Elder Slack here! Once again it´s p-day. The time has flown by this past week, legit. So much has been happening, and I´ve been having lot´s of different thoughts about things. But hey! Here I am!!
At the start of this week, well half way through, we had a meeting. On Tuesay night, we had to travel all the way to Banfield, which is about 2 hours by public transport away so we went Tuesday night, because our meeting was on Wednesday morning. So we travel on some buses ad trains and made it. That area is completely different than the area that I´m in. My area is the majority dirt roads and kind of a poorer neighborhood. We went and slept over with some elders in Banfield and over there is like city all the way. It´s super nice over there, legit. We met up with the Elders who are in that area, and guess who it was? Elder Brock Miller, a friend from Brighton! It was way cool to be able to meet up with him and see him out here in the mission field.
That night I heard more English than I have the whole time I've been here. It was kind of nice to have a little bit of a spanish break, but now we're back into it! We went over to their pench (what they call apartments/rentals here) and holy moley! It is so nice, we're over here in Gonzalez Catán with our 1 room apartment that is about a 15 foot by 10 foot box on the ground, and they live over there, they've got 2 floors, a full area for kitchen and everything and eating. They have 2 rooms with 2 bunk beds each. And, get this! They have Carpet!!! Carpet! I haven't seen carpet in any other house besides the mission home here! But probably the best part, when we got up in the morning and I got to shower, oh my goodness, the water pressure is amazing! I couldn't believe it! So nice! Plenty of warm water all rushing down in full streams! Our apartment is a little old, and we're lucky if we get any sort of stream of warm water. Living here is really making me appreciate what I had back home.
But anyways, that night, they attempted to make us some pancakes, they turned out a little like big crepes, because they had to use cake batter instead of flower, But with plenty of dulce de leche is was good!
The meeting was really great though the next day, it was a new missionary training essentially, they talked about a lot of different things, from managing our money to the kind of missionaries that we need to become and how to learn from our trainers. It was really great, our mission president shared a little bit, it was really great!
The castellaño (spanish) is starting to discourage me a little bit. I can understand decently well, but I can't understand no where near well enough to hold a conversation with someone. That's probably the hardest part for me, I want to talk to the people, I want to talk with them and I want to converse and tell them about so many different things, but I can't really. I can talk, I can pretty much get my thoughts across in a lesson. But when my companion starts talking about normal things when we first come up to the people, I can try and follow the conversation, but it's extremely difficult because I can't understand well enough, and I can't really add to the conversation because I don't know what's going on half the time, It's a little rough for now, but I'll catch on eventually I know. One of the things that I've been told is that the language is the only thing that really just comes with time, I need to study and everything, but it really is just dependent on time and my patience. So I wait!
A problem there is here in South America, there are tons of less-active or inactive members. Tons of people have been baptized and are members of the church, but probably 80% or more of the people who are baptized are inactive right now. It's kind of weird sometimes, we'll be walking around trying to contact people, and we'll talk to 5 different people and like 3/5 are like, "Oh yeah, I'm a member of your church!" And we're like "That's great! Want to come to church on Sunday?" And they're all like "no" because a lot of them don't have a lot of problems, and a lot of the people here don't realize why they need to go to church. Hopefully we can help them remember.
To those of you who have read all the way to this point, thank you! And you may be wondering why this week is titled stinky feet. Well. I've had 2 different interesting encounters this past week. The first, we we're half running in a hurry to meet up with a member so we could go to some appointments, and we were almost back to our pench. Here, they don't have that great of a sewage system in my area. They have this thing called a Sangha (sungha?) They have these gutters all the way down the street that are open and when we flush anything or run any water it all goes down a drain, and just out into the street where it just decays away and rots. Well we we're hurrying back, and I happened to step a little to close to the sangha, the edge started to collapse, so I try to step backwards and lose my balance, so I put my foot down to catch my self. Straight in to the middle of the sangha, yup! And it splashed, all of this stuff that I don't know what it is, all black water and dirt and some other stuff you can imagine, all the way up my pant leg and a bit on my shirt. So what do me and my companion do after I get back out? Bust up laughing, what else could we do!?
But that wasn´'t all that my shoes could take for the week, oh no! The other day we show up for an appointment, they let us in the gate. Did I mention that essentially everyone has a dog here? Yeah, so we walk in, and I turn around to look at my companion who is behind me. Then I feel my foot slide on something smooth, I look down, oh would you look at that! There's some smeared dog poo. Yes all over the bottom of my shoe, so I try and stomp off as much as I can while my companion is holding back from dying of laughter. One could say that I am putting my shoes to good use. One could also say that it was a bit of a sticky situation.
That's all for this week! Thanks!
Elder Slack
P.S. I had my first Asado yesterday! Oh my goodness!! It was amazing!!! Legit!! The meat here is so amazing, at least the way they cook it. Although, I've had more chicken than I've had beef. But all is well!
(Captions for pictures added by Elder Slack's mom- he doesn't tell me what or who is in the pictures, so if you happen know who it is let me know and I will change it)
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| Me with Elder Brock Miller |
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| In the kitchen... |
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| Meal completed |
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