6 months!

We made pastel de queso, and they turned out nasty.

I bought that chocolate milk because it had Ice King from
Adventure Time on it!

our area

So, tomorrow I will have 6 months in the mission, so I am going to do
a special 6 month edition of my blog. Basically, I am just going to
makes lists of my feels after living in Bolivia for 6 months.

First, questions I have for people at home:
-Is my blog Pinterest famous yet?
-Is anyone married or having babies recently?
-What colleges did everyone decide to go to?
-Why do only like 4 people write to me? Punks.

Things I miss:
-My family and friends, obviously
-listening to music that is not from the church
-Netflix
-naps
-basically all food
-washing machines
-being able to flush the toilet paper
-speaking English
-wearing pants

Things I don´t love:
-washing my clothes by hand
-that in the culture here, it is okay to call people fat
-eating rice all the time
-wearing the same clothes everyday

Things I do love:
-the cost of living here is SUPER cheap
-the people I am able to meet, both the members and the people we teach
-being able to have time to study the scriptures every morning
-I can speak Spanish, pretty much
-I am a lot more organized now
-I feel more self-reliant
-I am able to help other people everyday

I am very grateful for the opportunity I have to be here in Bolivia. I
have already been out for 6 months, and I have about a year left. This
is the only time in my life that I can dedicate myself 100% to serving
The Lord, and it is an opportunity not a lot of people have. It really is
beautiful to be able to share what I know with other people, and help
them strengthen their relationships with Our Heavenly Father.

I really hope everyone is doing well at home!

Wild horses.

My Feet

In the internet emailing today!

I would like to take a moment to acknowledge just how gross my feet
are right now. Like, I was born with pretty ugly feet, so they were
never anything to be proud of, but NOW...oh man. Because I walk
basically all day, everyday. So, I´ll just describe in a little
detail, that the balls of my feet are completely callused, and so are
the pads of my toes. And I thought, "Hey, maybe I can cut away the
callus, so I can have normal feet. So, I started on the bottom of one
of my baby toes...It was not a good idea. So, now I have a hole in my
baby toe. I hope everyone enjoyed this segment on my feet.

Elder Roth came this week, and he is hilarious. I am really glad he´s
here, because my humor doesn´t translate very well to Spanish. So it
makes me feel good about myself to have someone to laugh at my jokes.

This week my companion has been sick, so we had to go to the hospital
a lot to find out what was wrong. She has some bugs in her tummy, so
she has medicine now, and seems to be feeling a little bit better.
It´s pretty common in this mission to get bugs in your stomach, I
think. From accidentally drinking water that wasn´t all the way
boiled.

We are doing pretty well out here. We had one baptism this weekend, of
a young lady named Et. She is pretty shy, but now that she is
comfortable around us, she jokes around a lot. She is really fun to
visit, and she has a really strong testimony.When we teach her she
always has a lot of questions, and is always really excited to learn
new things about the gospel. I am grateful to be able to be a part in
helping her learn.

I hope everyone is doing well at home!

Baptism.

Transfer Week!

Old railroad bridge over Entre Rios River.

I don´t remember if I wrote last week about my companion being
psychic, but I think she lost her abilities. She usually has dreams
before transfer week about what is going to happen with her and her
companion, and until now they have come true. But this time she had a
dream that she was with a different companion, and her companion was
showing her around a new area. So we thought for sure she would be
transferred. But she wasn´t. We´re going to be together for another 6
weeks. Which is fine, because we work really well together. But this
will be the longest I´ve ever been with one companion.

And my first zone leader was transferred to Tupiza! He will get here
Wednesday. I am super excited, because he is hilarious and he is a
really good missionary.

This weekend 3 people we have been teaching were baptized. It was
really beautiful to be there and to be able to help them make this
decision in their lives to follow Jesus Christ. They are really great,
and have been very prepared. Two of them are little girls, but they
already ask us a ton of questions about when they can serve a mission
and what they have to do to prepare and where they can go. They are
really precious.

After their baptism, we had them give their testimonies. K., who is
9, asked what a testimony was. We told her to just say how she felt
about the church and about being baptized. And she was like, oh okay,
got it! And when she bore her testimony about how she felt, she said
before she was baptized she was afraid that she would fall in the
water, but when she was baptized the water was warm, and she didn´t
fall. Literally, how she felt about the actual process of being
baptized. She is seriously so precious. Haha.

Everything is going well here! I feel like the time is going by so
fast. I´ve been away from home for almost 6 months already. Which is
only 1/3 of my mission. But I have a feeling I will be headed home
before I know it. Until then, we will be working hard here in Tupiza!

I hope everyone at home is doing well!

baptism day! I tried to get Sydney to look a little darker but then the rest of the picture was gone! lol

The Great Mystery of White People

Meeting with new President and Hermana of Mission.

Four, FOUR, different people this week basically asked me why I am
white. This is real life. Why my skin was so light, why my hair is
light colored, why my eyes are light, and why I am so tall. They asked
if it was:
1. the weather
2. what we eat
3. because we drink a lot of milk
Forreal. I tried to explain that my parents could have brought me here
as a baby, I could have grown up in their same family, eaten all the
same food, and I would still be white. I guess because there isn´t as
much diversity here as there is in the United States, it is really
weird for someone to look so different.

Anyway, transfers are this week, and I think my companion might be
leaving the area. She has dreams before each transfer about what is
going to happen. Seriously! Her last transfer, she had a dream that
she was going to leave, and her old companion was going to train, and
that is what happened! And the other night she had a dream that she
was in a different area, and her companion was showing her around.
But her companion was not me. So, we´ll see. But we work really well
together, and we have been seeing a lot of success here, so it would
be kind of sad for her to leave.

We also have 3 baptisms scheduled for this weekend, 2 little girls and
one woman who is 25. They are all really great and prepared to be
baptized. The little girls are really funny, and the 25 year old is so
sweet. Her name is E., and she is seriously so wonderful. She
asked us yesterday if we were allowed to have a slumber party at her
house. I was honestly sad to have to tell her no. Because I love
slumber parties and I love her!

So, I have been bringing bread with dulce de leche, which is basically
caramel, with us to church for my companion and I, because we always
get hungry. But we never end up eating it, because I always give it
away to whoever sits with us. Last Sunday, I gave one to E.
because she was sitting next to me, and she looked like she was
falling asleep. Yesterday, she told me that she had come to church
last Sunday without eating, because she didn´t have money to buy food.
She told me that God had answered her prayers to make it through the
day though me. And I really almost cried. I didn´t think anything of
it at the time, but now I know that it was a prompting from the holy
ghost to help someone else.

I really am grateful to be here in the mission. These last few day I
have been thinking a lot about home, and how much time I have left,
especially because one of the elders from my branch is going home this
week. But this experience really helped to bring my motivation back,
and to really be thankful to be here.

I hope everyone at home is doing well, because I am doing really well
here in Bolivia, doing the Lord´s work.

Teaching

,