04/17/2017 – Elder Schroeder's Mission Blog

18 months, 10 days, 2 hours, 17 minutes!

I’m just kidding about that! I’m not sure how many days or hours I’ve got because I’m not counting. The months, yes, I do count, and the days too, but I forgot… Last I checked, I’ve been out here for more than 540 days… I think…!

Anyway, like I said last week, we had cambios! I already knew that Elder Davila was going home, so I was guaranteed to have a new companion; the “who” is the question! Well, last Tuesday I found out: My son, Elder Pereira!

(Man, I don’t look good in any picture, do I?!)

Turns out I’m training! In mission slang we call our trainees our “hijos” and our trainer our “padres” (Or “madres” if you’re a Hermana!). So now I’ve expanded my family tree. Here’s as far as I know:

I’m the oldest of the four “sons” of Elder Terrones, but I trained after Elder Souza and Elder Turley (I’m not sure who his “son” is)! But now I have someone to carry on my legacy — I honestly thought that I’d never train and the family line would finish with me!

But honestly, it’s tough for me to call him my hijo because he already seems like a missionary with six months in the field — in reality he only has a week, and only a month here in Peru! He knows how to teach and he does it really well, so I’m basically refining his skills rather than teaching. It also helps that he’s really obedient and humble, so he’s willing to listen to me and wants to work hard! Honestly, it’s only when he asks me a question about Peruvian culture that I remember! (He’s from Argentina, which meant it was a little tough to understand him for the first few days, due to his accent!) I’m hoping we stay together during his entire training period of three months because we get along really well, but only time will tell.

But man, my companion has had an interesting first week in the field!

We started off with a service project: Cleaning our room! I had to live with the zone leaders for a few days, and there hasn’t been any time to clean lately, so we called our district leader, Elder Gallardo (I’m no longer district leader! I was a little disappointed because I really like it, but at last I’ll have a break at night to write in my diary and stuff!), his companion, and the zone leaders to help. We started by dividing up all the stuff Elder Davila had left when he finished and then moved on to the most pressing problem: the cockroaches. It doesn’t matter how many times we kill them — they keep showing up every night! Well, we found where they were all hiding: underneath my wardrobe!

So Elder Gerken, our zone leader, came in with a can of Raid and took care of that!

It felt good to solve that problem!

The next thing we tackled was a particularly difficult English assignment! We went to eat lunch with some members and when we asked if there was anything we could do to help them, one of the daughers asked if I could help with her English homework. Part of it was the past tense, and I realized that I couldn’t really teach her how to do it because it asked her to conjugate words like “is”, “eat”, and “go” in the past tense, and as any English speaker knows, there isn’t really a rule for that…

So I was explaining this to her and said, “You just have to memorize this part because these words aren’t normal. Normally, you just add ‘-ed’ to the end, like with,” (I looked at the page for an example), “‘sleeped’!” WRONG! So I guess this proves I’m forgetting English!

Then we also had a cool miracle happen. I’m just going to put it in Spanish ’cause my English isn’t so good right now…

El viernes estábamos trabajando (¡Como siempre!) pero no teníamos citas — todas habían caído. Estábamos sentados, comiendo galletas mientras pensábamos sobre qué era Plan G cuando ¡de repente una joven que estaba pasando nos preguntó, “¿Ustedes son mormones, cierto?”! Respondimos que sí, y ella nos dijo que era atea, pero quería que visitáramos a una mujer que estaba pasando por dificultades. Nos mostró la casa — que estaba en la misma calle — dijo el nombre de la mujer, y se fue. Bueno, ¡no teníamos nada que hacer!, entonces fuimos y tocamos la puerta de aquella casa. La mujer nos dejó entrar y le enseñamos. Nos contó algunos de sus problemas y dijo que quería saber cuál era la iglesia de Dios. Se comprometió asistir a la Iglesia el domingo, y al terminar la cita ¡nos dio la referencia de su hermana!

[Jeff’s translation, courtesy of Google Translate:

On Friday we were working (as usual!) But we had no appointments – they had all fallen through. We were sitting there, eating cookies, while we thought about what Plan G was like when suddenly a young woman was passing by asking us, “You are Mormons, right?” We said yes, and she told us that she was an atheist, but she wanted us to visit a woman who was going through difficulties. She showed us the house – which was on the same street – told us the woman’s name, and left. Well, we had nothing to do! So we went and knocked on the door of that house. The woman let us in and we taught her. She told us some of her problems and said that she wanted to know what God’s church was. She promised to attend the Church on Sunday, and at the end of the meeting she gave us the address of her sister!]

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for this week!

— Elder Schroeder