Hi everyone,
This is my first P-day in two weeks, and suffice it to say that it couldn´t have come any sooner. Hermana Campbell is finally out in the field, and BOY has it been tough! My area is called San Cristobal, and it´s infamously difficult. So far we only have two baptismal dates (and I didn´t do anything to procure them), but we have a lot of new investigators. Yesterday we were walking around in Balcones, which is a poorer part of our area, when we stumbled upon a huge family sitting outside their house (I say house, but it´s actually just a bunch of sheets of metal stacked together). We taught them the restoration, and they were really willing to listen and excited about everything we said. It was amazing.
One of the crazy things about here is the huge variance in living conditions. We live in a little apartment behind a member´s house, and within a fenced-in area called Pinares. There are so many of those types of areas, kind of like gated communities, except not everyone that lives there is rich like you would expect in America. So our apartment is pretty okay, but just down the street lives a member family who live in a metal shack and they don't have electricity. I don´t know.
One thing I do know is that the babies here are reeeeeal cute. On Wednesday, we went with a member to visit one of her friends and taught her a lesson, and the member brought her daughter Crystal, who's two and so smart. She held my hand the whole way there and she had maybe the worst smelling poopy diaper I've ever encountered.
It´s really, really hard to speak Spanish all the time. My trainer, Hermana Merlo, is from Nicaragua and can understand some English, but she can´t speak it, so I barely every speak English out loud these days. That's a big adjustment. It's also weird to go places like church and riding buses and have people try to talk to me and have zero idea of what they're saying. But whatever! I'm learning!
This is the cold and rainy season in Guatemala, which basically feels like Seattle in spring, except that the rain is waaaay heavier. On Thursday we were out teaching a lesson and it started pouring, and we had to walk home two miles in the rain. We were completely soaked. But it was a good educational experience, because now we always take our umbrellas.
Saturday was Dia de los Muertos here, which is a pretty big deal. There were tons of people selling flowers on the street and in the cemetary, where we went tracting and taught the Plan of Salvation (clever, right?), which was cool. The members we live with, the Menas family, made us a traditional Guatemalan Dia de los Muertos dish called fiambre which consists of a LOT of different types of meat and a lot of beets. It was...new. Mostly I haven´'t had to eat anything too weird yet, but I'm still inside the city, so we'll see what happens when I get transferred.
This week was mostly tough because 1) it was my first week and 2) my companion got some really bad news about her family on Thursday. So if you all could keep the Merlo family in your prayers, that would be great.
I don´t really know what else to say and I´m running out of internet time, but I hope you're all happy and healthy and I would love to hear from any and all of you!
Much love,
Hermana Campbell
No comments:
Post a Comment