Area: CCM Comp.: Elder Luster
Hola familia!
I can finally write you guys! Sorry about the email last week, they gave everyone 3 minutes...
First: the essentials:
Bathroom-Good. The water temperature is moody but semi controllable.
Shower-Good. Again, moody, but super private. The only problem is the drains suck and they're sunk into the floor a little and if you don't shower fast the water rises to your ankles which is disgusting.
Food-Ok. They try to serve us American food and end up with this strange pseudo-Peruvian comfort-food type stuff that's just rice and chicken basically. Also there is one cereal dispenser, but it has this kind of unfrosted, unsweetened Frosted Flakes, that look suspiciously like mini tortilla chips. Also there isn't any milk, so you have to use yogurt or just eat it dry.
Room- Good. Sleeps 6, but there's only 4 of us, so that's awesome. It kind of smells, but the other companionship in my room are the funniest people I've ever met. I end every night crying laughing, they're so funny. Also we can set our AC to whatever we want, and we set it to like 19/20 degrees Celsius, which is super nice. We don't know how hot that really is though.
Companion-Jock from Texas. I know I said Utah, but it's really Texas. Long story. He's a great guy and I really like him, but at the same time we're very different people.
Lima-Beautiful! The city has a very strange smell, but not necessarily in a bad way. The weather is perfect, like 60's with not at all bad humidity, the only problem is that we have only seen the sky for two out of the seven days so far, and only for like 15 minutes at a time. VERY cloudy. Also the drivers are crazy. They never leave more than 6" of clearance on EVERY side, all the time. And if you get into an accident and the cops get involved, both people lose their licenses for life, so people are constantly crashing then just driving away. Strange.
That's basically it! The only people who speak English here are the other Norteamericano elderes, so it's interesting to see what Google Translate tells our instructors to say to us. In our welcome presentation, they told us "Don't put fruit in the urinals" and "Don't put paper in the cup" and we still don't totally get that. The Spanish is good! By far the hardest thing I've ever done, but I'm doing well! Back in school our Spanish class was set up in like 2-3 week units, and here each unit is called a class and we have two classes a day. But we can retain it like crazy! I can't take credit for that though, 100% el don de lenguas. But now I can understand and hold a simple conversation with Latinos, and we teach our first "investigadore" tonight in Spanish! And we go real proselyting to menos activos this Saturday! I'm excited!
I'm sorry I made you all sad! And also I have some devastating news. The internet here SUCKS, like, worse than anything we ever had at home, so it takes about an hour and a half to upload a picture and I have an hour to email... So there's that. I'm sorry! First week in the field, 100s of pictures! And when I got in the computers were down, except for one which is why we wrote for 3 minutes each the next day. My district is good! There's 6 companionships, which makes us the largest district, and we're all Elders. Of the 150 people here, there's about 10 Hermanas and 20 Latinos, and as Norteamericano Elderes we're not allowed to associate with either of them (like, we can't even acknowledge the Hermanas. Crazy, right?!) We went outside the CCM for like 20 minutes to exchange money, which we're in by far the nicest part of town and it would be the ghettos of Mesa. The CCM is the second nicest building in Peru, excluding the temple of course. No money spent, but soon! They have peanut butter here!
Oh hey! I thought you'd find this interesting! The water here is 'safe' but it tastes really sour and they gave us these REALLY NICE like military grade water bottles with filters built in! Like these filters will remove radiation! They said that you could drink straight out of the Amazon with these and it'd be fine, but they don't recommend it!
Hopefully I can write more next week!
Se amo ustedes!
Elder Acero (Elder Steele)
