Plenty of exciting stuff has been happening here in Arizona. I got here a week ago, and now I’m in a little town called Payson, about an hour and a half north of Mesa. It’s nice and cool, and there are actually trees here.
It’s really nice, and we had a car, at least for the first 2 days… It’s actually a very interesting story. On Wednesday night of last week, we were helping a recent convert, Pablo, find work. We parked in his trailer park and went with him. 20 minutes later, we came back to find our car in the middle of road. We saw distinct tracks where our car had been dragged about 30 feet.
The man who lived in the trailer that we had parked in front of had come home, and he had decided that it was HIS parking spot, so he hooked our car up and dragged it out of his spot. Now, this would have been all fine and dandy, except that he totally messed up one of the back right-hand tire. It was turned about 20 degrees to the left, which made the car very, very unstable. So, we called the police and filed a report and everything, and eventually got the car in to be repaired. In the mean time, we’re on bikes!
But the car is supposed to be repaired today, hopefully, and if it costs more than $250 and the man who dragged the car refuses to pay for the repairs, then he may be put in jail… We’ll have to see, because the Church doesn’t want to have him put in jail.
Anyway, enough about that. The work is going well here in Payson. The Spanish branch only has 25 or so members, but we’ve got 3 investigators with baptismal dates. Two of them are for the 16th of Sept, and one is for the 7th of Nov.
I’m having tons of trouble actually understanding the people, it really takes some focus. They don’t have any trouble understanding me, but it doesn’t help if I can’t tell what they’re saying. My companion, Elder Barrios, is from Chile, and his accent is so different from my MTC teachers’ accents, that it’s really hard to understand him.
But hey, I’m making progress. As long as I stay focused and don’t let my mind wander, I do ok.
The people here are all really nice, and they’re understanding, but they hardly ever talk to me. My companion does most of the talking, and they hardly ever directly ask me questions, and when they do, they try to ask them in English…
No surprise, the vast majority of them don’t live in nice houses. Actually, few of them live in houses. Most of them are in really, really worn down trailers. It’s definitely a change from what I’m used to.
The English members are willing to help lots of the time, and we’ve got some English members assigned to help in the branch, so they help to fellowship people, and they also give us food sometimes. The other members give us food when they can, but there are so few of them that much of the time we’re left to make our own food.
The authentic Mexican food is definitely different from what we get in restaurants. It’s usually pretty good, but it involves a lot of corn tortillas, which I’m not the biggest fan of… I’m picky, and I like flour ones more. Ok, ok… I’ll stop complaining.
Well, ok.. I don’t want to waste everybody’s time by going on and blabbing and whatnot… But feel free to write me back, there aren’t many restrictions on my email usage.
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