April 15, 2017

New missionary training

Denny's

Hi MOM!  What's up?!  I'm sorry, I haven't been able to write until now.  We've had a super busy week, nothing too interesting, but super busy.  It honestly might have been the fastest week in my mission.  On Tuesday, the new missionaries came.  There was a ton of super good elders, but only 2 gringos came.  The mission is mostly Latinos at this point.  So on Tuesday, I gave my capacitiacion [training] and all that to the new people.  Wednesday was changes!  Elder Gardner the AP and Elder Averett the financial secretary both had changes.  They were both going to the same district and it's super far away.  Gardner is opening a new area, so they needed beds and a fridge and all that.  So I got to drive them to their area with all the stuff.  Awesome road trip.  We didn't have time to take pics or do anything interesting, but it was really fun.  And yesterday I had to train in the new district leader's meetings  (I'm the new district leader for the office) so that went well.  It was the same topic I did last time, which helps.  Then today, we had extra missionaries in the house, who had come for the DL's meeting and all lived super far away.  So we woke up early with them and we played an hour of soccer, then an hour of football, and then some basketball.  Good morning!  I cut my hair, dropped off the extra missionaries in the bus terminal, and we all went to Denny's.  SO GOOD.

I also got stopped by the police today.  It's nothing bad, they always set up checkpoints to stop everyone and ask for license and registration.  What it really is, is a chance to get bribes from all the people.  This time they stopped me and told me I had to have my passport with me at all times, because I was a gringo.  I told them I didn't have it, and that with all the thieves, it would be crazy to carry it at all times.  But I didn't say it quite so directly (don't want to annoy the corrupt police here!)  So they made us wait and pretended to call the officials to talk about the situation.  Basically just waiting for money from me.  Eventually they let us go.  That happens a lot.  Sometimes the cops see our missionary badges, and immediately say, Oh keep going.  It's the missionaries.  They don't even ask for a license, but other times the cops see a gringo and think, I want money.  So that's fun.