Guallejllachu cacancu?

If you’re wondering, that means “¿Éstan bein?” or “Are you well?” in Quechua, the Incan language. One of my goals before I finish the mission is to get a book to teach myself Quechua! Right now I’m making use of a dictionary I found on the internet, but I’ll need something that can teach me grammar and pronunciation…

Anyway, this week has been a little tough but pretty normal. I know I didn’t mention anything last week (mostly because the only thing worthy of mention was the cool experience we had), but I also forgot to mention that this past week was Semana 11, or the 11th week of my companion’s training! That meant that he was in charge of everything: the keys, the phone, deciding what we do for every hour of every day, everything! (Obvously I helped when he wanted it, but it was fun to take a break, not because I wanted to, but because I had to in order to help my companion!

Sounds like I did it right; of his Semana 11, Elder Pereira said, “Fue interestante. Hubo días cuando todo salió bien, hubo días cuando todo salió mal — ¡el jueves fue super estresante! — Fue entretenido guiar el área… No sé. ¡Tenía el celular! ¡Oh, y tenía las llaves! ¡Cada llave era distinto! ¡¿Qué es ésto?!”

[Google Translate says: “It was interesting. There were days when everything went well, there were days when everything went wrong. Thursday was super stressful! It was fun to lead the area … I do not know. He had his cell phone! Oh, and I had the keys! Every key was different! What is this?!”]

(Just so you understand, there are three doors to get into our cuarto, and every one is different in it’s shape.)

Here’s a picture of him enjoying his newfound authority:

He needs to start preparing himself because we’ve only got one more week together — we’ve got cambios next week and it’s more than probable that I’m leaving the area in his hands and heading off somewhere, where I’ll finish my mission! (Awwww…) I’m honestly going to be kind of sad if I leave Industrial because I like it here and I love the people that I’ve come to know! We haven’t had another baptism since Aimeé, but we have so many great people here that want to become closer to our Heavenly Father by being baptized! It’s so awesome to see how happy the gospel is making them! (I’ll send some pictures with them next week!)

One of the really cool experiences Elder Pereira had (I would say “we had” but I wasn’t there — we had a mini intercambio and I went to another area for a little bit) that shows just how awesome being a missionary is: We’ve been teaching a family that’s a single mother with her 17-year-old daughter and her 8-year-old son. We found them one day when the daughter, Ruth, talked to us one day and asked if she could come to church!… Obviously yes, PLEASE! Later we met her mom and her brother, and from then on we’ve been teaching them.

Well, the other day my companion went to visit them with another Elder (I, unfortunately, wasn’t there) and taught a really great lesson. During the lesson, they explained about Joseph Smith — how he had been the prophet that God chose to restore His church here on the earth — and how that had happened. At one point Ruth shared her testimony, telling her mom and her brother that she felt that it was true, and when she said the prayer to end the lesson she thanked our Heavenly Father because “she felt good, but didn’t know why”! I know that what she felt was the Spirit, and Elder Pereira came back and told me all about how amazing the lesson had been! It’s so awesome to be a missionary!

But yeah, what else happened this week…

Well, we decorated oranges to give to someone for their birthday:

Since it’s the season for oranges and mandarinas, we have a whole bunch of them, and to get rid of a few (And to try and get some birthday cake!) we drew these faces and they were our little birthday gift!

We also did some service to fix someone’s roof. Pictures pending — The Hermanas haven’t passed me the pictures yet! When I get them I’ll send them!

To finish, I suppose I’ll share some pictures from this cambio that I haven’t shared yet:

Eating a spoonful of dulce de leche / manjar blanco / caramel:

Dinner after a long cold day:

I suppose I should mention that I’m no longer district leader. Here’s my face when I had to go give the district binder to the new DL:

I’ll keep you all posted with the cambios that happen around here next week, and anything else crazy or exciting that happens!

— Elder Schroeder