Week 7, Delicias Mexico

The weather is still pretty hot here, but I´m getting to the point where a day in the 70s feels pretty good.  The leaves are slowly starting to die, but nothing too colorful yet.  Most of the trees are palm trees and I´m not posivite if they change color or how they shed their leaves... if they do.  Last year was the first time it snowed in my area in 5 years.  It´s not due to it being cold enough, but more because it does not rain here.  It´s rained 2 times in the past 7 weeks here. That is okay because this place is pretty lit. 

My new companion is super super fun.  He´s a little crazy, but he is the same person in the house and on the street.  Because of this a lot of people like talking to us because he is super funny to talk to and has a bunch of great stories.  His stores are often about gringo companions in particular his trainer who had a rough time with the food and often couldn´t find a bathroom.  The people here love to hear about how gringos do in their state.  Fortunately, I´m not super interesting with food stories ha ha ha. But this week was probably one of my fastest because of my new companion.  It was probably my funnest as well.  I´ve finally reached the point where I can understand about 99 percent of what people say.  Granted when they aren´t drunk ha ha.  Anyways because of understanding more there are times where I´ll teach the lesson for an hour or 2 and my companion won´t really talk.  It´s been some super good practice and has helped my spanish a ton in terms of speaking it.  Speaking has come behind understanding. A lot of the people will pretend to not understand me, so my companion will make fun of them for being drunk or not understanding their own language.  He´s super cool about helping me out in those ways.

This week I also had a bad luck streak.  On Tuesday I forgot the keys in the house and we had to climb in through the roof.  On Wednesday I was cleaning out my razor and all the blades bounced off the table I was cleaning it on and fell over into the very very well used toilet...  It was not a fun experience getting them out.  I probably washed my hands for a solid 30 minutes and scrubbed them red ha ha ha.  Finally on Thursday I opened the fridge door and it broke off the hinges and fell on top of me.  That was a fun one though.  We had some good laughs about it.  Finally I had some good luck in the end.  I got my card from the church and it had 2 months of money on it, so basically I had an extra 100 bucks to spend. I decided rather than spending it all on food that would go bad in a week, I would buy an item.  I decided to buy a piano.  I would've bought a guitar, but guitars got banned from our mission because people would play them instead of working.  Pianos are alright because we have to practice for church or for district meetings.  I´m often the one that has to play even before I had my new piano mainly because I can sight play any song right handed.  We all thought the piano was a good idea after getting tired of singing sweet hour of prayer every week from another elder ha ha ha. So that was a super cool experience.

Our area got our threat level raised because of all the clowns.  Now we have to enter the house at 8 pm instead of 9 pm because we´ve got 4 clowns around our house and in the areas we have most of our investigators.  It is super annoying because some of our investigators are only home around 8 pm, so I´m hoping that this dumb clown thing passes.  My companion lost a few investigators and members to the clowns in his old area so he´s a little worried about it.  I´m not too worried because everyone here is super cautious and likes to help out those in need, even the missionaries ha ha ha.  Oh and the gangs are on our side too, so that helps a lot.

Anyways a cool experience we had this week was we were walking home when we were encountered by a drunk man.  He started calling us liars and calling us out on a lot of things.  He told us that we never said hello to him when we walked by.  He was very upset because of this.  Anyways he told us that we needed to visit him and teach him a lesson.  So the next day we went to his house and he quickly apologized about being drunk.  He told us he was in a program for it and was trying really hard to stop drinking.  We had given him a packet when we met him before in the street about the plan of salvation.  He read the entire thing and had a ton of questions.  He really enjoyed what was in it and we taught him a lesson on it.  He said he wanted to be baptized by the end of the lesson.  Unfortunately because of the new rules he has to attend church 5 weeks in a row.  He is super interested and wants us to come to his house everyday in the afternoon because when we are with him he doesn´t want to drink. He is super cool and we have high hopes for him, and we think he can reach God's expectations. 

Well there you have a little bit of misfortunation, terror, and success, and a piano, basically the best week ever ha ha

ha

Elder Bunch,

Delicias Chihuahua