So
this week I got sick. I was fine on Monday, then Tuesday woke up feeling
sick. I had the standard flu symptoms, body aches, temperature, nasal
congestion, etc. Before too long, it was way worse. Joint and bone
pains, excruciating headache, and the fever was getting higher. But I
felt cold. Tylenol didn't do anything to bring the fever
down. Elder Le May (one of the other elders here in the ward) told me
that it sounded like Dengue Fever, and to call the nurse. I did so, but
she didn't answer. So we stayed home all day. By the time the nurse
was able to call me back that night, my fever was at 39°C, or 102.2°F.
That's "have to call the nurse and no work until it goes away"
level. The nurse was very nice, and told me that I had a textbook case of
dengue, so stay home and drink lots of water, and take tylenol every 6 hours to
help with the pain and fever. I resigned myself to the fact that I would
spend the next 4-7 days suffering, was a good boy and took my tylenol, and went
to bed.
Wednesday
was Multizona (Multi Zone Conference). I had a fever of 101.5 and felt miserable, but we went
anyways. I'm stubborn like that. Something interesting happened
though. I spent the whole Multizona in cold sweats. By the time
Multizona ended, my fever had all but disappeared. I still had the body
aches and joint/bone pains, but I was feeling much better. We still had
to stay home, because the fever wasn't gone, but I was actually able to sit at
my desk and study. At bedtime the fever was at 99.0
The
next morning all of my symptoms were gone, with the exception of some muscles
that were still achey. But I was better. I'm not sure if God has
invented a 24-hour Dengue, or if I just had a super super strong 24-hour flu,
but I'm grateful that I'm already better. I'm just going to chalk this
one up to blessings for being diligent and going to Multizona even though I was
sick.
I haven't
written about my new companion yet, so I'll do that right now. Elder
Maldonado is from San Marcos, Guatemala. He has 8 months in the mission,
and was in Zona Soyapango (a.k.a. Soya-Panico) for all of his time before he
came here. So far we get along very well, and work together well.
At the
moment we have a few people progressing towards baptism. One is called
Osmín Rodríguez. He's 60-something years old, but says that he's
102. We contacted him several months ago, but stopped teaching him for a
while because he wasn't progressing. Not too long after we dropped him,
he started coming to church on his own. So we've been teaching him
again. He wants to be baptized so that he can take the sacrament, but he
has to get married to his companion first. We're working with them to try
to get her interested in the idea of marriage.
The
others are the Durán family. They all investigated the church 2 years
ago, but only the oldest daughter, Valeria, got baptized. They've been
progressing slowly, mainly because the dad, José, works a lot, and they just
had a new baby, Axel, last month. We're going to marry Jose and Xiomara
(the mom) pretty soon, we just have to get all of the legal paperwork for
Jose's divorce from his ex-wife worked out. José and Xiomara will
probably be baptized next month. I just hope that it's before I
leave. We will be baptizing the younger daughter of the family, Ruby,
this month though. Prepare yourselves for pictures!
Time's
just about up. Have an awesome week!
Elder Colton West
El Salvador, San Salvador East Mission
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| Trying to bajar ("to drop, to come down") some of the coconuts from the
tree. We managed to get five down. And they were delicious! |
 |
Elder
Ramirez and I with baby Axel.
Only three weeks old and the little guy
already has more hair than I do!
Yeah, I'm slowly going bald. It's
devastating.
|
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| My bible is starting to give up the ghost.
Again. The humidity down here destroys the glue in the spine. I got a new one though. |
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I made
a pamphlet organizer so that we don't have to go
digging through boxes looking
for the pamphlets we need.
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