Hola, hola de El Salvador.
So it's been an eventful week.
On Wednesday the President came and gave us interviews. I think this was the final time we'll have interviews with him before he leaves and the new president, President Cordon, comes in. So it was the final interview and I wanted to be the perfect example of a clean cut, perfect missionary. Also, I didn't want to get michetied for anything (michetti is like getting chewed out). I put on my best tie, shaved, and did my hair. Not in that order. But unfortunately I cut myself shaving that morning on my neck, and because we don't actually have a mirror bigger than 4 inches in our house, I didn't know. (I know, we don't have a mirror. It's difficult. Probably the most difficult part of the mission so far. Kinda miss my old phone.) So my neck bled on my collar. And nobody told me until I got to the stake center. By the time I got there, I had a nice little mancha (spot) of blood on my collar. I spent 5 minutes scrubbing it, and eventually I just had a big gray spot. Then, as we were waiting outside on the benches, a bird poo-ed on my shoulder. So, great.
We had a lesson from the president, and after interviews. I think President Lopez is really baggy.
Oh, yeah. You don't know what baggy is. Baggy is a missionary term. It's when a missionary really wants to go home. It's "baggy" because he has his bags packed. So whenever someone gets homesick or something like that, it's called baggy. In Spanish too. We all call it baggy. There are some English words like that that all the missionaries use. The other's snake. A snake is a person who flirts with the missionaries. There are a lot of snakes here. Everyone wants to steal my deep blue eyes and my hot brown/blonde hair.
Anyway, President Lopez is baggy. He's been here for three years and wants to go. I had an interview with him. It was pretty short. He told me my Spanish was muy bien. Chivo. He didn't say anything about the stains on my shirt. Thank goodness.
So we're having success. We have 3 weddings planned for this month so that our investigators can be baptized. Also, we picked up a really cool investigator. He came to church on Sunday with another investigator (Abigail) who's going to be baptized and married to Nelson (a former inactive member) this week. His name is Benny. He's Mexicano. I think the reason I like him so much is that he can speak English (he grew up in the states) and has been to Utah, LA, LV, and Seattle--the four places that I got to explore with my hermanos before my mission. So we got to talk a lot, and I actually understood all that was going on. It was so cool. We taught them from the LDM (Book of Mormon), and asked him if he had any questions about life, and said that the Book of Mormon could answer any question he had. So he started sending them at us: questions about problems in his family, why good people die, the afterlife, (Abigail asked about baptisms for the dead), God (he studied scientology in LA for a few months and was really confused from that), and we answered them all (mostly my companion though, cause I kind of struggle with finding scriptures in Spanish still, but I still did my share). It was way cool. At the end we gave him a LDM, and wow, he was excited. He's only here for a month, he likes to travel, and he still has more questions, but he's going to get baptized. He's way sweet. At the end he told me that if I ever wanted to go live in Mexico, he has a couple empty houses alla (there), and that I'm free to live there. Haha. Sweet.
And if that's not cool enough, Nelson wants to cook me rabbit. Everyone here says it is RICO (amazing). Yeah, that's right, Joseph, I'm going to eat some fresh rabbit. Mmmm...I really hope it tastes good.
So, I need to learn how to cook. Everyone here can cook...and I can only cook Mexican food and cookies. And since we don't have an oven or Mexican tortillas, that doesn't really help. So how do you cook really good eggs with just a few cheap ingredients. Help me out chefs. What do I need to buy? What's some rico ways to cook eggs?
I'm going to learn how to cook pupusas eventually—pUpusas—it's not papusas. My companion always makes fun of gringos because when they first get to El Salvador, a lot of them call pupusas papusas. I never did, but my companion still likes to make fun of me for it. So next time you go get El Salvadorean food, it's not called papusa.
Some of the food's not that good here. On Saturday I went to Primavera with Elder Brown, and his cook cooked us ham, fried in a lot of grease, and rice. It wasn't that good, but Elder Brown said it was the best meal she cooked. So I'm really lucky to have Hermana Fernandez as my cook. She's basically the best in El Salvador. Here food is so good. She made us lasagna this week. It was SO good. Some of the best lasagna I've had. Once I'm done writing, we're going to Biggest. It's a wannabe American fast food restaurant. Their burgers are disgusting, but everyone here thinks it's what we eat in the states. Nope. It's not. But it's funny, because here, the nice restaurants are like Wendy's, Burger King, and Pizza Hut. Weird.
So back to Primavera. I went with Elder Brown, then the stake president called him and told him that he wanted to visit some members with a missionary. So I got to go on splits with the stake president—the big man. I was a little intimidated (a little not scared, but obviously, not really scared), but it turned out okay. He was impressed with me. ¡Yeah!
Also, on Wednesday, we had a visit from "the Tiger." He gave me a lesson on intonation, and said that Spanish is the language of love and emotion, and when I talk and read the scriptures, I need to do it with emotion. Pretty awesome.
Well, that was this week. The mission's going well, I pick up on more and more Spanish every week. ¡Adios!
Elder Bailey
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