¡Hola familia!

Something terrible just happened. Perhaps one of the worst things that can happen on P-day. I was in the middle of writing my email when my computer decided to shut down. I was annoyed. It was a pretty epic email too. Full of insightful comments and witty remarks, but now it’s gone forever. You may choose to hold a memorial day for the “unread email” if you wish. I was so devastated I almost gave up and didn’t write an email, but then I thought of my millions of dedicated readers who would be heart broken if they didn’t get to hear about my Ecuadorian exploits so I took courage and began again. Ok I think that’s out of my system, on to business.

Remember how last week I told you about how I was going to Manta to buy pizza and Captain Crunch and how I was really looking forward to it? Yeah didn’t happen. We did go to Manta but the only pizza place we could find was really expensive:  $8 for a reasonable amount of pizza. And I just can’t afford to spend $8 on pizza when I’m living on $40 a week. So that was sad. Then we went to the store to buy Captain Crunch and they didn’t have any. As it turns out the only store with Captain Crunch is way across town and we didn’t have time so we left manta empty handed.

Our teaching pool is also not exactly filling up either. We did start teaching an interesting person this week. He is a leader in one of the major evangelical churches here. We sort of just ran into him on the street and started talking to him and set an appointment to meet with him later that week. I have got to tell you, that guy knows his Bible. Luckily both Elder Ruiz and I know our Bible as well and so far he has not been able to talk us into a corner or stump us. We don’t “Bible bash” with him or anything like that but every time we try to teach something, we have to show it to him in the Bible or he tells us we are full of it. I don’t know that he will ever get baptized but he definitely keeps us sharp so we are going to keep teaching him. Although we did have a cool moment where we were talking about our different views of the trinity and we showed him how God and Jesus are two different people who both have bodies. At the end of the lesson he just sat there thinking and staring at us. It was kind of funny because he said that the thing that annoys him the most about us is that we have a very literal view of the Bible. I took it as a compliment because in high school a lot of people said Mormons don’t use the Bible.

Friday we had a “service project”; we helped an old lady fix a house she wants to sell. At first we were painting but then we ended up cleaning the back yard. When people clean outdoors it almost always involves fire and such was the case in this project. We had to gather up all the bits of wood, leaves, branches, and other garbage into piles and burn it. Best service project ever. apparently they don’t have boy scouts in Costa Rica because my companion does not know anything about starting fires; so I had to start and maintain all of them. We had almost 15 fires going at our peak. It was awesome.  We had a massive cloud of smoke going and with all those fires going the heat was intense. Probably one of my greatest pyro moments ever.

Saturday night was also slightly eventful. I woke up at about 3 am and my bed was shaking and in my semi consciousness I assumed it was Elder Ruiz trying to annoy me. So I said, “Hey what do you want? I’m trying to sleep.” or something like that (but in Spanish) and from across the room Elder Ruiz responds, “It’s an earthquake genius” and I was like “oh…OK…cool” and then I just laid back and enjoyed the moment. It only lasted for about 20 seconds and it wasn’t very big; just big enough to be cool but not big enough to be dangerous. Then I just sat there and thought about the awesomeness of what had just happened and fell asleep again. So now I can check “survive an earthquake” off of my list of things to do before I die.

All in all it really wasn’t the greatest week ever but it did have its moments. Elder Ruiz and I are still hanging in there. He is really hoping he gets the boot when transfers come around in three weeks. He’s probably right because he is going on 6 months in this area. I learned something interesting about the new missionaries that are coming in the next few transfers. Apparently there are no gringos coming in the next change, and in the two changes after that there are 3 in one group and 4 in the other. They are really cutting the number of white [missionaries] here I can tell you that. My group had 10 gringos in it and in the almost 1 year since then, there has only been a couple more gringos come to this mission. We are a dying breed. I’m wondering if I will even have a white companion, much less train one. I have been trying to figure out why they are not sending Americans here and the only thing that I can come up with is that the president here is so anti-American. I really don’t care as long as they don’t decide to boot us out of the country.

Well, that’s pretty much it for the news in Jipijapa. Oh yeah, interviews and zone conference are next week. President Gamboa has decided to make our P-day a little brighter by holding interviews next Monday. I don’t think I can express how unappreciated that is. Honestly I’m not sure why we have interviews. It’s enough to make one want to murmur I tell you! Well that’s all for now. I hope you all enjoyed your time off. Next time you go to Utah it will probably be with me. That’s really weird. I have 11 months today and being so close to a year has really made me think about all that has happened so far and all that’s going to happen in the next year. I can’t even believe that an entire year has almost passed. Weird.

Te quiero,

Elder Walke