Week 9

Maybe it would be a better idea to bring my Agenda with me on Prep Day so that I can look back through the week and see what I did so that I can go back to doing the day-by-day-format. I would bring my journal, but by the end of every day, I am far too exhausted to write. I write once a week at the most, and usually not even that. It isn´t that it´s hard. It´s more tiring. It isn´t really difficult, or at least isn´t difficult yet. I want to be here, and for that, the mission is easier. Sure it´s tiring, but physical exhaustion is temporal, and when I wake up in the morning, I´m always refreshed... Anyway, down to the nitty-gritty.

Pretty much every day this week, it rained, but at the beginning of the week, we had a deluge. It started raining early in the afternoon and continued well into the night. Elder De Jesús and I had been contacting in the streets and teaching families in Apacilagua, about a 30 minute walk from our casa. It´s a little higher in the mountain and away and on the other side of the river, so we didn´t quite realize how bad it was until we began to walk home that night.

Just as we were leaving Apacilagua, on the corner of the last street to leave the town is a pulp. (short for pulpería, which is a tiny store to buy basic stuff and snacks, there are a million in every town.) and the woman in this pulp called out to us to tell us the small stream down the road was flooded. We kinda of just brushed it off, but 5 minutes later we arrived at a party of a few cars, cyclists, and mototaxis all looking at what used to be a dry stream bed. It was now about thigh deep to me, and about 20 feet wide and flowing fast downhill. The stream is perpendicular to the road. Eventually a truck pulled ahead of everybody and plowed through. It took a while, and I wasn´t convinced it would make it through, but it did, so Elder De Jesús and I crossed first, and we made it. No one else tried for a while. And I know this, because we had walked pretty far before anyone else passed us.

After crossing through a couple streams and pools in better conditions than before and walked a decently while, we were almost back to Orocuina, but we still had to cross the bridge over the river. It wasn´t an issue because we had a bridge. But the water, which used to sit at least 10 feet below the bridge, was now running into the bridge, and several trees had crashed and were stuck on the bridge.

The inundation for the rest of the week never got that bad. But it rained every day and I am so grateful. It is so much nicer to have this rain than the scorching heat I had when I first got here. I love Orocuina. I love the people and the culture.

It´s incredibly different here, women breastfeed in Sacrament, and every one lives in a hut with a flat screen. Because soccer is everything.

Everything. Today for P day, we played Soccer in an outdoor fast court that we rented for a little over 3 hours. I am exhasted, and I am not very good compared to the Latino Elders. In fact, I am awful compared to the Latino Elders, but playing 5 on 5 is still really fun, and I look forward to the next time we play.

On Saturday we had two more Baptisms, Milton and Rosa, and their families came, this time we went to a church in Cholu because the water was muddy and flowing from all the rain.

The mission is great. Sorry I don´t know what more to write, I will start writing in my journal more often so that I can give you a better review of the week. Anyway, thanks for all writing me, and have a great week.