Week of April 6th

Family,

I´m emailing late because today we took a trip to Tolhuin to have a testimony meeting about the Book of Mormon and break our fast (we were fasting for more baptisms and more miracles!).

So every night we sleep in sleeping bags and it´s actually pretty nice. I feel like I don´t get cold because my blankets can´t move during the night! I have been having really weird dreams though but I can´t remember them. 

For laundry, we have a washing machine in our pension that we take turns using. In our bedroom, we have this drying rack thing that we can hang our wet clothes on to dry. It´s actually not that bad and it makes folding easier because they´re already hanging and not all crumpled up. 

We usually buy our groceries at a grocery story called La Anonima. We have to put our bags in a locker before we enter the store. The store is pretty nice and has a lot of stuff. They don´t have grocery bags so we bring cloth tote bags from the pension when we go shopping. 

I told you that there are a lot of dogs here, right? Usually two dogs, Mora and Pin Pon (Ping Pong), follow us around. They are the Marcos´ family´s dogs and they follow us everywhere. Our investigators and contacts always ask us if they are our dogs haha. They protect us. Also, I got bit by a dog this week. It was a tiny puppy so it didn´t hurt haha.

Saturday we had a practice emergency drill throughout the whole mission. Every zone had to meet at the stake center of their area dressed in pday clothes with all of our emergency stuff (emergency bags, water, sleeping bag, change of clothes, scriptures, and money). Hermana Gómez and I were the first ones there, since we live right next to it, and we were the only ones that had everything exactly right! So we rock haha. 

When we knock on doors, a lot of the time we clap instead of knock. We clap at houses that have gates where we can´t get to the door. It´s kind of weird to stand in the street clapping, but it´s also awesome.

The people here really do drink mate a lot. And they drink a lot of coke and a lot of juice. The funny thing, though, is that they call coke Coca and never say CocaCola because cola means butt. 

I think I told you guys about ñoquis? I was wrong it´s not what they eat on Palm Sunday, it´s something that they eat on the 29th of every month if they can or feel like it. I don´t know why.

I hope that you all liked General Conference! We watched it here in our chapel. For the first session, the sound wasn´t working, so we used my speaker for my iPod and it worked great! The Internet went out a lot, but it worked pretty well most of the time. We had to watch all of it in Spanish except for the very last session they were able to set up English on a computer in the Branch President´s office. 

One talk that I really liked was Kevin W. Pearson´s. He said that you can´t return from your mission with a swan dive back into Babylon. Wow! I love you all and I hope that you had a great week and a wonderful Easter!

Love,

Hermana Martin