21 February 2013

Greetings from the purple girl.  Lots to share.  From the sublime to the ridiculous.  The sublime was sitting at the feet of an Apostle and being fed spiritually.  What a grand experience!  The sweetest part for me was listening to Elder Andersen speak in Spanish.  He was not fluent but he did a great job and I followed most of it.  When does an Apostle have time to hone his language skills, pray tell?  It was a great confidence booster for me to hear him struggle with words and get help from others and still carry on with a smile and the spirit.  Amazing!  As he called the niños to come up to shake his hand after the conference (interesting how old the "little children" became as the line got longer and longer), I thought how like the Savior that was.  And he shook hundreds of hands, of all ages, with that same smile and genuine love.  It was a treat to be with him Saturday and Sunday.  A memorable weekend.

Here's Elder Andersen with a soon-to-be missionary and sweet Elder Dominguez (an area authority) and his wife.  We love them.  Their daughter Lisha, one of our students, just left on her mission to Mexico.

Here's my new personal hair stylist, Rocio Santana.  She cut my hair last week.  Her first try.  She was scared to death but did every bit as good as Elder Partridge!

Last week I was the cookie queen again.  Since it was "The week of love" of course the students needed cookies.  I baked about 100 sugar cookies, 140 chocolate chip cookies and 96 brownies.  Thankfully, our director located a nice heavy duty mixer that was sitting upstairs in the employment center not being used, so we "borrowed" it.  (I have no idea why they had it...there's no kitchen facilities there...who knows?  It's the DR!)  What a difference from the last time I did big batches by hand.  This time I only half-died.  They weren't kidding when they said, "You'll be baking a lot of cookies on a CES mission."  No duh!

Next we helped serve 120 plates of "pollo y pan" (chicken and bread) - which was the council's menu of choice for the Valentine's Party.  We received cute little valentines of love from lots of students.  What sweethearts they are!  The best part of our mission is getting to know and love these wonderful students.

Elder Partridge serving pollo y pan. 

He's the popcorn man again!

Now, for the ridiculous.  Concerning cucarachas, rats, butterflies, dogs, and car alarms.  Oh, and out of control fires.  We're in a new apartment, on the 3rd floor and I'm safe, right?  Crawlies don't do heights... right?  Wrong!  I was greeted on our first Sunday morning in the new apartment by a large-black-fast-moving-many-legged something in my kitchen!  It ran fast across the floor into the laundry room under the washing machine.  ERG!  I ran fast out of the kitchen calling white knight who came sleepy-eyed to my rescue again.  He used the last of the RAID all around the washer.  We raised up the washer to look under it (I was grimacing, holding my breath, ready to scream!) but no sign of the critter.  Double ERG!  If there's one thing I hate, it's a crawlie on the loose!  Thankfully, he hasn't shown his face again (of course it's a he...) and the fumigator has since come and worked his poisonous hazmat magic.  Now my hero will only have to kill the dead ones!  So far, so good.  

Except for the rat.  Well, I think it was a rat.  I saw it's tail end scurrying around the garbage on the street  near our casa.  Piles of garbage are everywhere so now I know rats are everywhere, too.  Eww...

A couple of days ago, there was a big brownish black triangular shaped object on the wall in the hallway leading outside our bldg.  I cautiously got a little closer to see what it was...and it started to fly.  Scared me to death.  It was a very, very large moth...we're talking a wing span of at least 6 inches!  Think Gandalph in Lord of the Rings on top of the Tower being carried off by the moth-turned-eagle.   It was on the wall again yesterday when I came in from my walk.  I motioned for Antonio, our maintenance man, to come over from his little guard shack and see it and he smiled sweetly and said, "Oh, a mariposa," and walked away.  Now butterflies are supposed to be colorful and sweet but this mariposa was more like a small bat and someone needs to take a bat to it!  Where is my grandson Sammy and his hand-made butterfly net when I need him?  It could have carried me away!

And let's not forget the fire yesterday...next to our ball park, across the street from our apartment, roaring out of control.  It burned half of a big tree and a big area just outside the fence around the park.  People were just walking by unconcerned.  We asked our neighbor if we should call the fire department (I'm not sure they even have such a thing) and she said, "No, it's just somebody burning garbage."  Oh, well...OK, then.  So we watched it burn for a while from our window and then left for the Institute hoping we'd have a place to come home to.  All the buildings are cement so I guess they don't worry about fires so much.  There's usually something burning somewhere every day.  It's the DR!

Here's our cute little ball park last week.  Don't you just love baseball in February!  Notice the tree on the right rear of the park.

             Here it is today.  After the fire.  I wonder if anyone said, "Whoops, sorry about that."  

Then, there's the happy new sounds we hear at night.  We left the busy street noises and now we have roosters even closer, but that sound has now been drowned out by barking dogs (sometimes hours at a time).  You know how I feel about dogs in general (with the exception of my friend Dawn's sweet Marley) so it's all I can do to not to try find a stun gun or a very large sling shot with something to knock it silly.  How do people let their dogs bark all night?  Are they deaf?  Sister Douglas said she sleeps with ear plugs because of the dogs near her home.  And then, there's the car alarms...2 nights ago for 2 hours!  So that sound drowns out the dogs.  And the drinking and singing baseball players drown out the car alarms.  Oh, and of course dominoes.  We couldn't escape that national pastime.  But really, do these people ever sleep?  Maybe the roar of cars and motorcycles wasn't so bad after all. 

       All in all, we do love our new digs. 

Our apartment is roomy, airy, sunny and 

hopefully bug free for another 5 weeks!

Plenty of room for company...come on down!

And now we have places to sit so we can invite missionaries over and share our dinner!  These are some of our favorite sisters...Cordova, Schillamat, Dahlia and Porter.

Eating salad...my favorite thing.  Yes, that's an avocado.  And check out this fruit.  That's a very small papaya in the middle.  And the funny looking green thing on the left is called a guanabana.  Never tasted one before but I hear they're good!  

                                                                                 

Elder P's favorite place...power nap time. :)