White Shirts and Red Dirt :)

My companion is Elder Mechan and he is from Peru. He does not know much english, and the english that he does know come mostly from songs. We get along alright..More or less based on the fact that I am not going to be troublesome and he has been here for a lot longer then me. Oh and he is 26 years old and will be heading home in January.

I am living in a small town. We are currently renting a third story apartment, It is one of the taller structures in our area, they dont get much taller then 3 stories. There are vendors on every corner for fruits and nicknacks and such. There are some very humble sections of the town and some very nice sections of town, but both can be right next to each other too.

They have us on a payroll system in where every P day we take a card and go get cash at a ATM for food and such. There isnt much left over after a week of food buying and such.

We were standing in the middle of a circular roundabout and there was a collection of vans, motorcycles and cares.  They were all yelling words at us but it didn't make much sense. I only understand about 30% of the spanish but it is also mixed in with Guatanese and Portugese. Throw in some English thoughts and it makes things a bit tough.So thats how the language is comming along haha.

We got to My city by bussing from Posodas for about 6 hours to the small town and then catching a taxi ride to our apartment, it didnt take too long but im not to excited to have to take that ride back at some point haha.

One problem I couldn't imagine that I would have are the mirrors. All of the wall mounted mirrors are about 8 inches too short for me. It is becomming a problem haha and I dont enjoy bending over.

While we were walking we came across some actuall nuns and my compaion with his fluent spanish told me he wanted to get a picture with them. We didn't get the picture. haha, They were not too pleased with us..

Oh..So Apparently when it rains here we dont go tracting based on the fact that no one ever lets in wet people. While it rains the town gets really quiet and everyone just waits for it to pass haha. So it rained for about 2 days straight and so my companion and I just sat and studied and waited. It was nice to be able to study some and relax a bit but at the same time I missed saying hola to people.

People here are extremly nice, I would not go as far to say receptive of the message, But they are extremly willing to talk with us. They listen to our message and then tell us no thanks. Its tough we haven't had many people agree to meet a second time with the exception of a guy who me and my companion were convinced had a bit to much to drink the other day.

Here are some quick pictures.The computers here are extremly slow. Hopfully they will send. One is of the river that seperates Paraguay and Argentina. The other is at the Buenos Aries temple where we stopped between flights earlier. And the other is of me and my companion Elder Mechan.

Con Mucho Amor
-Elder Merrell