Week 21 (Campestre, Atiquizaya)

Well between yesterday and today nothing much happened. This Wednesday are changes, and so far this morning we haven’t received a call, which means no changes for us. Which means I get to finish training him in this area.

Yeah this week was a little hard because everyone was visiting their family or out shopping and preparing for Christmas. But Christmas day was probably the best for us. 

They celebrate Christmas on the 24^th which was super weird for me. But the day before and after Christmas we couldn’t find anyone in their house and no one wanted to talk to us. But Christmas day literally everyone either invited us in or asked us to come back another day. We found a couple new investigators so this next week should be good. And then we had like 5 people offer us a ride on our way back from Nuevo Amanacer which is about 50 minutes by walking through jungle. But we couldn’t accept cause we can’t ride in the back of pickups. But that was the first time in my mission I had people offer to take us. Yay for Christmas spirit.

First he tried fixing his hair with a razor without using a mirror. Then he tried fixing it with sharpie. Didn't work. Then he used shoe polish which actually kind of worked. 

Um other than my comp shaving a chunk off of the side of his hair with a razor trying to fix his haircut without a mirror, and our investigator not being able to be baptized due to his abusive girlfriend whose son is in a gang so he’s afraid to leave her and doesn’t want to marry her. Nothing too eventful here.

Christmas Activity in the mission office in Santa Ana.

Christmas (24th) was pretty boring too. Here they don’t really do anything. Like 6 years ago I guess everyone used to go super crazy, like the whole world was out in the streets drinking talking dancing, blasting music and lighting fireworks. But one of the members told me that something changed and as of 6 years ago it’s been super quiet during Christmas time. For this reason we didn’t have to return early. 

We bought a cake and ate it for my birthday along with the making of the empanadas.

I made empanadas from pure memory. Even though I never learned how to make them. And they actually turned out Mas o menos.  Making the dough not knowing how to make dough. All i remembered is seeing flour and eggs and oil when mom made it before. Also that chile bottle was my rolling pin.

The only thing that was crazy was about at 11 o’clock at night, everyone went crazy with fireworks. the 4th of July can’t compare to what I heard outside of our house. For 2 hours straight there was fireworks. I did not hear a single moment of silence. And these were right outside of our house too. I thought I had been transported to Vietnam of Afghanistan because it was so loud. There were little fire crackers going of constantly and occasionally a huge boom from a larger one, so it literally sounded like I was in a war zone. But honestly with this country it could have been both fireworks and guns outside haha.

Love Elder Blanchard