Sunday, September 13, 2015 -- Month #6 - Week #30 - Day #209 - Santa Cruz de Yojoa

(Note: upon re-reading this entry I realized I wrote "Subday" instead of "Sunday" but I have decided to leave the error as it made me smile, made me think of submarines.)

Subday! (Sunday) This was probably actually one of my best Subdays so far...we found our people! Whoohoo! Had a lesson almost every hour, it was awesome. Oh, it's good to have some light before entering another tunnel.

In church today we had a surprise visit from a member of the Seventy, so E Pocock and I were a little concerned about speaking, but he left after the Sacrament was passed. We then gave our talks and everything went as normal. I talked about charity and love and stuff, and how the members can develop this love and find small ways to share the gospel, without fear: E Pocock talked about retention of new members. And we didn't have to give the class later that day, so that was nice. It's fallen without notice on the missionaries the past few Sundays.

In other news, it rained at 4:00 pm in the afternoon until around 6:00 pm or so, then it just kinda sprinkled. As we walked around with our umbrellas our feet and legs (skirts and slips as well, I love layers!) got pretty wet. I was just glad that it wasn't like one of the storms in SPS where the rain came sideways and everything got wet, even our faces under the umbrellas got wet. It rained pretty hard today, but maintained a mostly vertical fashion of arrival.

We're visiting a recent convert named Guadalupe that has a little baby boy of about a year, and he's so cute! He has 5 little teeth coming in, and started walking a few weeks ago. It's so fun to see him do his little marching-step-walk as he figures out how to be better coordinated in his motor skills, but he's coming along very nicely. He's always laughing and smiling and gazing about the world with his enormous brown eyes. Wonderful little kiddo.

One of the members with a mototaxi that gives us rides sometimes makes about 28,000 lemps a month, or about $1,400. And that's a lot of money over here. His wife runs a pulperia and makes around 1,600 lemps, or about $80. Things in the states are really expensive, if you think about it. 

Funny story from this week: we were in a bus heading over to Potrerillos, and we had to pull over to a gas station to refill. As we were waiting, I saw that someone had brought a TV box with a picture of a butterfly, which somehow reminded me of when we raised butterflies when I was little.

Monarch Butterfly

I asked Hna Rosas if she knew anything about raising butterflies, to which she said that she didn't. So I started telling all about how one day my dad came home from work and surprised us with a plastic container full of leaves and caterpillars, and he explained that we were gonna raise some butterflies. So my little sister and I got a bigger habitat and placed the caterpillars inside, and changed out the leaves every day, and sometimes just sat there watching the caterpillars munching leaf after leaf after leaf, and how they grew and walked around.

Butterfly Habitat

And, after a few weeks, they started hanging upside down on the lid of the container, curled up partway, and then somehow they were covered in a chrysalis. A short time after that, the chrysalis had become clear, and you could see the butterfly inside.

Chrysalises

We had been studying up on butterflies, and we knew that they tend to emerge from their chrysalis in the early morning, so everyday as soon as we woke up (when you're little, you tend to wake up early all the time) we would go and check on our butterflies. One morning we checked, and there was some kind of liquid on the floor of the habitat, and it looked like blood, so we thought the butterflies had died!

The red liquid is meconium...just waste material from the emerging butterfly

That was kind of upsetting, until we realized that one was actually in process of emerging, so we watched as it worked itself out of the chrysalis and clung on upside down to let it's wings dry and straighten out. In the meantime, several others came out of their chrysalises, and we determined that they were ok and not bleeding, as we had previously thought. In the first little bit when they start opening and closing their wings, the butterflies would walk across our hands and noses, before being strong enough to fly.

Lyndsey - 3 years old

Andrea - 7 years old

The joys of butterflies!

So that was pretty neat to "hold" our butterflies that morning. We also had a whole row of azalea bushes in our backyard, so we were able to release our butterflies outside and most of them visited our flower bushes for the following few weeks. So that was really neat. A few years later we did a butterfly unit in 5th grade where we studied monarch butterflies in detail, and raised some as a class. And another few times at home with some caterpillars we found in the greenbelt behind our house.

So that was neat to share all that with Hna Rosas, and some of the other passengers were also listening, as an older gentleman started smiling and laughing a few times as I was describing our little-kid emotions about our butterflies and demonstrating how they formed their chrysalises and everything. I'm a very good story-teller, apparently, as he enjoyed hearing about how to raise butterflies and everything. I learned how to say caterpillar and chrysalis in Spanish, so I thought that was some pretty helpful vocab to have on hand in case I get asked to speak in a seminar of butterfly-raising. Gotta be prepared, right?

I also had arroz y leche (rice and milk) for the first time here, I have never had rice pudding before, but I imagine it's something similar? You cook some white rice, and then boil it again with whole milk, sugar, and what tasted like cinnamon and cloves?  It was delicious.

And, just thought I'd let ya know, we haven't had water in pila since last Monday...kinda felt like the end of the world! It normally comes every 3 three days, and on Thursday it was only a sputtering little trickle for a few minutes, the same thing happened today. So we're on super water saver mode until we can talk to the land lady tomorrow, and maybe we'll have to borrow water from Hna Esperanza (the member we were living with previously) as the water never goes out over there and she's offered to other people to lend water before. So we'll see. I consider one of my biggest accomplishments in life is showering with just 2 gallons of water! That's about a third of what we normally use to bathe, I think so I'm pretty proud of myself. You gotta get everything wet, and then shampoo your hair, soap up your body and everything, scrub your face, (basically everything is covered with soap at this point) then rinse everything off. That's it. Somehow it takes longer than a normal shower, maybe because you're a lot more careful and focused on pouring the water a little bit at a time. Anyways, that's my big news for now, keep y'all posted on how we're gonna get our water back...maybe we gotta do a rain dance or something.