Dos Años: "Tomorrow we go to the temple. A clean place...literally!"

Hey,

We have been moving all day. Elder Taylor decided he didn’t want to live in Panga anymore so he found a place a couple miles away in Balboa. At first I was super not happy because Balboa is the loudest street I know of here. It’s where all the buses connect and I avoid it at all costs. But I saw the house today and it is legit. Like too nice for a mission. It’s on the seventh floor of an apartment building and it’s little, but awesome. And we have a new fridge that’s not tiny and moldy. It also has windows! Hopefully that’ll keep the mosquitos…and ticks…off of me. I have been waking up each morning with about 20 mosquitos on me, and these are not normal mosquitos! They’re huge and the bites are huge and hurt. (I hope he is taking his Malaria pills!)

And it still has a trough! The trough at our last house was my bathroom and it was sick. Bathroom to like brush my teeth, not a toilet. But we also have super nice bathrooms now that work so maybe I’ll start using those.

I think this might be the "TROUGH."

Nice, new bathroom, but I guess they ran out of toilet paper.

And the bottom floor of this place is not a bar, it’s a Chino and a bakery. There are like 5 bars and 2 casinos across the street though, but also a place to email that’s not an hour away!

The old apartment...ours is the one with the hammock on the balcony.

Just hanging out. (Taylor always had to wear some kind of shoes in this apartment,
because there was always water on the ground.)

This week Salamanca and I have been exploring a lot. Panama Viejo has gotten pretty boring, we’re still teaching lots of lessons, but nearly all of our appointments fall through every day, so we decided to absorb the area of the secretaries, which turns out to be mostly gated houses and hotels. Still we go walking through it a lot to try to talk to people, and look for fishing spots. We talked to a guy and turns out the fishing is somewhat prime here, so I’m going to buy some nets and line this week.

Exploring at the beach.

Look at all the Pelicans in the trees.

We also started running every morning, so we don’t get fat. There’s something missionaries get here that’s called a “rice baby.” I hate that name, but rice makes you fat. I do not have one yet, but I’m planning ahead.

We have 4 new baptismal dates this week...we’ll see what happens. Two of them are sisters, 14 and 12, from the Dominican Republic. They were past investigators, maybe like a year ago, so we taught them and one of their friends. But like 2 minutes into the lesson, their grandma comes out and starts yelling at us, and threatening to call the cops on us. (Like they would do anything.) They told us she’s crazy so to just ignore her, but their friend went running…ha-ha. So we taught the lesson through all that and they said they’d like to get baptized. But they did not come to church! Nor did one of our Kuna investigators. Isai is still coming though. I do not think some of our other investigators will be getting baptized very soon though. They still don’t want to get married because they just don’t understand. And I don’t understand. Nothing makes sense here.

Also! Answer to a prayer I prayed 3 weeks ago, happened like two days ago. I was on a bus going downtown and there was this Venezuelan kid playing guitar and singing. He was really good so I thought, this guy’s gonna be famous someday, I better make him Mormon before that happens. I really felt like I should talk to him, but I hesitated, then he got off the bus before I could! So I felt terrible and just prayed that I’d see him again, even though it was unlikely because we were really far from our area. But two days ago I get on the bus in Viejo and there he is! So when he was done singing we started talking to him and he’s awesome. He’s trying to get his citizenship here, like every other Venezuelan in the world, there are so many here, so he plays on the buses. I said we wanted to meet with him to talk more so he got off at our stop with us, played more songs, then we got his number and everything. Turns out he lives really close to our new house, which is the area of the other elders next to us but were not going tell them about him yet because we want to teach him.

Yesterday was also Broadhead’s birthday! He turned twenty, but naturally since it’s on the 17th, we're celebrating his 17th birthday. He’s buying each of us a pizza tonight, and five gallons of ice cream…"Because he can.” We did fill his room with balloons Saturday night, and woke him up Sunday morning by popping them all with machetes.