"Among other eventful moments was the moment this week when I discovered that there was a giant cricket inside my pants. Ha. That was fun!"

Yo

Hey I'm a little limited on time today but we'll see what kind of an e-mail I can pump out with this ticking time limit. Okay 1, 2, 3 GO!

I'm currently in Lambayeque spending p-day with the rest of our zone, and we're staying the night because tomorrow we have a multi-zone conference in Chiclayo (those are the best!!) and it saves us a lot of money and a lot of time traveling to not go back to Olmos for the night. I just spend the past hour or so talking with Elder Huntsman (en ingles...) about SpongeBob and all the funny parts of every episode. Which is a TON of parts! We were just cracking ourselves up remembering SpongeBob episodes. The Tattletale Strangler is still the funniest. "GET YOUR FEET OUT OF MY EYE SOCKETS!!!" Hahaha. How I miss that yellow square.

Well... This week was... not the most successful week I've had... to say the least. Let's just say that on Thursday, at 5:00 PM was the first appointment of the entire week that didn't fall through. Oh man, we just had the absolute worst luck of all time this week! On Wednesday for example, the entire day was full of scheduled appointments. We had seven set-in-stone appointments for Wednesday. Every single one of the fell through. And all of our backup plans and other people we could go visit also weren't available and we couldn't get into any houses! What happened?? Well, I decided to keep track this week, and here is a scary statistic: This week we had a total of 22 set-in-stone appointments scheduled. Out of those 22, guess how many fell through?.... 18. Wow. Minimal success. But... just gotta keep workin' hard. I got a little fed up with all the appointments falling through though, so I took some contact cards that we have that we never use that have a picture of the Savior on them and say something to the effect of "What does Jesus Christ hope of me?" on it, and that's all it is with the name of the Church on the back of the card. Well, underneath that question I wrote in "Revelation 3:20" and I now leave those at the houses of people who have let us down multiple times with appointments. Lolz, look it up.

Last Monday we also went to La Cruz de Motupe for the second time. This time with the whole zone. Highlight of the trip: on our way back down the mountain this old lady passes by who's making her way up, notices our nametags, realizes who we are, and asks us in a really accusing tone "What are you doing here?!" "Just visiting" said one of the elders. She was way mad that us Mormons were visiting the cross. Jeez, its a nice hike. (No, I don't like hiking all of the sudden. Don't get any ideas. When I come back home, I don't want to go on any hikes.)

One silly thing that happened this week was that an Adventist missionary named Cezar approached us this week and gave us a free book. I forget what its called. But yeah, I took it. He was a nice guy. Asked us to pray for him. Yeah, cool. We talked a minute, and then I gave him a Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ pamphlet. Fair trade, right? Yeah he took it and was all cool about it. I was tempted to be like "oh thanks, and we have a book we'd like to give you too!" and hand him a Book of Mormon, but I thought I'd better not. Anyway he was a cool guy, not offensive or anything like many people of other faiths that call us out in the street. So then the other day while my comp was in the shower I took a look at that book, looked at the table of contents and found a chapter called "In Defense of the Truth" and so I turned to that to see what truths they were defending. I had a pretty good idea before I read it. In fact, I guessed perfectly. All the chapter talked about was how important it is to keep the Sabbath Day holy on Saturday and not Sunday. It was ripping on the Catholic church like crazy too. But yeah, I thought that was funny just because I knew exactly what it was gonna talk about. It's called the Seventh Day Adventist Church. You can tell a lot about a Church by it's name. For example, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's the church of Jesus Christ, and the members are latter-day saints. Pretty clear. We focus on Christ.

We also had to give talks this Sunday. We found out Saturday night, which is typical. Had no time to prepare. But I threw an outline together before church and had a pretty solid talk idea. I spoke about missionary work and how important the members are in the work, and how much they can do. I shared about how Jesus Christ taught that He is the "light of the world" (John 8:12), but also, on a separate occasion, He was speaking to his disciples and told them "Ye are the light of the world" and how they should "let their light so shine" (Matthew 5:14-16) and be examples to the rest of the world. It was a pretty positive encouraging talk, but that was only the first half of the talk. I also had planned to talk about keeping the Sabbath Day holy because keeping the Sabbath is a huge problem here even for members, but... before I got to that point the branch President cut me short. Haha. Maybe it was for the best. I'm not big on guilt tripping or making people feel bad, in fact, I never do it.  Later in Priesthood meeting I got to see William get ordained as an elder and receive the Melchizedek Priesthood along with another kid named Julio. Way cool! William is the best and he's always way willing to help us and go visit people. He's prepping for his mission which is so rad because he's been a member of the church for only like seven months. Sadly we haven't been able to go back to visit his mother since the first time. We're working on it though. Just have this continuing problem of appointments falling through...

Among other eventful moments was the moment this week when I discovered that there was a giant cricket inside my pants. Ha. That was fun! Crickets are everywhere, and they're always crawling all over us, or flying right into our faces. But finding one inside my pants was just a little... shocking.

Last night we were talking to some members about foods, and one thing that's a big deal to eat here in guinea pig. I haven't tried it yet, but everyone eats it. We were talking and guinea pig came up and I told them I've never tried it but that I totally want to (and quite frankly I'm a little disappointed that I haven't had it yet after six months of living in this country). So they invited us over for lunch this coming Saturday to eat some delicious guinea pig! Hahaha. I'm so down with eating anything weird, just so I can later say that I've eaten it. And usually it all tastes good too. Bunny? Delish. In some parts of Peru they eat cats, and I'd so be down to try cat! Sadly, in this part of Peru, eating cat is considered... very weird. Well, yeah, it's weird to me too.

Alright, gotta go, the clock is ticking down and the comp is about to shut off! Send me a Tommy's burger if you get the chance. Thanks!

-Elder Victor

"Way to go buddy. It took us three days to make that potato salad... THREE DAYS!!!!!" (apparently this is a SpongeBob quote...)