6-25-12

Moms,

Yeah, so I am in an area now called Santa Cruz in Quiche. It’s very movie-esque, like remember the scene in Inception where he is running through the market in Central America? That is what my area reminds me of. It’s really touristy so that is kind of different than what I have been used to. Mostly because it’s clean, that is the biggest change, there isn’t garbage everywhere. It’s really big though, I don’t know why but all of my areas so far have been huuuge. My area is the actual town of Quiche, which is 80 thousand people, and then about 20 aldeas (little groups of houses) of about 200 people. There are a million of the took-took things also, the little red taxis, that is how everyone gets around because they are suuuper cheap. Most of the women wear "corte", the traditional clothes, and almost everyone speaks Quiche. They all speak Spanish too but my comp and I want to learn at least the basics in Quiche if we can.

My comp is Elder Villalazy, and he is a cool guy. He has 14 months in the mission so I am still just going strong as junior comp, but that’s fine with me ha-ha. He is from Panama, but not from anywhere normal. He grew up on some tiny island and spoke only the language that the 200 people on the island spoke. So he came and had to learn Spanish too. Which is kind of funny for me because he speaks pretty well, but not perfect.  He gets a lot of the tenses mixed up, and always prays in the wrong tense. It always just kind of makes me smile a little bit to see a pure Latino, from Central America and all, and he doesn’t even speak perfect Spanish. He can speak quite a bit of English too, which is cool. He is a smart kid really, considering where he grew up and all. But I am stoked, he is a super good comp. In one of his older areas he learned how to speak fluently one of the other dialects here, Mam. So he always tries to speak to people here in Mam to see if they know it, but its basically pure Quiche here.

One of the best parts of my area though is that there is a cream soda factory here, and it’s amazing. Makes me sooo homesick, but I cant resist it.  It rains a lot here too. A lot more than what I have ever seen before, it’s crazy. The roads at night are usually just rivers from the rain all day. I had to break out the shoe dryers for the first time actually. I am glad to say that was a good investment of yours.

As for the church in my area though... it’s not so great. There are three sets of missionaries in my area, and there is no division, and we basically are just in charge of reactivating and hoping that we get some baptisms in the meanwhile. There are 650 members on record in this town, at church yesterday, there were 60 people. There are less than 100 active members out of the almost 700 members here. In elder’s quorum there where more missionaries than other people in the whole class. That’s not good ha-ha. There is some crazy apostasy here too. Apparently there is a branch that is like an hour from here where they just found out that they had women blessing and passing the sacrament because there were not any active men attending the branch. (I am assuming the branch president is inactive also) One of the area authorities was trying to get that all worked out, and he went to the church the next week and women were still passing the sacrament, the guy was like uhh hey guys you can’t be doing this, and the women told him, oh don’t worry, since you said we couldn’t last week we had the branch president give us the priesthood so we can bless the sacrament now. Holy crap ha-ha. When I heard that I was just hoping that it wasn’t true ha-ha. That is sooo bad.  

With my old comp though, yeah I am not really sure, he didn’t really have much to go home too. He told me he was going to come back here and live in Xela, but like right-now-right-now I am pretty sure he is with his uncle in Honduras.

Anyway, that’s about all for the week. Jared wrote me back, he sounds like he is doing awesome. He is such a good kid. Crazy Taft is almost done too. That will be a weird day when that comes. I had a few really good friends here in the mission just go home, that was kind of sad. I know I am starting to get to the point where I have been out for a little bit, but I still feel like I can’t really see the light at the end of the tunnel. That’s all right though, its going fast. Also, a member told us the heat won the NBA finals. That’s a bummer. Good thing I missed out on that.

Love you, 

Adam