Tayvin

 Hey guys, sorry it's been a while. I had a few crazy weeks in a row, and I haven't had a whole lot of time to write an email. I'll try to sum up the last 3 or 4 weeks in a short little email because a lot actually happened. I'll just do bullet points to keep it short haha.     -some kids were "playing" in the street as we were walking past and as we got closer, we realized that they were literally throwing rocks at each other pretty hard and when we passed them, they started yelling "mira!! Hay dose gringos blancos!! (Look there's two white, white guys). There were also a lot of cars on that street, so they probably hit some cars with their rocks haha.     -we got done with a meeting and one of the members started following us and we passed a pizza place and he told us we were getting pizza. My comp told him it was working hours and we had to keep doing stuff, but the guy said with a straight face "I've already worked today" and walked ...

    Sorry I haven't written for the past few weeks. It has been really boring here. I don't really have a lot to share, but I'll try haha.      Last week was Easter and General Conference. For Easter they have a tradition here called the 12 plates and it's exactly what it sounds like. They make 12 plates of food each and you see how many you can eat. When I heard about this tradition I was really excited...but then I found out that its actually falsely named. It should be called the 12 worst plates Peru has to offer. We sat down and the lady gave us a soup with a lot of weird vegetables in it, which was sadly the best thing there was that day. After that they brought another soup that was basically fish eggs, fish, potatoes and something really slimy and I still don't know what it is. The third one was trout that had more bones than meat. Then we had tarwi, which if you haven't tried yet, you're lucky. After this we had a plate of beans with an e...

 Sorry I haven't sent an email for a while. Every pday has been busy. This email is just going to be stories because the work was really slow and stories are more fun to read anyways.      The first story is that we were on a combi (mini Peru bus thing) and there was a guy that was really drunk and while he was trying to get off, he tripped over a bucket and laid in the funniest position I've seen for a really long time. Then when he finally got up, he walked out of the combi without paying and stumbled into the forest for some reason.       One day we were sitting on a curb and these 2 little girls started punching and making fun of us because they thought we were tourists or something. We left to go find a combi and somehow, they were there too and they kept trying to push us into traffic, so that was fun.      Last night my companion was trying to find a taxi for today and a drunk guy walked up to me and talked to me for ...

  This last week we had transfers and I'm in Cusco now!! Everyone says Puno is the worst part of the mission, but I miss it a little haha. The city of Cusco is huge and just on a mountain, so all the streets are super steep and some of the houses are...really fun to get to.       The first day I got to my sector which is called Santiago, we were walking down a street and a drunk guy screamed at us that we were a cult from Utah and so we smiled and waved at him. Not even 2 minutes later a drunk lady tripped over a bucket and laid on the floor laughing while we passed her.        A couple days ago a guy walked up to us at the church and his eyes were super bloodshot and he said "quien es José smith" (who is joseph smith) in a super aggressive sounding voice and so we told him he was a prophet and he told us that we were exactly right and that we are angels sent from God. He then told us that he's an inactive member and he wants to c...

      This week started out like any other week, but then we got a call from other missionaries that they needed help with some service, but they didn't tell us what it was, so we went. We put the address into google maps and it brought us to a literal mountain and said the house was near the top, so we had to walk up one of the steepest hills of my life. Once we finally got up there the elders looked at us with an evil grin and we knew we were in for a fun time. We saw a giant pile of sand at the top of an even steeper hill with 2 buckets with sleds on the bottom of them with rope connected to them and a bunch of tarps, so I had no idea what was gonna happen haha. We ended up having to put sand in the buckets and drag the buckets down the mountain with the ropes, putting the sand in a tarp and carrying the tarp on the side of the mountain to the ladies house where there was another tarp. While this was happening the lady was trying to make sure the evil...

     These 2 weeks were both awful and pretty cool. They were awful because I got super sick last week and sick days on the mission are not fun. At home you can sleep and watch tv and do whatever, but on the mission, you're just trapped in the house calling people all day long... not fun. But it was pretty cool because we baptized 2 people.      The first person we baptized is named William and he's 10 years old and he was kind of frustrating to teach because he had infinite energy and likes to punch and kick and head butt us. He didn't really think he needed to learn because his older brother is a member, so he already wanted to be baptized. There was one lesson where we taught him who Joseph Smith was probably 20 times because we asked him who he was 20 times and he didn't know haha. We felt super bad though because the water heater didn't work for the baptismal font, so the water was freezing and he was shivering really bad. But he's baptized...