AJ's email 1/16/2012

AJ on his new bike heading up El Colon

alright im gonna tell you about the pictures first today. one is of me on my bike on a road called el colon. the next is a girl we are teaching with her family. her name is fernanda and she is 11 and very sweet. the other little girl that is in my lap is named monse and she is 4 and one of the cutest little girls 

AJ and 4-yr-old girl in El Monte

i have seen, although she normally looks a lot better than she does in that picture. the next is of my sun burn that i got from when we went out to chiñigue 
on saturday. and then the last 3 are the views from paico alto, another road in our sector that is absolutely tough on bike cuz its 2 miles up hill but the view is amazing.
       but anyway to start i have to say 2 things that i forgot to mention last week. the first is that i found a food last week that i am allergic to...melon. one day last week we ate a type of melon with one of our investigators and within 15 min i was completely without a voice. i couldnt say anything. and it was weird cuz i could breathe perfectly, i just couldnt say anything and it stayed like that for about 3 hours. then this week we ate watermelon with another investigator and while i was eating it, my lips got swollen and hurt a little but then about half an hour 

Sunburn from ride to Chiñigue

after we stopped eating, i was ok again. so from now on im gonna have to tell people that i cant eat any type of melon cuz i dont want to have a reaction like that again. the other thing i forgot to say last week is how much i 

AJ in Chiñigue

had forgotten how bad the fleas are in the campo. they started eating me alive from the first day that i got here. and there was a point early this week that i counted and had more than 75 bites. so after that we went out and bought spray and i went home and sprayed all over my bed and carpet and its made a huge difference. i still get a bite or 2 every night but its not nearly as bad as before. but its just one bad thing about the campo. i dont know how some people live out here and deal with that all the time.

AJ and new district leader E. Ciccio

       tuesday i did divisions for the first time with my new district leader, elder ciccio. he is from italy and is pretty cool. he knows italian fluently, speaks spanish well cuz thats what he always spoke with his parents, and then he can speak english well for not being gringo, but he is still practicing that a lot. but i had a pretty good day with him. and then we stayed up til 1 in the morning talking while he finished working on his scripture covers that he is making. he is pretty artistic. but at one point he spoke italian for me and it was pretty cool cuz it is so similiar to spanish and i could understand about 60 percent of what he said. and it made me really interested in learning italian when i get back along with continuing to study spanish.
      wednesday was also a good day for me cuz i got a surprise from president king. he sent me a new bike that i was hoping for cuz the one that i had before was a piece of junk. cuz the good bike before got stolen and i had been using the bike we are supposed to use for whoever comes with us. and so this whole week i have been racing elder vilar any chance that i get cuz now i can actually beat him.
      the other highlights from this week were that we set a fecha with an investigator named victor who wants to 

E. Vilar knocking a door.

Should we knock THAT door...what door?

get married the second week of february and then would get baptized after. the only bad thing about that is that we might be getting another set of missionaries in our ward next change, the week before his baptism. and they are most likely going to be hermanas so they would get the city part of the sector where all of the success is right now and we would get sent out to the campo with all the inactive members. but we ll see what happens. and im almost positive that hermana missionaries are coming cuz they started fixing everything in our house this week. or in other words getting it ready for hermanas. (Can I just interrupt here and say from a Missionary Mom's point of view...WHAT?..if its good enough for the Elders, then its good enough for the Hermanas. And if its not good enough for the Hermanas, well then...).and then the last thing was our trip to chiñigue on saturday morning. and i say trip because it was one. it takes 45 min on bike from our pension to that part of the sector. but its really pretty out there. the only problem is that as missionaries we cant waste that kind of time going out to do nothing, which is basically what happened cuz we have no one there and there arent many people to contact. so we probably wont be going there very often. but it was a fun time.
         well i hope that you are all doing good and have a good week. take care

View from Paico Alto...2 miles uphill.

More heading up hill....

Another view from Paico Alto.