Week 40

Tuesday, April 2, 2014

OK.  Well, yet again we’re having internet troubles.  Hopefully my parents are able to get the capitalization and punctuation of my letter cleaned up.  It’s a long story - and wow, that’s a pretty inappropriate song that they just started playing.  It’d be pretty easy to tune out, but it’s in English - so it’s more difficult. 

Moving on, since last I wrote… well, yep, I ended up getting pretty sick after eating in that comedor [restaurant].  I’d say it was just my head, but I was really sick.  Let’s just say I became very familiar with the bathroom of one of our investigators that was so terrible I don't think I could have imagined it before coming here to Guatemala.  Anyway, I’m feeling much better now.

We had three baptisms this week!  Two were Marco and Josue Alvizures, the sons of Aidee and Marco Tulio.  Apparently no records of them exist anywhere in the Church.  Being unable to recreate the baptismal records for various reasons, we had to baptize them again so they would be considered members.  The baptismal font was extra full this Sunday and after I baptized Josue, he swam back to the stairs.  As in, 100% swam, head under and doing breaststroke.  It was hilarious.  Their family is kind of like that - not super educated.  I really love them. 

Anyway, the third baptism was Catherine Garcia.  She’s super pilas.  Her dad is an excommunicated ex-missionary and her mom is inactive.  We started visiting the family a month ago and, man, since the first day, the dad decided that he’s coming back to church.  He’s got a super strong testimony and knows a ton.   (He even showed me some cool scriptures I hadn't seen before.)  He’s been coming with Catherine and his younger son to all the church activities and services.  For whatever reason, the mom has been the problem.  She’s been super resistant and getting her signature for the baptismal form was pretty hard.  She didn't even show up to the service - talk about totally lame. Anyway, Catherine is doing great and wow; she and her dad are really pilas. I really enjoyed that baptism.  The other kid in the picture is a baptism of the other elders. 

Yesterday we had our p-day and Elder Huish and I went and picked up the hammocks we had ordered a week before.  In a part of our area there’s a ton of people who make hammocks. It’s super cool and they only cost fifty quets aka six dollars.  Best purchase ever. I set it up last night using every bit of my engineering skills and it was rather revolutionary.

The first picture is of my companions hammock, as they were attaching the end parts. 

Mine is the same color as the hammocks in the background.

My two favorite trees in Guatemala the highly efficient, solar panel like tree and the giant ceiba.

A cool morning in Escuintla.

A picture taken shortly before my personal battle with Shelob [Lord of the Rings reference].  

My respect for Sam has greatly increased.