Hmmm...
This is the part where I think: I really should have thought about what I´m going to write before I get to the internet café.
This week has been the week of the festival Yamor. He´s the the Indiginous god of the corn. People come from all over the world to be in Otavalo for this festival. We had to return to our apartment a bit early last Friday because the parade went right in front of our house and this festival is a bit dangerous for people to be just walking around at night. We watched the parade go by though, and that was pretty neat. They had all the traditional dresses from the different parts of Ecuador: Otavalo, Cayumbe, Santo Domingo, Esmeraldes, Guyaquil. They all danced down the street and it was pretty cool. Especially from our balcony that was directly over it.
We´ve been teaching this family, the Familia Villacreses. The missionaries have been teaching them for a really long time (like, a year) and they haven´t gotten baptized. We finally got to the interview last Thursday for their baptism last Saturday, but alas, we are still without them being baptized. I know that they are going to get baptized this month, we´ve just got to figure our what it really is that is impeding them from getting baptized.
I´ve been trying to figure out the secret to success here in good ol´ Otavalo. I think that one of the biggest problems ( for the missionaries and the members) is that nobody wants to take responsibility for anything. The missionaries are mad at the members for not kissing their feet and filling their laps with references and the members are mad at the missionaries for somethings that have happened here in the past. Really the only way to fix and accomplish anything is to just buck up and take the credit for the lack of faith or vision or understanding or godliness that we all have within us. If all that I ever do all day is look for the problems of other people, I´m never going to accomplish anything in my life. That is why I say that the reason we haven´t had any baptisms recently is because it´s all my fault.
Just because I know that people ask this question a lot, my español is coming along great. Sometimes words come out that I didn´t even know I knew. I fumble when I get nervous or forget to have faith, but I think that if I was confined on a desert island where they spoke nothing but Spanish, I´d get along fine (as long as I had a dictionary for the tough words). It´s funny. It´s gotten to the point where I´m speaking in Spanish and all of the sudden an English word just slips out in the middle of the sentence, like my mind is finally putting the two things together. Then of corse there is the forgetting of words in English. It´s even more embarrassing when someone asks, ¨How do you say__________?¨ and I can´t remember. I´ve also started to say things, when I´m speaking in English, in the form they´d be in Spanish, like ¨What passed?¨ and ¨What great!¨ Then we all laugh (which means me and Hermana Groesbeck, I saw her last week at the women´s conference) our cans off and almost get hit by cars. Just kidding. I didn´t almost get hit by a car at that moment.
I´d also like to annouce that I´ve been rice-free for almost eight weeks now, and I´ve never felt any better.
Whelp, that´s all for now. Hope that everyone is doing great and that Kyle is recovering (and allowing himself to recover) and that you are all enjoying the delicious ice cream that is available up there in the States. We´ve found a place that is good, but not nearly as good as Cold Stone.
Love. Love. Love.
Hermana Cooper
No comments:
Post a Comment