Octubre

Well, it has reached October once again. Tomorrow I will complete one full year since arriving in Bolivia. We also had the great opportunity to listen to 4 of the 5 General Conference sessons, only missing the Priesthood sesson becaue of its late start time. Unfortunately, we don't have any other chances to watch it, so those talks will remain a secret to me, probably until we get the next Liahona  with all the other talks. It's a little sad, but the talks that we did listen to were really good. And the best thing is that we got to watch in English again. Hurray for the Internet.

This week was fairly interesting for us, as we started off pretty well with some good  references that we received, leading us to some prepared families on Monday. The father of one family is from Cuba, with a very different accent from what I'm used to hearing. At least it's still Spanish, so its all good. Tuesday we also met with a good amount of people, after  cleaning up a bit of our yard again. It was also E' Quispe's first time using a machete, and his hands didn't fare so well, leaving some painful blisters. Good ol' learning by experience. Life's a cruel master.

Wednesday we had plans to go with the other Elders in our ward, that live in a different house, to help out a member. However, since it started raining a little in the morning, we called ahead to make sure we were still good to go. We got the thumbs up from the member, so we headed out to the other Elders' house through the mud and rain. When we got to their house, they told us that they also called the member and were told that the service was called off. As such, we traveled out to the sticks in the mud and rain basically to hang out a bit as we waited for the rain to calm down and let us head back out.

In other Wednesday news, the son of our pensionista returned home from his mission to Brasil. As such, we had a special lunch of churrasco and talked with the newly released Elder Supayabe. It was especially interesting because, as Spanish and Portuguese are practically the same language, he kept switching from Portuguese to Spanish in the same sentance due to his past 2 years only speaking portugués. It was quite fun for all of us to speak with him.

Thursday was a pretty normal day, going around and making sure to invite everyone to the General Conference sessons. We also found a member that had receintly moved to our area that had started to fall away a bit from the Church, so we talked with him a while to get to know a bit of his story.

Friday we got a little surprise as the asistants called to inform us of interviews with the President that would take place in the afternoon. As such, we rushed to get everything ready and headed out to the new office, which we had to search for to find. We got to know a bit more of Santa Cruz than we  had planned. Luckily we got there on time and passed the interviews without a problem. As a side note, I also learned that E' Moreno, the first missionary I trained, headed outside the city to a pueblito (village) called Riberalta. President Zambrano also commented on several  interesting and popular photos of me that seem to be floating around on the internet.

For both Saturday and Sunday, we had a prolonged intercambio (exchange) with the Zone leaders so E' Knight and I could go watch the Conference in English in the stake center while E' Quispe and E' Saira went to watch in Spanish in the new chapel. E' Knight is also from Arizona  - Page, in case anyone is wondering - so we had a little more to talk about as well. It was a pretty  nice weekend.

Con mucho amor,

Elder Yates

ps Recibí el paquete que me envió mi familia, justo en tiempo por 1 año en Bolivia. (I received the package my family sent me just in time for 1 year in Bolivia)