Week 1 in the field - Our Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

Summary

The view from my window

I left the CCM and headed into the mission field on Tuesday! In a 45 minute underground metro ride, I moved my bags from the vintage embassy to my new home on level 18 of a great and not so spacious building. haha. The metro reminds me of Space Mountain... except it´s all shiny and everyone looks like they want to hurt me. (to quote Elf.) The week has been everything they say it´ll be. Hard, spiritual, amazing, fun... yep! My companion, President, and his wife are all amazing. We went straight to work when we got here. There´s LOTS of reactivation to do. To give you a taste, one of the elders that was in the MTC with me said his dad served in this mission and baptized 300 people. 

Food

My companion is from Costa Rica but she really wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving with me because she knows that's what we usually do in the States. We don't really have turkey or pumpkin pie stuff on hand, so I decided I´d teach her how to do Thanksgiving in a Charlie Brown style. During our prep hours we made the popcorn, toast, and jellybean plate like they do on the movie. Haha

People
People here don´t even care that I don´t speak their language well. They just talk to me anyways. For example, one of my roommates just sits by my bed at night and tells me stories and laughs her head off while I´m trying to sleep. Hahaha! I don´t even know what she´s saying.

They´re also VERY quick to help. For example, we were in an elderly member´s home the other day and she saw that I had a blister on my foot. Next thing I know, she had it up on her coffee table and was pouring some medicine stuff on it. It actually stung like the dickens but my feet feel great now!

Spiritual

This week I had the opportunity to visit a 16 year old girl named Cata every day because she was scheduled to be baptised yesterday. I love her. We went to take her on a tour of the chapel on Saturday and she came out of her house crying because her dad had been yelling at her and telling her she was wrong to join the church. After the tour she said she felt better, but at about 11:00 at night the elders called my companion and I and said Cata could not be baptized without her dad´s consent. We didn´t think it was possible that her dad would ever sign. Before church yesterday, though, we decided to stop at her house. Her dad was there and my companion ended up bearing her testimony to him about why the church is important for us and for Cata. I watched his countenance change completely and he signed the paper! I got to watch my first investigator´s baptism.

Funny

One of our investigators told us she couldn´t stay for all of church because she had to go to work in the afternoon. Shortly after church, when my companion and I were walking to our next lesson, we saw someone in the park across the street look up at us and start sprinting away. SPRINTING. haha. Then we realized it was our investigator hiding from us. We stopped walking for a second and looked at each other, then just busted up laughing. She´s going to learn to love church. I can feel it. haha.