Well, since I didn’t mention a whole lot last week about how life’s going and stuff like that, I’ll give you all a two-week recap, ’cause it was pretty interesting:

For starters, another “first” in the mission: Praying for our dead neighbor’s funeral (!) That was certainly a little new. One of our neighbors died this last week, on Friday, and because they’re richer here they had a massive funderal/party that involved lots of loud music and lots of alcohol, punctuated by moments of silence to mourn. I’m not entirely sure how Peruvians normally do funerals, but whatever. Anyway, on Sunday we were returning to the house and a woman ran up to us and asked us if we could offer a prayer for this man. I was a little confused because they’re Catholics, but one of the things about Peru is that basically any religion will do, as long as they don’t have to change their religion, and anyone who devotes their time to God like we do is more “holy” or something. So we entered their house and I said a little prayer for this guy, doing my best to not mess up, becuase that would.. kind of.. ruin everything… and be super awkward… Yeah.

Then, for those of you that haven’t heard, we recently had some changes to our daily schedule! Before, we woke up at 6:30am, studied or got ready until 10:00am, went out to work until lunch at 1:00pm, left to work again at 3:00pm and worked until 9:30pm. Now we wake up at 7:30am, study and get ready until 10:30am, work until lunch at 1:30pm, and work from 2:00pm until 10:30pm, with freedom to choose when we take an hour to study as companions and to study the language! I’m still not used to it because I keep on waking up at 6:25am every.. single.. morning!

Of course, the 31st was my birthday, and it was pretty awesome. We celebrated a little on Monday, too, because it was P-day and all. I’ve added some pictures below.

Me, eating ceviche (Which we’re not supposed to eat in the mission because it has raw fish, but this is a special kind of ceviche that doesn’t have raw fish (Ceviche de pulpo)! So I can eat it!). (Ceviche is a mixture of fried fish, octopus, onion, lime juice, cancha, and aji, for those of you who haven’t heard of it before. Sounds weird, but it’s really good!)

This awesome family that we have here love the missionaries, so they threw a party for me and bought me a cake!

… And then shoved the cake in my face! (Well, actually, Elder Escobar also helped a little with that!):

Then, a few days later, I bought dinner for a drunk guy we’d contacted a while back. Why not, right?

So it’s all good here, and I had a good birthday! I’ll keep you all posted about how everything goes this week! ¡Nos vemos!

— Elder Schroeder