Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Teach 'til you drop

Another week on fire here in Tiquisate. Summer is just starting up, so it should be getting even hotter. It LOOKS like I might be here until I`m done, possibly. And summer just started, apparently it gets hotter. Maybe I`ll take a detour in Arizona on the way home or something... adjusting to the Oregon weather is gonna suck.

We are burning up our area here! This week we taught about 70 lessons, and 45 new people agreed to continue meeting with us. Our area is huge here. The farthest we ever go is 2km from the main town. The problem is there is no transportation. So how did we have 70 lessons you ask? It’s simple! My companion is a new missionary and doesn`t know better, so I convinced him we should run between all of the visits!!!! At first he wasn`t too up for it because of the crazy heat, but I got him stoked out of his mind and now we just run around all the time super, super, drenched in sweat. It`s seriously great, and honestly is part of the reason we have been having success. Lest you all think I am crazy I do have several reasons why we have been doing it. The biggest is that all of the people see us running around all day and when we stop them in the street they always want to know why we are running around all the time. So we excitedly tell them what beliefs we have that would make us excited enough to run around in Tiquisate. The next step is for all of my district to catch the wave!

When we got to church this week there were.... 15 people there. Later on a few more showed up, but we barely broke 40. Not everybody is so excited yet, but we`re getting there! Several street dogs came inside the chapel during the service too, which didn`t seem to bother too many people. Gotta love it.

Our house here is the bomb! Some members of the church just built it on their property to rent out, so it is almost brand new: new paint, new walls, not a tin roof, all in all- pretty awesome. It is really big too for a missionary house. My companion is from Honduras, and I received him when he completed his 1 month training period. We have somebody doing our laundry again, which is super nice! The members here might be few, but they all invite us to lunch, so we eat lunch every day for free.

We just put up our mosquito nets yesterday, so now I don`t even have to use sheets to keep the insects off me! It’s pretty awesome. My bed just has the one sheet that goes on the mattress and nothing else. The last missionary took the pillow with him... punk... and I don`t use the other sheet or a blanket for obvious reasons. I could fall asleep even with mosquitos though, I am so ridiculously tired! Between training, working in an area that has been struggling much in the past, being in charge of a district that has a hard time getting excited to do more than we have before, and just being a missionary for a long time, my mind and body are running on overtime. But it’s great! About 6 more months and I`ll be back in paradise where you only have to work 8 hours and you don`t have to work on Sundays or get up at 5am every day.  Until I get to college anyways I suppose.

Enjoy the winter paradise on that side of the world!

Love you much!
Elder Rice

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