Proselyting in Peru: January 15, 2014

Hello family!

I’ve been having a fantastic time here, once again I’m writing in English so I can do this faster. Anyway every day has been the same but I do feel like I can understand the language a lot more now than I thought I would be able to. I’m having a hard time remembering how to say words though so my companion has to help me out when we teach our fake investigators but they tell us that it’s more important to teach by the spirit than trying to speak Spanish which is very true. Also my companion has 3 years of high school Spanish on me. I’m 3 days behind in my journal though and not because I haven’t been writing, it’s actually the opposite. I write around two pages or more about every day so I feel like I don’t have enough time at night to write. Anyway I’ll let you read it when I get home so you can know more of what my MTC experience was like.

We had our first proselyting experience last week where we were paired with a Latino companion. We would go out to get contacts and teach inactive families. It was a really cool experience except I couldn’t understand what was happening in our lessons. All I did was say the prayer and bear my testimony but that’s all I expected to be able to do. The family we taught though had this little girl who would come take my scriptures and look at them and then give them back to me. It was super funny. I was a little disappointed though because the Latino companion I was with and the member who came with us just wanted to head back to the church building and wait for the others instead of doing contacts so hopefully I will get that chance next time. The days here feel long but I can’t believe how long I’ve already been here. They say days feel like weeks and weeks feel like days. I definitely remember how fast it felt like it went by for Tara back at home.

Anyway we just had the first transfer since I’ve been here which was kinda sad because I lost all my Latino soccer buddies and we had to say goodbye to 3 elders who were the only ones in their district so we called them the 3 Nephites. They say that there usually are more English missionaries that come and have even had more English missionaries than the Latinos before and that this has just been kinda a dry spell for Americans. However we are supposed to get 15 new missionaries tonight, 9 sisters and 6 elders.

There is a ton of poverty here though, the houses are tiny and a lot of people live in them, there’s garbage everywhere and everything is gated or walled off and has some form of barbed wire on the top, however I still love it here. If the missionaries that come in are from poverty, you wouldn’t be able to tell unless you asked because of how clean they look. Also on our P-day yesterday (sorry I couldn't write you yesterday because the internet was down), we went to the temple again.

I can’t wait to get into the mission field though especially because people keep telling me that the Cusco mission is the best. I was wearing jammies because I was doing laundry so all my shorts were in the wash. Anyway I love you guys and I´m so thankful for all the work I can be doing here and I’m excited to hear from you next.

Anyway that's all for now, Love you all!

Elder Halverson