¡4 de julio!‏

Woo! Happy Fourth of July! Even though the people around me don't seem
to be as enthusiastic, I'm pretty pumped for the good ol' USA. And the
weather this year is a whole lot better than last year, when it was
freezing cold and pouring rain. For now the sun is out and showing
it's smiling face. Not sure just yet what we're going to do in
celebration, but I'll figure something out.

¡USA! ¡USA!

In this last week preparing up for this day, things were pretty
normal. Not once has it gotten realy cold, even though at the
beginning it was a little chilly. All week people have been warning us
that a cold front was going to arrive, but nothing arrived. What a
shame. And so, Monday in the afternoon we went as a zone to play some
volleyball. We wanted to try a new place, but only 2 Elders new where
it was, so we all meet up and started getting to know more of
Trinidad. I don't think any of us got lost. At least, E' Abrego and I
could later head out in the evening to do some proselyting.

When we were heading around visiting Tuesday, we received a reference
that lives in the little hidden neighborhood of San Silvestre that we
found some months back. We had stopped heading out there because it
wasn't yeilding any results, but we had to go back to try and find the
reference. It was fun taking the very sturdy bridge for the first time
with E' Abrego, who was not thrilled to give it a shot. Heh heh. And
then, Wednesday morning, we did some arts and crafts with a family to
help create a 'read and pray' reminder for their house. It was quite a
change of pace, but not exactly something I miss very much from
elementry school.

We had an interesting District Meeting Thursday, since half the
district had to leave about half-way through, leaving just the 4 of us
Elders from the house. So we really just had a House Meeting in a
different place. A very common thing here in Bolivia (at least in
Santa Cruz/Beni) is to have parrots in house. That said, in the
afternoon of Thursday we had some fun playing with some parrots as we
waited a few minutes to share a message of the Gospel. And we didn't
get pecked at this time, a win-win. It is also common that the fathers
of families leave the city to work in the fields for long periods of
time, which happened with some of the families we're visiting. How
difficult.

Once again Saturday morning was futbol morning. While futbol is
growing on me, I'm still not a fan of waking up even earlier in the
morning. Oh well. In the afternoon, as we were searching for another
reference we had received, we contacted a family kind of by accident.
As we shared the gospel, they seemed very interested. Guess there
arn't any accidents in the work of the Lord, ¿no?

Our scheduled Church time changed this week, so instead of starting at
8 in the morning, now we're attending at 4 in the afternoon. This
first Sunday was kind of weird, as I've never gone to church in the
afternoon before. And, based on the attendence this first week, the
ward isn't too used to it either. I hope that we can adjust quickly.

Photos will be coming.
Mucho amor,
Elder Yates

E' Abrego and I with one of the parrots we found.

This contraption is the 'motorcar' which is basically a motorcycle use for hauling stuff around.