’m not exactly disappointed about the changes to my companion (It’s the same) or the hermanas (They’re the same hermanas), I’m still trying to wrap my head around two things:
1. I’m now district leader of, not only my area and Collique, the area of the hermanas, but I’m also in charge of two other areas, Casuarinas 1 and 2! I just barely figured out how to work with the sisters and be DL, but now I’ve got to get used to it again because now I have four Elders, too! I think I just became the largest district here in my zone! (I’m gonna die…)
2. Well, as I mentioned a few weeks back, we have a new mission president, Presidente Godfrey. He’s very different from Presidente Erickson, but we didn’t really realize he would do so many changes until this week! We learned on Monday that he has decided to change the following:
We aren’t going to have zone meetings every week, now it’s district meetings, meaning we don’t get to be with other missionaries outside of our district as often and I have to start preparing something to do for an hour and a half, not just 30 minutes! And now my district is twice as big, too!
I don’t have to call and verify with the missionaries every night to see how they’re doing, just once a week (Which actually works in my favor after my district’s growth, but how am I supposed to know what’s going on if I can only call once a week?)
All our lessons have to be really short, quick, and powerful. We shouldn’t teach longer than 15 minutes the first lesson, and the others should only take 30 minutes at most. Sooo… I have to re-learn a few things and start practicing teaching quick!
The zone leaders are only going to interact with the district leaders (me, in this case), not with anyone else. So I’m basically on my own here (I’m seriously going to die…)
Sooooo… Yeah. That’s going to be interesting…
Moving on, last P-Day was pretty cool because we went to the Park of Legends, which is a zoo with a much cooler name. Anyway, there we got to see a whole bunch of cool animals, but my camera died halfway through, so unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of a monkey with the most amazing mustache I have ever seen in my life (I know you’re all really disappointed about that). But here are some other cool animals we saw:
A penguin with big dreams (Feel kind of sorry for him, right?)
An amazing, one-of-a-kind animal from the selva (jungle) of Peru:
Elder Ushiñahua! (In front of a giant pineapple) (He actually is from the selva, a part called Urimaguas)
Then I guess some other people got a photo of a REALLY strange animal from North America:
That’s right: Some little Peruvian kids ran up to me and asked me if they could take a picture with me because I was such a strange sight! I thought it was funny, so I went along with it!
So that’s pretty good, but not really a whole lot of things you wouldn’t find in other zoos in the States. I guess that’s kind of the problem with zoos: They bring animals from all over the world, so you don’t really find anything new in any particular zoo (Except for Elder Ushiñahua, I guess, but I’m kind of over that ’cause I live with it! Elder Schroeder, too!)
And then we also helped out with a wedding! (And Elder Rodriguez, my companion before, was there too, so he got a free ride into the picture)
However, it was kind of *pbthhh* because the husband, Freddy, went to go work in the morning and was really far away! So he didn’t get back until really late, and we didn’t get there until after everything had already ended! So I was a little ticked and I imagined his wife would kill him (I’m pretty sure that if I even thought of working on the day of my wedding my wife would refuse to become my wife — She’d end it right there!), but she was all good because they’d already signed the papers and were legally married. But still!
So yeah, those are the adventures from this week! Hopefully I have some more goofy things to share next time, but until then I guess I’l be figuring out how to be district leader all over again!
— Elder Schroeder