(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.
