Hello!
Here are the photos I couldn't send last
week (there should be another 4 in the next e-mail).
The first one (003) islooking down the street where we live. Our
apartment is across the
street from the police station here in Ticuantepe and is one of the cleaner and
safer places here (so don·t worry mom, I'm safe and all).
The next one (004) is of yours truely and personally I
think ifs a pretty good picture if you ask me. It rained pretty hard that day and as we were walking up the street it
suddenly turned into a river so it was a good photo opportunity. (005) is of our apartment nothing too special and I'm
not exactly sure why I took that. (006): Elder Franco ... and the
bathroom. The two of them go well together
as he spends much of his time there before we leave to go anywhere.
He's always afraid that he'll have to use
someone else·s "bathroom" so he does all he can to make sure that
doesn't happen. I just stopped caring after the first
couple of days. (007) is me
again ... and a "moto". We ride
those around all the time for really cheap,
they·re pretty fun I guess (although I have my doubts as to whether
everyone driving them has a license or not). (008): Another one of me again! I would take more of Elder Franco
and I but I'm affraid if I give my camera
to someone to take the picture that I won·t be getting it back. In this
picture though we were walking for like 7
miles that day (we may or may not have gotten lost), but it was really
pretty and there were lots of pina
(pineapple) farms. (009) is
pretty fun , we were at
this less active member
family's home and they live on a farm type
thing . We were
sitting there talking and all of a sudden this little girl
walks over with a stick and her pet bird at
the very end of it (truthfully 1 ·11 be suprised if its still alive when we go
back). I think its pretty common here, but it just kind of clung on to whatever. Anyway they were really nice.
So that about sums up our week(s) here in
good old Ticuantepe. A little bit
about the church ·s history
here: there
isn ·t much. The church has been here for no more than 4 years and there are about 500
baptized members here.
We share the area with two sister
missionaries and attend sacrament meeting with the branch in a somewhat
converted home. Only about 90 attend every week, but we·re hoping to improve that. Everyone is a
convert here
so we·re learning together, but everyone is really nice and understands
having gringo missionaries here.
(apparently they·ve had someone from the
states here for the last couple of years and they all seem to say that
my spanish is pretty good compared to the
others).
This is their winter here now, but it's about like summer at home. Not quite so warm though so its actually
pretty
comfortable. It rains everyday but only for a little bit. It really isn 't that bad ... now.
The food isn ·t anything too special. I eat red beans and rice every day, sometimes
together and then its called
gallopinto (they seem to think that by
mixing the two together you get something different but they haven 't fooled
me), its not too bad though. Everything ·s fried and bland. They have really good juices made from the different
fruits here but its all made with the water
from the tap so its taking me a while to adjust to that. We eat at a
member's home every lunch and I just buy
breakfast stuff and usually we can get by without dinner. Aparently
the
elders can ·t be trusted with the privelage of cooking here, so we·re left to cold foods.
The work is going well here, we're planning on having a baptism for a man named Moises later this month. He is
something else. He's had some drinking problems and one night we caught him pretty drunk and
he sang for us
backstreet boys and in-sink first in
english and then in spanish ... I nor elder
Franco could understand either. He's
struggling and pretty "pobre", but we're confident that he'll be ready. We went contacting the other day and found
a family to teach (that's not too uncommon
here), and we've returned
a couple of times to teach them. I think they
really want to hear what we have to say. I really do believe that there· s someone
here who is waiting to hear from
me; waiting for some gringo from Oregon to tell him what he's been waiting for
all of his life. My goal is to talk with
everyone that I can as if they are that
person. My hope is
that by the end of my mission here, I will have realized
that there were more than just one person
waiting for me, but many
families who will be affected by my time here.
That's the mission goal: to bring not just individual people to the
gospel, but entire families to the waters of
baptism and prepare them to enter the
temple.
Anyway, 1 ·m out of time and have to go. But know that my time here is very valuable and I can see
that. I'm
picking things up pretty quickly and
learning a lot as I go. I hope all of
you have a great week and 1 ·11 be keeping
each of you in mind.
Love, Elder Bever.
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