This week we had more excitement in the sketchy drug neighborhood. Saturday afternoon, the guy who we’re pretty sure is the main drug dealer told us that if we ever wanted to go into the most dangerous part of the neighborhood, that he would be happy to go with us to keep us safe. It’s super interesting to watch the superstition that even people who are only casually religious have about “the Jesus people ”. The next day we were passing by the houses of a couple of friends to help them get to church. We were waiting outside of one house and saw a guy buy cocaine from the house next door that we […]
A Pretty Normal Week
This was a pretty normal week. We worked a lot with other missionaries. The elders who we report to came to spend the day with us on Wednesday. During one lesson in a sketchy drug neighborhood, we watched a guy snort a line of cocaine off of the table in his front yard. Later, that same guy tried sneaking up on us through the chest-high bushes, presumably to try and rob us. Because he was high out of his mind, I just turned around and watched him trying to hide while my companion finished the lesson. The next day, we went to visit the elders in the town south of us. During lunch, we had […]
Salta and Paperwork!
The promised excitement from last week is that we got to travel to the provincial capital of Salta to do my residency paperwork. We got on a bus early on Monday morning, waited in line at a government building, signed some papers, and had the rest of the day to roam around in Salta and play tourists. We had a great lunch at McDonald’s. My mind was blown that while we’re up here in almost Bolivia without clean drinking water, there are missionaries who can just go to McDonald’s for lunch every week. The next day, we got up early again and waited in a migration office for 4 hours to sign 3 papers and […]
More Water Problems
It’s been another exciting week of dealing with extremely inconvenient problems. The best one this week has to do with our drinking water. The water in Northern Salta is super unhealthy. When I first got here, we had to buy 8-liter jugs of water and carry them back to the house a couple of time a week. Then, the mission office set up a water delivery every week with a water company. Even with the water deliveries, there were still a lot of problems. The worst part of all of this unfolded on Thursday when we found mosquito larvae swimming in the jug that we’d all been drinking from. We got sick for about a […]
New Year and a Baptism
First, the obligatory: Happy New Year! I had a great New Year’s Eve. We had a pretty regular Sunday with our main meetings in the morning and 4 hours of planning visits and lessons for the week in the afternoon. In the evening we went to the house of the district president, the person in charge of several of the local congregations. We enjoyed our extended curfew and had a nice dinner of traditional New Year’s food. I don’t know what it was, but it tasted good. It’s also a tradition to wear white on New Year’s Eve, so we were conveniently well dressed in our white shirts. We got to baptize our friend Milton! […]