May 18

Thank Dad for all the lovely photos. They also make me hungry (We're going to go get lunch after this). I'm having to learn how to budget a bit more lately. I bought a scripture cover for my Bible at the temple, and payed two months worth of fast offering that I had forgotten about, and some other little things this month more than I usually do and am having to think more about what i am going to spend my money on for the rest of the month. I mention this because I am thinking of what I will buy to eat for breakfast. Bread is super cheap and filling, but not as healthy as oatmeal or granola, etc. Fruit is also relatively cheap, except for apples, but goes bad pretty quickly. 

If you want to send me music, I asked and Handel's Messiah is definitly missionary music. CD, although it scratchs eventually, is the best way for me to play music. At the moment our dvd player does usb music too, but not all do.  

Interesting things that happened this week( I can't find a colon on this keyboard)

We are teaching someone who looks a bit like a younger Matt Riley and also acts a bit like him.

I only have two new photos. Hna Gonzales and Elder Mandujanu making invitations for an activities we are going to have in a week or so.

We saw a church with a funny no parking sign. Most places say prohibido estacionar or prohibido parquear (parking forbidden). This one says it's a sin to park there. 

The photos from last week are of the goodbye party for Hna Zaida, who is moving back to Utah, with the relief society. It was pretty fun. Everyone brought a lot of food and danced to fairly out of date spanish music. Now one sister is trying to get me to give her the photos, but, as she admits, doesn't understand anything about technology. I sent them to her email, but she doesn't understand how to open her email on her smartphone.

Things have gone much better with Hna Gonzales since Monday. We talked and agreed that Mondays are generally stressful for both of us. For me because I feel like I have too much to do and not enough time and for her because she is more introverted than I am (I'm finding that I'm not actually all that introverted) and we spend too much time Mondays in big groups of missionaries in crowed, noisy places. Today we are just going to internet, buying lunch and a few other odds and ends and going home  because we have a ton of stuff to get caught up on, which feels a lot calmer and more relaxed. 

In general we are getting along much better than last week and learning to understand each other better. Hna Gonzales says she's going to learn to be more patient and I am trying to be more loving and have charity. I've been studying a bunch about charity in the scriptures, which are very clear about how important charity (also translated as love) is. There's the most famous 1 Corinthians 13 that says that even if you have a ton of faith or good works, if you don't have charity, it doesn't help you and that "who is found with it (charity) in the last day, it shall be well for him" or something like that. 

There is also a passage in the Pearl of Great Price in which Enoch and Jesus are talking and Enoch asks Him why He is crying when He is allpowerful and allknowing and everything. Jesus responds saying (more or less), look at my creations (the works of my hands), who I love, to whom I gave agency and knowledge, They are without love between each other. 

Thus, I am trying to be more charitable and loving, especially with Hna Gonzales.

Yes, Roselyn is very pregnant. She's probably going to have her baby (a girl called Louisse) in the next few weeks. She has a good deal of support from her mom and her motherinlaw lives in the same building and also friends in the ward. We also go visit her a lot. Although, we are trying to visit her more to really help her and not just because she wants the company, because we spent way too much time with her this weekend when we could have been visiting other people too. She wanted help making cupcakes for the baby shower (for some reason baby showers here are almost always right at the end of the pregnancy) and we thought that would take about 2 hours, maybe less. We ended up spending the whole afternoon there, making a ton of cupcakes because the first batch didn't turn out good enough and the recipe was pretty complex. I try to be very patient explaining teaspoons and tablespoons and that you have to follow the recipe when baking, especially the first time, but sometimes I just have to let her cook the way she wants to and add bicorbonato even though the recipe didn't call for it. 

As missionaries we are always talking about truth and testifying that things (the church, the Book of Mormon, the priesthood) are true. However, I've been thinking more lately about what things are important. The problem most church member have isn't knowing if somethings if TRUE, but realizing how important it is. There are a lot of things that I know are true that I would like to teach people sometimes, such as how to follow a recipe, dental hygine, how to speak English, how to use a smartphone. However, those things aren't really as important. They aren't what I want to spend 18 months doing. The gospel, on the other hand, is both true and extremely important. I've know for ages that the Book of Mormon is true, but am just know learning how much it can actually change my life. 

Speaking of Roselyn again, there are so many little babies in this area. The first week here I got to hold a little baby who was only a week old while visiting an investigator (it's her sister's baby). There's also a less active sister who has a 4 month old, and now Roselyn's baby. All of the mothers are only a tiny bit older than me and the same age as my companion, which we find really weird. Neither of us feels nearly old enough to have children.

I will almost certainly choose may 3rd [2016, to return home], becasue it's closer to april 22nd and lets me complete my full 18 months. I still doesn't know what I want to study. Linguistics interests me a lot, but it doesn't feel very practical. I'd like to try to learn Arabic again or maybe do something math related.

PS Would you send me my recipe for chili.
It's in my 13wattn email because you sent it to me at BYU. I still haven't cooked any of the recipes that you've sent, except for pancakes. To make pancakes, I've had to add a lot more milk than the recipe calls for because I cant get the stoves to go low enough to cook the pancake through without burning when it's thick, but it tastes the same.