Happy New Year.
Sorry, my computer’s a little broken — or at least the keyboard is — so I can’t use exclamation marks or anything else above the letters. So this email will probably be really boring, sorry.
I can’t even make jokes without the exclamation mark to make them interesting. Crud.
Anyway, Feliz Año Nuevo. This week has been good, but it’s really difficult for us just because everyone’s family is in town and thus they don’t want us to visit them. I don’t really blame them, but we already had our Christmas mission celebration and now we don’t have anything else to take up our time with, aside from walking around looking for people to teach and avoiding explosives that are probably illegal. I got some sweet pictures of the explosions, but it’s pretty easy when the entire skyline is a series of explosions lasting 15 minutes.
I wonder how many calls the firemen get these kinds of nights… Maybe not too many, just because most of the houses are made out of cement, but I bet the hospital’s pretty occupied.
We finished watching the fireworks and then went to go to bed.
… Or tried to, because then the cantina in front of our house started up the music and we basically didn’t sleep because it was so loud and they didn’t stop until sometime around 9:00am…
Then earlier in the week we did a service project that ended up being pretty interesting.
A recent convert asked us to help her take apart a pre-made house that they’d set up on the roof so that they could move:
… And everything was going just fine until ELDER MCMURRAY FELL OFF THE ROOF.
I didn’t really know what was going on because I happened to be on one side of the wall while he was trying to pry the wall apart on the other. Then all of a sudden I hear his companion, Elder Escobar, yell, “No¡ No¡ NOO¡” and then I hear a big thud accompanied by a few other strange noises. I thought, “What was THAT?” and then it dawns on me… “CRUD…”
He was a little shaken and beaten up, but other than that he was OK. We sent him to the mission medic just to be sure, and he got to rest a little, but it wasn’t anything serious. I just hope he doesn’t have any super dangerous service projects in the future — he’s only got four weeks in the field and he’s already falling off roofs and stuff.
But yeah, all good here. Hope it’s the same there. WELCOME TO 2017.
— Elder Schroeder