I love that Alex gets to add a little more detail now. I think he will be able to make us feel like we are there after a few more weeks. Maybe it is the amount of time he gets as opposed to the MTC. I Love to get his letters and know he is where he is supposed to be.
What can I say about this week? I don't even know. It would take about as long to tell you everything as it did to experience it -- you can't really easily compress time down on the mission. New stuff happens all the time. All the time. (If I spell things weirdly, the keyboard here is much different.)
Let's see. We don't have a lot of investigators in our sector immediately right now, so we spend a lot of time looking. We contact for about three hours a day, usually more. A lot of talking in Castellano, essentially. (The dialect is different enough here that the locals don't call it Spanish) Basically they take most protruding ss and combine two different word endings, for example, if a person is asking me and Elder Mann how we are, he may say, rather than "¿cómo estás?", "¿cómo estái?" Needless to say, it´s rough on new speakers. We are not supposed to talk in the informal unless we are talking to toddlers, dogs, or inanimate objects, or in prayer, so we don´t have to worry about picking up that peculiarity.
Food. Everything is very different. Milk is in a box, and is cheaper. Flavored milk is much more common and is very, very good. The chocolate milk tastes like a shake, but has about thirty or forty less calories somehow. It´s just not so homogenized and watery. They have these cool little stores called almacéns that are basically what convience stores are to cars to pedestrians. You can´t go more than a few blocks without seeing one, usually it´s just in front of the house of the owner. They have different themes, but you can always find certain things. You can always find glass bottle coke in a few sizes. By the way, the coke here is much better. They use unpurified cane sugar and don´t use as much coloring.
Oh, and the bread. Everything made of flour is incredible here. My favorite is either the hallulla or marraqueta. The first is like a big flaky english muffin that´s the size of a hamburger bun, and the other is a small loaf characteristically divided into four pieces (as if cut with a cross) that you can use for hot dogs, jam, eggs, or whatever. They have pretty much everything we have. It´s as expensive or less, never more. Some stuff is ridiculously cheap -- glass coke bottles are like maybe 150 or 200 pesos, which is about 40 cents. You don´t keep the bottle, usually. You pay 350 or 450 and get the rest back when you give back the bottle, unless you want to hang onto it. It´s the same way for these three-liter bottles of soda. You pay the deposit, like 300, with the actual price 500. You only pay 500 again when you take the bottle back to any other place. You can get your 300 if you´re moving or something and you give it back permanently. Good idea.
Pretty much everyone has a few bottles of juice and one thing of some soda, usually a coke product, and even people who want nothing to do with you will bring you a glass of whichever if it looks hot outside - you might not even ask. Older people tend to like soda water, or as we call it, agua con gas. So we avoid asking it from them. You want a person with kids, because they have the good juices and don´t have ecco, which is a gross coffee substitute a lot of people like that is okay with the church.
In conclusion, this is not guatemala. It´s hot, but in the way that provo is hot. It´s not humid or dry, and everyone has nice plants you can stand under. No one rejects you really hard. They always say something like "Ah, no, estoy preocupado." We get good investigators all the time and those who need to hear it recognize it quickly. We´ve given five or so copies of the Book of Mormon this week, and we have several "nuevo"s.
I did get sunburned like crazy the first three days, but then I was tan and put on sunscreen. I got a blister on my heel on the side for some reason, but it´s going away. We walk at least those ten miles, I guarantee that. Our working sector is a mile and a half from our pension (that is what they´re called), and we usually do it at least twice a day, there and back. And we have three main neighborhoods, all about that far from each other, so when we cross, that´s another mile or so. We have three areas, Santa Adela, atrás de Lider, and mas atrás de Lider. The second two are made up and just mean behind Lider (basically Wal-Mart) and further behind Lider. Santa Adela is the nicest, but we have had more success in atrás de Lider. We have six or so good shots at baptism going right now.
It occurs to me you don´t know much about Elder Mann. Elder Mann is from California and has about a year. He´s been in this area for the last three changes, so he really knows the people and area. He is relatively a ground-pounding animal. We walk fast, contact a lot, and don´t leave until the time is really over. He speaks and understands everything people say. It´s pretty ridiculous. The other two in our pension are Elder Smith of Texas with 13 months, and Elder Silva, a Chilean native from Concepción, who has about five months. They have the close sector, and we have the far sector, which means we work more in areas they haven´t been worked very much. Elder Mann split the sectors, which were one until recently, so that we would have more contacting and tocando puertas (knocking doors) so I could learn faster. Nice. Not. I know I need it but it´s not my favorite. I can usually do a whole contact by myself, but if the person talks back really at all, I´m poked. They say generally that I´m doing well but I still am bouncing between a quarter and a half understanding, unless the person is being really "flaite".
(Oh, see, those are the classic words for ghettoness and richness. Ghetto is "flaite". It can be an adjective, like how El Espejo is "flaite", or a noun, meaning general gangster. The opposite, kind of rich, maybe snobby, is "quico". It´s said kweekoh and fly-tay. You can´t use quico as a noun, but many neighborhoods are referred to in this way.)
I need to leave to the store relatively soon, partially to buy a cord to send you pictures. We´ll see how much more Elder Mann will let me do.
This stuff is hard, by they way. The days are freaking long and I´m tired and hungry almost always. But I can say we still do it.
Love
Elder AC Crist.
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