9/7/10

Okay, sorry I didn´t write yesterday. I didn´t know, but on transfer weeks our P´days are usually delayed until Tuesday. So we had a work day yesterday.

 

I´m still here in Gandia, and Elder Crofts is too. This transfer was a lot calmer than normal, thankfully.

 

So, the office has had me in limbo for the past week. First, Elder Parry didn´t know when I was going. Then, Tuesday at District meeting in Valencia, Elder Estrada said ¨Okay, so Elder Parry says we´re going to fly to Madrid on thursday, pick up our cards, and fly back on the same day. So I´m thinking ¨Okay, so I spend tuesday night in Alcoy, to go back to Gandia Wednesday afternoon, to go into Valencia Wednesday night, to fly out thusday morning, to come back and be dead Friday.

 

Then, Wednesday, I got a call from Elder Parry saying ¨Okay, I know you´re going to kill me, but we´re not sending you until next Friday, same way.¨ So Friday I´ll probably fly to Madrid and back. It´ll be nice to be on a plane without luggage worries for once, though. Only like an hour flight each way.

 

Poor kid. He´s got less than six months in the field and he´s drowning at the moment. It´s become the mission joke at the moment ¨Oh my, Elder Parry´s involved? Get ready for a disaster!¨

 

Yes, I got my box with the CD´s last monday, actually. I like how it said ¨book¨, but dere was no book inside...

 

Apart from that one box, everything comes fine.

 

I sent out some letters Saturday, so I have no idea when they´ll be delivered. Sent you a couple of photos, and then sent the Williams and your parents a letter. Typed with my fancy typewriter, too!

 

Ismael (small confession: he reminds us of Sid the Sloth from Ice Age, so we´ve nicknamed him Sid) is a spainard. He´s still going out pretty regularly. Good kid-¨like Nathaniel of old, in whom there is no guile¨.

 

Erardo and his sister, Hillary, are Bolivians. We barely got her to agree to be baptised on Thursday. Erardo, for some reason, is really scared of being baptised. We can´t figure out what´s wrong, but the district is praying for him right now and hopefully we can diagnose the problem.

 

Funny story. Hillary has a problem (granted, she´s only 10), in that she doesn´t make decisions. If we asked a question, she always looks to her mother, or to her sister. ANd we were closing up the lesson and hadn´t gotten her to commit to anything again. Then I felt the impression to tell her (because she had said that school was hard this year) that the Holy Ghost could help her with her school work, but that she could only get this if she was baptised. She thought about it for a second, and then said yes, without looking for help.

 

Hopefully she´ll be a good enough pull for Erardo to calm him down.

 

Now, their mother also wants to get baptised, but can´t, because they´re not married. We´ve discussed this with her husband, who always offers the lame excuse ¨I think you have to really know someone before you can marry her¨...they´ve been living together for twenty-five years. We´ve told them they have to talk this out, but it´s not going anywhere really fast.

 

So, our apartment, well, it´s not terrible, but it´s definitely not wonderful. We´ve been making small fixes here and there (a common theme throughout the mission, lazy missionaries running down the apartments), but the apartment is more than thirty years old. (And has electrical problems...had Elder Crofts panicking that I was going to kill myself and set the building on fire for a bit. I was only working with an outlet...and sparks shooting out are normal, right?) But some of the issues include broken light fixtures, no oven, aging bathrooms, peeling plaster, sagging ceilings, (my personal favorite is how it takes ninety seconds for the kitchen light to turn on. And the light fixture where it actually fused the base of the bulb to the socket...). Well, Sister Lund (one of the couple missionaries, she´s the distribution secretary for the mission and her husband is the finance secretary) called on Thursday and said ¨You´re still looking for a new piso, right?¨ Turns out the office never bothered to renew our contract, and so we can look for a piso whenever we want. Already seen that there´s piso´s avaliable that are cheaper and better.

 

It´s odd we´re in that piso, since when President Hinckley got into the mission last year he changed nearly all the pisos because he said ¨We don´t want to be in a piso that could have problems¨. Now that Cataroja has a new one, we might be in the oldest in the mission, so we´re looking now.

 

We were hoping to get one in the same building as one of our favorite members, but they were a tad higher than we´re allowed at the moment. He´s the second counselor here, probably the Spanish equivalent of Dean Kartchner mixed with Gerry. His wife died a few years back, so we visit him every so often.

Sometimes it´s just crazy how things are here. People think it´s normal to be so heavily taxed on everything. And so many people think it´s normal to be out of work. Here, if you´ve worked for only like a month, you can get free checks from the government for over three years...You want to shake them and say ¨This isn´t normal! Wake up!¨ but it wouldn´t matter.

 

Saturday, we were heading to pass by someone when we passed by one of the bakery´s of a member (who´s instructed his employees to give us free pastries all the time...we try not to pass by too often). He asked us to help him move a fridge from the old store to his new one on the main road. So we´re in his van with the fridge (he also speaks English, lived in the US for ten years) and we see that the main road is blocked with protestors. Going around, he shakes his head and says ¨You know what they´re protesting today? George W. Bush. I don´t even think those idiots realize he´s not the President anymore.¨

 

Like he said (and as we´ve noticed), the people are pretty anti-US. Everything is the US´s fault, and that means it´s Bush´s fault, because they all love Obama. Their media constantly reports on how we´re evil, and Islamophobes (because the New Yorkers don´t want a blasted mosque next to the WTC site, which is kind of a ¨duh, that shouldn´t be there, we don´t need a momument to terrorism¨ moment), and all manner of bad things.

 

But still, the work goes on.

Something else you can look for for later is to see when the Halo: Reach Original Soundtrack comes out. I can´t really guess, because for Halo 3 it was a few months after the game launch, and for ODST it was a day and date launch with the game.

 

That´s all for this week. Good luck unpacking!