A REAL Baseball

Well here's my first email from the field and many more to come!!! 

Yeah its pretty crazy here but it is so much fun. I’m not really overwhelmed, it’s just hard because I still don’t really know the language too well. I am just working hard on trying to understand them because they all talk so differently and they don’t really finish their words all the way so it is hard. I’m just doing my best trying to learn new words and trying to figure out the conjugations, which is hard, but I know I will get them. But the language is getting better as the days go on.

Living arrangements are pretty much the same, but you have a whole house and not just a room, which is really nice. We live in a gated community, where only people who live in there can get in so we're pretty safe. The house isn’t the best, but I’m getting used to it. In one room there’s my companion and me and then the other room is where the other companionship lives. My new companion is from Sandy, Utah. What a surprise another kid from Utah ha. Feels like all the kids are from Utah here that are on a mission. My companion is great. He’s been out for 20 months so he knows the language really well and helps me out a lot! You can just tell that he really loves the people. People always ask me how long I’ve been out for and I always say 23 months just joking around with them and they believe me for a minute. Then they catch on that I am new because my Spanish isn’t very good haha.

We don’t really cook for ourselves. The other companionship cooks and then we do the dishes, which is okay. But I don’t really want to clean dishes, I would much rather make food but I got to get use to it I guess. The bug’s here aren’t bad at all. You’ll get mosquito bites but it’s not very common to get danga. Yeah I’m surviving the weather! It’s just really hot and humid and there’s no AC anywhere but it’s cool, I can live without it for 2 years. I don’t get how they do it sometimes it’s crazy hot in some houses. It’s maybe rained about 3 times since I’ve been here.

My area from my house is a 45-minute walk to our first house. There are some steep hills that we have to climb. By the time we get there I’m sweating like a horse after you take the saddle off. I seriously probably sweat like a gallon of water a day. I had to buy some bandannas to wipe off the sweat from my face. By the end of the day, I’m super sweaty and really wet. My area is cool! It’s kind of campo-ish, but then at the same time its really city. My area is Manoguayabo. I don’t really know how many people we’ve taught. We had two baptisms lined up for this coming Saturday, but we had to change them because one didn’t show up to church yesterday and he wasn’t home when we went by so we felt like he wasn’t prepared to get baptized on the 21st. The other kid has been to church enough, but we just didn’t feel like he was ready to take on the covenants of baptism so we decided to wait for a little bit. The first kid is 15 years old and the second kid is 9. 

Last week we were walking to our area and we went a different route because it was a little faster to where we were going. We were walking by a group of kids that were playing baseball and they all had gloves and a bat and they were hitting the ball. The ball they were playing with was a foam ball that they cut to be round. They hit the ball and it rolled over to me and I picked it up. I asked them where there actual ball was in Spanish ¿Donde es su pelota? They said that they didn’t have one and that was the only one they had. Then I said MIRE and pulled a real baseball out of my bag and all their eyes went huge and they all started to grab at it!! I gave it to the oldest one and he ran around screaming that he had a REAL baseball. Then of course all the other kids wanted a ball, but I only had one ball with me. They all said it was okay, esta bien, and then they started to pass it around and they were so happy that they had a real baseball!!

Sorry I’m running out of time! Love you guys lots!!

Love, Elder Medrano