Happy Halloween to All! (And I got transferred!)

They actually do celebrate Halloween here in Peru, but you have to be careful because apparently some people use this day to worship the devil or something. I don’t think that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that a while back it was and that’s why some people have a problem with it. But at least the little kids still get to golosinear! (According to my dictionary, that means “to go around eating candy”!) I spiced up my room a little bit for the occasion, thanks to the decorations my family sent me:

And then I got transferred to a new area, too!

I pretty much moved  30 minutes away to another part, called Comas, where I’m now in Año Nuevo 2 (And I just might end up staying here through New Year’s!). Here I am with my new companion, Elder Marino:

Two things: Yes, Elder Marino really is that short; and yes, I cannot take selfies. (But I really don’t care about that last one!) I’m happy to have Elder Marino as my companion because it gives me a bit of a break. Back in Villa Hermosa with Elder Rioja, he didn’t like to take initiative to do anything, and I ended up doing a lot because I had to force him. But Elder Marino likes to work and does it well, so I’ll probably enjoy this change!

The last litte thing I wanted to report is about the ward activity Añp Nuevo is going to do tomorrow. Unfortunately, we can’t go (?) but all the preparation that they’ve done is so cool that the four of us (There are four missionaries in this ward; that’s why I’m in Año Nuevo 2) had to take a picture with the banners they made for the four teams:

Apparently the bishop works as a graphic designer, which explains a lot!

But yeah, I don’t know what else to tell you guys. I’ve almost got 13 months now, so I’m on the downhill, and I imagine this will all go by way too fast. I’m just going to keep working, and one day I’m going to wake up and I’ll have a week left. Then it will all hit me and I’ll freak out and work like a loco. But until then I’ll just keep at it. It’s weird: this has been my life for so long that it’s completely normal, and I don’t even realize that I’m a missionary…

— Elder Schroeder

Well, sorry for the lack of an actual email last week. I didn’t really have a whole lot to report, as I said, and I had to take a lot of time preparing my tech. Elder Ushiñahua gave me a little radio and I was getting some conference talks, writing to my mission president about all the things I’ve got to do as District Leader, and a bunch of other stuff. So this week I’ll try to make up for it…

(… But I don’t really have a whole lot to report this week either!)

Well, for starters, tomorrow are cambios, which probably means that I’m off to another area! I’ve already been here for 6 months now and it’s time for me to go. I’ll honestly be a little sad but I have been here for a while. Maybe it’ll do me good to go off to another part (And maybe have a new responsability! Everyone in my district thinks I’m going to be a zone leader, but I doubt it. I don’t have a whole lot of time as a DL and all the ZLs are new, so they’re not being changed out quite yet. Plus I don’t really want to stop being DL! It’s a lot of fun and I’m learning a lot!) Unfortunately, I won’t know until tonight what’s going to happen, but that will be the first thing I mention in my next email!

I admit, it would be really funny if I didn’t leave because everyone’s already saying good-bye to me! I’ve written in so many notebooks and Books of Mormon!

This is only half of the stack! I’ve been working my way through the books every night, but I don’t get far enough because I finish one or two and end up with three more! It’s really great to see that these people really do like me and it gives me the opportunity to write a little something so they remember me (And how to spell my name! My ward mission leader still doesn’t know how to pronounce it correctly! I’ve actually given up and have started telling everyone — ward members, investigators, contacts in the street — that my name is “Élder Shweder” so that they can manage to pronounce it!). What I don’t like is that I NEVER KNOW WHAT THE HECK I SHOULD WRITE!!! I have no clue what to say and it takes too long to write it all! If I make it sound lame or write something dumb, that’s what they’re going to have to remember me by! Luckily I’ve at least figured out Spanish grammer, so I don’t make mistakes (Hopefully!)

Then we had a little fiesta in our district meeting:

(Man, you can tell that summer’s coming! All the whiter people in the district are a little sunburned! It’s starting to get really hot here! And the weather always messes with you! It’ll be raining in the morning but during the day it must be 80 degrees, and at night it drops down to 60 or 50! It’s like being in Colorado! (But with more dogs. And Spanish!))

I made pancakes, which, might I add, is no small feat! When you have no measuring utinsels and the recipe is according to cups and teaspoons, you kind of have to guess it. Then you don’t have syrup! And when you’ve finally finished mixing all the ingredients you have to cook it on an electric stove that you need to unplug every few minutes to maintain the heat and keep it from burning the pancakes. They ended up pretty well, so I’m proud of it, but it was very hectic for a good half-hour!

But not much else to share for this week. Today I should have a party in the branch, so I’ll take some pictures of that, but I’ll keep you all posted! Until next week!

