Ok so nicaragua is a tiny bit different than the MTC. The last week has been pretty crazy and I feel like a months worth of things happened, so there´s no way I can tell it all. We arrived on Monday and the mission president and two office missionaries met us at the airport and we went to eat and then to the office missionaries house to stay the night. My mission president and his wife are from costa rica and neither of them speak very much english. Mission president was impressed with my spanish, so he assigned me a latino companion for my trainer. His name is Elder Castro, he is from Panama and knows only a few english words and phrases. I´m his first north american companion. In fact, my entire district is latino, so after I left managua it has been 100% immersion, which is great for my spanish, but it also super difficult. Elder Castro is really cool though and he´s been out 17 months, so he knows what he´s doing. The first couple days kinda felt like a dream. Steaming hot, sitting in the most impoverished houses, and not really understanding much of what was going on. I can understand most of what people say, but there are a ton of words still that people use that I don´t understand and some people talk super fast or have a strange accent that just makes it super hard to follow the conversation. Usually I get the general idea of what they are talking about, but it is difficult to contribute to the discussion when I´m not sure exactly what they are saying. Elder Castro has been working on finding ways to include me in the conversation and letting me practice my spanish, but it´s hard because he can explain things so much better than I can.
My first area is Somoto, which is the capitol of Madriz. It´s pretty far north; about 30 min from Honduras and a long 4 hour bus ride from Managua. The are is a decently new area. It opened a couple months ago but the first missionaies here had a hard time getting the church started. The week before I came up my companion baptized 8 people, so now we have a total of 10 members in our side of Somoto. The other companionship in our district has the other side of Somoto and have around 14 members. Currently we have separate sacrament meetings for our different sides of Somoto, but we have been looking to buy a new meeting place near the center of the town, so we can combine our sacrament meetings and get the last few members we need to become a branch. It´s pretty hard starting up a branch because there are a ton of churches around here and it´s hard to commit people to come to a small meeting in someones house. This week of course was general conference which was held in a cyber, whch we basically had to buy out for saturday andSunday. Sunday morning we were able to pull a pretty good attendance and had a total of 22 people all crowded around the 5 computers in the cyber with one of the computers hooked up to an amp. It was way hard to get much out of the conference messages because I was super tired and couldn´t stay focused long enough to understand the complete message, plus a lot of it was beyond my spanish vocabulary.
So far though things have been going really well. The people are very open to listen for the most part and it is pretty fun to just sit down and talk to random Nica families, although most of the time I´m just sitting there trying to follow the conversation between my companion and the person. It´s really cool being immersed in the culture and the language though because I´m not learning what the words mean in english or what the culture is like, I´m learning in what circumstance different words and phrases are commonly used and I´m living the culture. One of the strangest things as far as the language goes is people use adios as a salutation as you pass. That was super weird my first day saying adios to people and them responding adios, instead of saying one of the greetings I learned in school, like hola, buenos dias, buenas tardes, or something like that. When I asked my companion why they do that he agreed that it was different, but it was just a custom. Also a lot of people talk in vos hear, which I haven´t learned. So It´s definitely tricky, but I´m getting better everyday.
As far as missionary work goes, it´s been super twanis. We got a total of 8 or 10 baptismal dates this week and a few of them are some pretty solid families, so we are stoked about that. I also performed my first baptizm this week! His name is Lester and his parent´s were baptized last week. The other missionaries, Elder Diaz and DeLeon, have been teaching his family, but when we asked him who he wanted to baptize him he said me and the other Elders were all for it, so long story short my first baptism was in my first week and we had to hike to a river to perform the baptism.
I could go on about our investigators and more of the events that occured this week, but I have no time because today for Pday we took a bus down to ocotal to play soccer with the zone and that ended up taking a lot of the day. One thing that is super nice is one of our investigators owns a restaurant and we pay her every 15 days and she provides us with breakfast and dinner everyday and she does our laundry as well. It´s way nice not having to cook. Most meals are pretty much the same though. Gallo pinto, a small portion of meat, fried platanos, and juice of some sort. I still am not quite sure what half of the juices are made of, like mareculla (probably spelled wrong) and tamarindo, but they taste pretty good.
Ok I think that´s all for this week. Here are some pictures.
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