Thursday, September 24, 2015 -- Month #7 - Week #32 - Day #220 - Santa Cruz de Yojoa

Weekly planning! Also visited Noemy and got fed lunch, went to the church for Coordinacion Misional, waited there for an hour, called our ward Mission Leader, he said he forgot but he'll be there right away, so we had our meeting, had a lesson, and had dinner with the Bishop's family. Good day overall.

I learned an easy way to make yummy rice from Noemy:

Tada! Gonna make rice like that from now on, good stuff.

Quote from Hna Escobar today: "Vamos a ganar la confianza necesaria." Or that we will win the confidence necessary to work with people here. We need to establish a relationship, but we're not here to be people's friends and talk with them all afternoon long, we're here to teach.  I like her, we're very happy together!

I've also been learning a few random words in Kaqchiquel, a native dialect from Guatemala, so I'm pretty excited about that. We have a ton of chapins and gringos in our zone, in our district each gringo is paired with a guatemalteco, and we all get along really well. 

So I know how to say:

horse - quiej "kegh"

death - ixcamich "eesh-kah-meek"

thank you - matio´x "mah-tee-oh-sh"

I love you - n´te wajo "nn-teh-wah-hoh"

I am a missionary - ajchiquib na´tat "agh-chee-keeb-nah-tahtgh"

Still a bit iffy on the proper rendering into the English alphabet, but I included how you would say all that if you sounded it out. Pretty neat, huh?

I also gave myself a haircut (nobody freak out, please!) and trimmed off an inch of my ends after my shower, so I feel a lot better about myself now. It's been 7 months without a haircut, and I didn't really feel like dropping 80-100 lemps and trying to explain exactly what I wanted in Spanish. So I just got to work parting my hair a million ways and snipping for about 10 minutes, and it turned out beautifully. Freaked poor Hna Escobar out when she saw me holding scissors to my hair, but she relaxed when I explained that I actually wasn't completely crazy. So now my dead, dry ends are off, I'm happy, and 100 lemps richer.

A common expression (most common among the elders, as they think it's funny to say, they're total boys) is "alacran!" which literally is saying "scorpion"...you use it like "whoah!" or "wow!" But they like to exaggerate it and say it deep in their throats: "AGHLA-cran!"  Total goofballs. Then the hermanas all make jokes about them and imitate what they say, so we're all just sitting around saying "alacran!" over and over, and it's actually quite funny. Gotta love the mission!