— Elder Schroeder

Hey all! Sorry that this week my email will be a little shorter than in the past because I’ve been busy today with other Internety stuff — downloading videos, emailing my friends from the mission so we can share photos, stuff like that — and I didn’t really have much to report to begin with, but next time I’ll share a little bit! Chao!

— Elder Schroeder

ONE YEAR DOWN, ONE YEAR LEFT!

I’m not exactly sure if I should celebrate or cry that I’ve already finished half my mission. When I had 11 months I was honestly a little scared to think about it, but now that it’s come around I’m not sure what to feel. The end of my mission is going to come at one time or another — and right now I don’t want it to — but I imagine that by the end of two years I’ll be quite ready to get back. There is, of course, the constant longing for good food for breakfast and dinner (The members always cook really good lunch!), and I won’t miss having to ride buses to get everywhere. Then it’ll be nice to relax a little bit and have actual free days, not just P-Days.

… But even if I don’t want to have finished a year, I admit that the fiesta was awesome!

One of my zone leaders, Elder Stoker, did a work visit that day, which is why he was there and not my companion, Elder Rioja. Towards the end of the night we went to visit a family (Hermano Alexis, Hermana Janet, and their kids, Diana and Roguel) who told us to pass by, saying that we could eat some banana pancakes for dinner, which would have been pretty great because I didn’t even know you could even make pancakes out of bananas! So we went and I had no clue that they were going to throw a party (As can be seen by the lower-quality photos; my camera died in the middle, so I had to copy the pictures from Alexis’s cell phone!). So we:

Burned my tie (I didn’t really want to follow the tradition of burning a tie at six months, a shirt at one year, pants at 18 months, and your suit at 24 months, but I have a lot of ugly ties (Thanks to you, Dad, and the bad taste of whoever gave you those ties!) and they handed me a bottle of lighter fluid, so what else was I supposed to do?!)

Made me a grave

Had some fun with swords and masks

And then ate cake (After they’d shoved my face in it and we’d finished throwing frosting at each other!)

It was pretty great!

… But aside from that not much else to mention. We haven’t done any dangerous service projects recently, everyone here’s pretty good, and I’m just getting ready to leave my area because I’ve already got six months here, so I’m pretty sure I’m gone. If I don’t leave I’d be really happy because I really love the members here (Who else would shove cake frosting in my ear?!), but, like I said at the beginning, I can’t stay here forever! Gotta change something!

Here’s wishing you all a good week and a happy whatever-Peruvian-holiday-it-was-this-week!

— Elder Schroeder

364 DAYS LEFT…

General Conference is always awesome for us missionaries ’cause it gives us a little bit of a break. We just kind of bring people to the chapel so they can watch it and learn something. In fact, my schedule for Saturday was basically this:

8:00 — Personal Study
9:00 — Companionship Study
10:00 — Call and look for everyone who said they’d come to conference with us
11:00 — Watch conference
1:00 — Go back to my area (We watched conference in the stake center, which is 30 minutes away from my area!)
1:30 — Eat lunch
2:30 — Go back to the stake center
3:00 — Watch conference
5:00 — Call people to invite them to eat pizza with us and come to the last session
5:30 — Eat pizza (!)
6:30 — Call people again
7:00 — Watch conference
9:00 — Go back to my area to sleep

And I don’t know what it was, but this time the talks were AWESOME! Saturday night I wanted to stay up and keep listening to conference talks because it was so good!… Then our neighbors had to ruin it all by having a party from midnight until 4 AM, meaning I didn’t sleep much… On the plus side, I slept really well Sunday!

And, unfortunately, that’s about everything interesting that I have to report. So I guess I’ll just stick some pictures in here:

Here’s my district:

(From left to right, top to bottom: Elder Seminario, Elder Gil, Elder Rioja, Me, some random woman walking by, Hermana Gonzales, Hermana Lopez, Hermana Manrique, Hermana Gilson)

And then here’s me messing around with the Color Accent function in my camera. I’ve decided this will be my album cover for The Greatest Mission Hits of Elder Schroeder!

The last thing is that I got my first dog bite! I’ve been bitten before, but I’m not sure those really counted because some of the dogs had a muzzle and just kind of squeezed my leg a little because of that, and others didn’t actually leave a mark! And then the first dog that actually bites me is a tiny little white dog, not even something scary or intimidating! I’ll admit that I really wanted to punt that dumb little thing, but I decided not to because it’s about a foot tall and I figured if I did kick it I might send it flying! (And then the mission rules say we shouldn’t do anything that hurts animals, so I guess I’d sin by kicking it…)

But yeah, that’s it! I’ll let you know what’s going on next week, and hopefully it’s a little more interesting!

— Elder Schroeder