73: Sonsonate 10

Hello family!

I'm sitting right now in the internet place with six other missionaries. We are the survivors. So far. There are 7 missionaries in our zone right now who are confined to their houses. There are six houses in all the mission. There's been an epidemic in the mission. It all started with Elder Rosas, a missionary in our zone. About two weeks ago he got a bad case of chicken pox, which was a little weird because he'd already had chicken pox before. A week later, our zone leader, Elder Tuck, started getting a whole bunch of dots on his hands and feet. Then the next person was the records secretary. Then it just exploded. Last Monday, the President sent out a letter to all the missionaries saying that we are not allowed to shake hands or touch any other missionaries. Apparently, the sickness that is going around is the cousin of chicken pox. It's called hand, feet, and mouth disease (or something like that). It's like chicken pox, but only affects the hands, the feet, and the mouth (sore throat). And it doesn't matter if you've had chicken pox or not.

On Tuesday, I got called up to go to Santa Ana with Elder Gillette the zone leader to fill out baptismal records. It was the due date for all the records, and the records secretary was sick. So I had to do records again...that was exciting.

It was interesting being back there again. I talked to the nurse. On Tuesday, there were 21 missionaries affected, 2 in my zone. Today, there are 7 in my zone (I don't know how many in the mission). THIS IS SO AWESOME. I'm living in an epidemic. I'd imagine this is kind of what it would feel like to be in a zombie apocalypse, all your friends getting eaten, and you just left trying to survive for yourself. It's pretty sweet. Luckily, we don't really see a lot of missionaries. But it's cool. Apparently, the disease isn't that bad.

Other than that, we've been working really hard in our area. We've been having a ton of lessons. A lot of our investigators are just not progressing really fast. It's frustrating, but it does feel good to just work. We have like 8 or 9 lessons a day. We have tons of contacts and are finding a lot of news, we just need to get them to CHURCH. But everything is good here. I love missionary work. It's dang hard, but it is awesome.

Hope that everything is awesome back home.

Take care,
Elder Bailey