10/20/14 How are you so white?

Yeah I know Elder Chisholm, Elder Bird, and Elder Jensen. In fact, Elder Jensen is in my district and he just shouted over to me that his mom has been talking with you. 

The Zone Leaders brought the furniture over. I don't know from where it is supplied. (we're going to be moving soon since we're actually slightly outside our area, still in the ward but in Centenario 1 instead of 2). Oh and when we first got moved in the Zone leaders said my first job was baptizing and my second is teaching my companion English, and yes he plays the guitar and he's pretty good. 

Our ward is pretty much average, I mean it is smaller than our home ward but not overly small. They can receive the sacrament from just 3 deacons but they, more or less, fill the chapel.  

You might be able to detect a mistake in that copy of the Book of Mormon. This is how the ones we've been giving out for the last 2 weeks have been. It just continues with Helaman from there and lacks the last part of 3rd Nephi (once it circles back to 3rd Nephi it again skips to Mormon on the same page) so we got new ones and will have to switch all those out so that was pretty funny. 

Yeah, we went back to the house up the stairs (that's where the pictures above were taken).  Their daughter was there (whom they said before did not live with them) and she said the man had died. I was a little unsure as to what she said so I asked my companion afterward and he said "El Murio" so yeah. 

We've gotten quite a few new investigators.  A few days ago, in a lesson a little four year old boy, Eduard, said something like (probably with different phraseology) "¿Como eres tan blanco?" (how are you so white?) while pointing at my hand. My companion and I got a good laugh from that.  Also around here there are a lot of English words they'll just throw in like every time they answer a phone it's with "hello" basically, and a lot of 'yeah's, and the phrase ¡que freaking! is common, especially among the missionaries.  

We have 8 missionaries in my district. 
Yes we go door to door. 
I participate in the lessons but it's sometimes hard to tell what others are saying.  
Yes i think we have district meetings every week. I've only had one so far.  
Yeah Peru seems really interesting so far, like the people have nice clothes and phones and stuff but the houses and furniture inside are kind of thrown together, which is interesting, for example almost all the young boys at church have suit coats... different priorities for the use of money I guess. 
It rains less than it did the first few days but we usually take our umbrellas out everyday, but that's only here.  It never really rains in Lima nor does the sun come out there like it does here.

Last Monday evening we went to teach a less active family and the father didn't want any of it but the mother brought us in and asked us for a blessing and told us all about how she had told her children not to go on missions but to go to college instead and how they have stopped going to church and how she regrets it now.

anyway ¡cuídense! 

The email to his dad: 

It's a fairly densely packed city except the edge of my area where it goes up somewhat into the mountain. There the houses have little dirt courtyard type areas walled on one side by a cliff at the top of which lies another road. Housing is kind of randomly put together as though they wanted to use the space as efficiently as possible so that you might see a large apartment building and around the bend of the road another but in between a house put together with brick shaped clods of hard dirt filled with rocks. Most buildings are built almost entirely out of concrete. As you walk down any street you'll see smalls stores intermittently dispersed among the houses, which can only be discerned that it is one because the door is open and there is food stored inside. They all sell basically the same things: sweets, soda, bread, canned milk, and some other essentials like toilet paper. There are taxis everywhere that charge a flat rate of 3.50 soles but won't necessarily take you where you want to go if it's too far for them. There are also vans that just drive on the main roads and you can get on and get off wherever for 80 centimos. They all have a 15 to 16 year old boy handling the door and taking the fees as his job. Many of the houses are lower down in the ground than the street, the bottom foot or so of the door is below the sidewalk. The bishop of the ward runs a wood manufacturing place that I guess cuts logs into long 2x4s and whatever else and ships them places. Other than that and another of the same I've not seen any industrial anything in this area. Next to that river is a small park which is a strip along one of the main roads (for whatever reason it has a hedge and barbed wire just outside the hedge bordering it). It's the only grass in the area until you get up toward the mountain where there are a lot of towering trees. Much of the time between the larger buildings next to the street lies an alleyway as small as 4 feet wide, like an outside hallway with the doors to homes on either side. A lot of people own chickens. Oh, and a lot of people have English sounding first names like Richard, Brian, Janet, etc.