My bus didn't roll over the road, but I do have a different surprise. My visa didn't go through and so I'm in California waiting for it--San Francisco to be exact. It's kind of sad because I was really looking forward to meeting my President and my real trainer, but things like this happen and I just have to keep a positive perspective.
April fool´s! I hope none of you were so easily fooled by that. And I know that technically april fool´s was yesterday but with the combination of it being conference it completely slipped my mind, so I figured I give it a shot in my weekly email. I'm celebrating a working enter bar so this might be a long email.
So my first week in the field in three words would be: I LOVE IT! It's like exactly what I wanted if I had any idea of what it would be (which I really didn't), but I have a Latina trainer, Hna Ramirez from Honduras. She's fantastic. Obedient, patient, and open to suggestions. I really am in San Francisco, but it's an area in the zone of Mazatenango which is about one hour from Reu.
I loved meeting President Maravilla. He's an enthusiastic man and they gave us all a warm welcome as well as a good laugh. We ate at his house the first night and he told the cooks to give the two Norte elders (who you should know would easily eat 2 plates of lunch or dinner at the CCM) a ton of food but when they saw them loading their plates. They couldn't finish their plates for probably the first time in their lives and to all the Latinos it was funny because they were always asking them for food or ice cream. I will admit I was laughing pretty loudly too, but partly because of President Maravilla's attitude about it all.
In other news, I love my area. It really is named San Francisco for a reason. It's built on a hill so we're either walking up a hill or down a hill no matter where we're going. We also have a village called Buena Vista which is a good walk from our little casa and it's in the jungle practically. Well, there are roads, there's just a ton of trees too. I inherited all of 1 investigator. The others were baptized before we came and so we had to focus a lot on finding finding finding. Families in particular. And we did find but we're now in the process of visiting which can be a tricky thing because people have such tricky schedules around here.
Conference was perfect, wasn't it? I honestly loved all of it and could go on and on about it, but I've just chosen a few to highlight. First, Elder Andersen's talk in Sunday Afternoon. The question he posed at the beginning, "What does Christ think of me?" was something completely different by the end of the talk, anybody else experience the same thing? How the question was transformed by the Spirit to mean something so much more than the sum of it's words. So cool. And then President Uchtdorf's about not judging seemed to go hand in hand with Elder Holland's about how life isn't a competition. Elder Christofferson's was funny with his little nod to the interpreters. I was watching it in English so I don't know if they translated it or not. Hermaneutics, eh? I really appreciated Elder Hallstrom's as a missionary because it's so true. How I wish sometimes we could just go around a say "Look at our church. Look how well organized it is. Look at all the fruits of our labors. Look what the Church can help you do." But I realize how silly that wish is, because if an investigator is going to join the Church, it should be because they're truly converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not the Church. The Church is merely a tool in the goal of salvation for every human being.
Life isn't so primitive here. We walk a lot, yes, but we also take a bus a lot and even tuc-tuc's which are small taxis that can fit 6 missionaries if you squish. There's a ward member that we pay for lunch and she's a good cook. There's also a ward member who does our laundry and we have a warm shower. My first day in Reu it rained super hard. And it rained again on Friday pretty hard and it looks as if it will rain today too. I'm totes fine with that too because it helps cool this place down.
The humidity really isn't that bad, but after walking a mile, you can feel pretty icky. What keeps getting my goat is the bugs. Apparently my blood is a hot commodity around here because everyday I have new bites. And even though white people aren't new to San Francisco, I'm 99.9 percent positive I'm the only one there right now which means I get noticed a lot. Some of my titles here are canche, canchita, hermanita, among others. None of them are inherently offensive, just a bit annoying, but that's life in Guatemala for nortes I suppose.
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