Moses Parting the Red Sea

12/5/13

Well, my new comp, Elder Varela, is from Honduras, 5 foot 4 inches (mas o menos.) He loves singing, telling jokes, talking about honduras, quoting scriptures, and anime/ videogames.  I think it is super super fun but... on the second day I started to hear a repeat of his jokes.  (Now... I had 2 weeks of it and I can quote most of them by memory. haha)

Varela and I were biking to one of our meetings and there are horses everywhere here. We saw a completely black horse and a completely white horse that were staring each other down.  We saw the black horse go in for a hit so we stopped and watched them for a bit.  I didn’t ever think that I would watch a horse fight but I did.  They didn’t really look like they were fighting, just trying to dance and moving around in circles.

These past weeks we have been having a lot of Noche de Hogars, which is where we go to a less active family’s house and teach them to have one night for the family only, with games, videos, lessons, food, just the works.  So with my old comp we had 3 in 3 months but in these first 2 weeks, we have had at least 9 or 10 haha.  It is pretty dang fun. The other night we had a family that made rice pudding and we helped them make some pizza, and then right as it was time for us to leave... It started dumpin buckets... like pouring rain.  But we had a schedule and we had to get home.  So we put all of our stuff in trash bags and stepped out into the rain.  Within 10 seconds I was sopping wet, my shirt was sticking to my back and it was hard to see 20 feet.  So we started our journey home and I was following my companion.  It was dumping buckets and I was trying to focus on holding our clean clothes that a sister washed for us and holding my books. So I lost focus and didn’t see my companion dodge a huge puddle. And by the time I realized that he dodged, it was to late for me.  I was going ramming speed so I just braced for impact.  I rode straight through the puddle and at this time in my life I felt kinda like Moses parting the red sea.  I saw the water come up to my mid shin on my bike on both sides and then it all came down. I don’t know how it happened, but not a drop hit the cement.  All of it went straight into my shoes and had real wet socks on the way home.  

The next morning we woke up bright and early to go give service to an old grandma with red hair and a blind grandpa in our ward.  Haha I was happy to help them cause they are always super super nice.  We showed up with some of the people in the ward to help them finish their house.  There was an age range of 14 years to 65.  And they all outworked me.  Jk but they had me working like a dog the whole time.  I was struggling to keep up with the 65 year old and he had me breaking a sweat the whole time.  But I learned how to mix cement by hand and how to plaster and all that good stuff.  After we had some lunch and we were all talking but we had been working for 5 or 6 hours so I was kinda tired and zoning out.  Until I heard the words "thug", "alarm", "neighbors", "burning alive" and then my ears perked up a little bit.  I asked them to reexplain what they were talking about. The 65 year old guy is an immigrant from Peru and he told me that when he was living there, there were so many robberies in his town that people started putting alarms on the doors so when the thugs broke in all of the neighbors would run over and surround him.  When they beat him up they would drag him to the beach and burn him alive.  Man that is so dang crazy. I can’t even begin to believe that these things are true, but I guess the moral of the story is thou shalt not steal, right? 

Well, I love you guys and hope all is well.

Love

Andy