Hey, everyone! It’s the week of my first transfer (I still don’t know who’s getting changed, but I’m pretty sure nothing new’s going to change with me)!
Hope you all had a merry Christmas and will have a great New Years! I know I won’t sleep because Peruvians love their fiestas and fireworks! I couldn’t get to sleep the night before Navidad until around 2 AM because of all the explosions outside my window! I just wish we were more in the hills because the fireworks were incredible and we couldn’t see a lot of them because we’re surrounded by buildings! But it was still great, and I got a Christmas package from my family and some sweet ties from my companion! He’s so funny: in the Peruvian mission field, you refer to the person who trained you, your capacitador, as your “padre” of the mission. So he put some scriptures on the back that relate to fathers and sons, like John 5:19! I thought that was pretty good, but what was really nice was he put it on the back of his favorite tie, which he gave to me! Elder Terrones is AWESOME!
Aside from not sleeping on Christmas, not much has happened this week (Well, a LOT happened in my stomach, but I’m not going to mention much about this! My stomach pretty much got loved to death by the members of our ward: the Christmas tradition around here is to eat paneton, which is a kind of sweet bread with dried fruits throughout. It’s pretty good, but I don’t want to eat any more for at least another year because we ate nothing BUT paneton all Christmas — every appointment, MORE PANETON! Not the healthiest diet, and our toilet and stomachs suffered for the next two days!). But we haven’t done much because it’s just been really slow. Almost none of our investigators are progressing, partly because it’s the week of Navidad and partly because they just don’t want to change anything. We do have one success story: One of our investigatores, Hermana Roxanna, is getting baptized on the 3rd, and it looks like she wants ME to baptize her! (My first baptism!) But besides her, not much is going on.
On the 24 I got a really nice break from everything while the entire mission celebrated Navidad together. Every group created a skit and they were all pretty good… except for ours, of course. I was really disappointed, because ours could have been awesome. We were going to do a parody of the “I’ll make a man out of you” song from Mulan about the mission, and it was really good. Elder Toth, our zone leader, had written some pretty clever lyrics and we’d figured out a really good way to make it work on a stage (I would send the lyrics, but they’re in Spanish and I forgot them, so I’ll try and send a translation next week!). Our problem was we’d only practiced once and we choked during the actual performance, so we probably looked really dumb. But the other skits were pretty good; one group did a “12 días de Navidad” that was really well done.
I also had my first encounter with true aji. Aji is a very spicy flavoring they use around here and I’ve only ever had it in small amounts before in my food. But in Christmas dinner with a member there were some mysterious yellow peas that I hadn’t encountered before, and I decided I’d be adventurous. That was a mistake! Turns out it was pure aji, and my eyes watered for about 5 minutes straight!
Well, not much more to talk about or mention. Hopefully some more interesting stuff will happen next week and we’ll have some more success. If anyone wants something Peruvian or has a question, shoot me an email and I’ll try to answer it! Here are some pictures of my Christmas presents, my companion, and fireworks.
¡Chao!
— Elder Schroeder
