ELDER COLTON WEST: Week 11: The Polar Bear Plunge

Hola norteamericanos!

This week I'll be nice and explain the title first. I've mentioned that we take bucket showers out of an open-air pila (font). We have a small plug-in water heater to keep the water from being absolutely freezing. And I broke it. The pila got kinda low over the weekend and I hadn't noticed just how low it was. So when I plugged in the water heater last night, I just assumed that it was in the water. Big mistake. The water heater destroyed itself. So I had to take a very very very cold shower this morning. Not fun.

This week we had MultiZona. That's a big zone conference for four or five zones. We had to go to Ilopango (a suburb of San Salvador) by bus, which takes about two hours to travel. It would be way faster if we could have rented a Coaster bus, but that's really expensive. Bus fare from here to San Salvador is only 75 cents.

At MultiZona we were instructed on asking inspired questions. A lot of missionaries fall into a routine, so Presidente Vasquez and his assistants want to make sure that we don't do that. Presidente also gave a talk about being excited about the work, and how we are going to exceed our expectations for people taught and baptized.

Now to answer a few questions. We still have plenty of mosquitoes around here. Not a ton, but they're definitely around, especially in parts of my area. Chikungunya is still running rampant here, because not everyone has mosquito nets, and most people can't really afford bug spray. One of our sisters here got it last week and was pretty miserable for a few days. She still tried to go out and work anyways. Talk about dedicated!

The Ilobasco Branch is in the middle of a reformation right now. We have a new branch president (he's been here for 6 months) who is a returned missionary and is deadset on improving this branch. Yesterday we had 95 people who attended sacrament meeting! That's the highest it's been since I got here, and the number has been getting higher every week! The missionaries are kinda like substitute teachers for Sunday School and the Young Mens and Young Womens programs. So far we've taught twice: once in Gospel Principles class and once for the youth sunday school class.

We haven't done any planned service projects yet, but we've done lots of little unplanned service activities for people. It's gotten us in a few houses that otherwise wouldn't have received us.

All for now!

Love,

Elder Colton West

El Salvador, San Salvador East Mission