Alec's Mission to Colombia: Thieving Monkeys

Hola Everyone,

First off, I’m sorry about not writing yesterday. Transfers were yesterday, and.... I’m not going anywhere. I’m still in Cerete with Elder Gomez although he isn’t my trainer any more. I have completed my 12 weeks and I am now fully trained. I have been talking with the other elders about transfers and how long they have been in different areas but none of them have a real answer for what is normal. It’s kinda just what ever happens happens. Elder Truijllo (other elder in our house) has been in the coast area for 13 months, different cities but the coast for 13 months straight So I don’t know what is going to happen. I let you know on the next one in 6 weeks.

I still have not received any of the packages you have sent. I talked with the other elders. They said it takes 3 months for packages to get here so I hopefully should get the one from May by the end of this month or in August. I just don’t know. Also I will want you to email me a list of all the silly holidays for the month that you usually put in my packages so I can print them out starting in August. They were cool to see when you sent them to Braden and I want to celebrate them too. National Accordion Day is so important haha.

I finally feel like I can understand everything people say at church now. Meetings are pretty much the same as back home with one major difference, they are in Spanish. They talk about the same topics, for example, last week they talked about the importance of prophets. As for the clothes, they recommend church clothes but some of the members or investigators don’t have that kind of clothes so they wear nice jeans and and if possible a button shirt.

I’ve been asked if we have sister missionaries here in my mission. We have quite a few. They serve in the bigger cities of our mission since it is safer for them there. In some parts even here in Cerete I have to project being the big strong man so people don’t mess with me but some times I still get kinda freaked out.

The most exciting thing for this week is that for pday we went to Montaria. Its the big city close to Cerete. We didn’t meet up with other missionaries there, just did our own thing. We did some shopping, I bought a Football jersey and a Calvin Klein watch. After that we just hung out near the Rio Sinu in the park they have along the shore which was a great idea since we found some monkeys that were super awesome. They turned out to be pretty aggressive and tried to steal from us. Then we ate ice cream and since Elder Luna had talked to the store owners about the church and the gospel before we got coke and juice for FREE! We still had to pay for the ice cream which was okay with me.

Funniest moment this week was I, an American, ran out of money. I had not received reimbursement for paying for things at the zone meeting last week so I didn’t have money for this week. It was really funny but I don’t know why. Although on Thursday our zone leader finally came to Cerete and had money for me so that wasn’t so bad. It was only 4 days that I was broke but it came as a big surprise to all the Latino Elders who thought I had access to unlimited funds.

This week I also got some awesome letters scanned and emailed to me that some of the kids in primary wrote to me. I really liked them. It’s pretty awesome that they are happy that I am a missionary. Good call on Dad’s part to scan and email them to me since I still have not received anything by mail yet.

Love you all,

Alec

I am officially a missionary now that I have a football jersey.