Tuesday, April 2, 2013

2013-04-02 Elder Howlett's first p-day


Elder Howlett and his companion, Elder Laidlaw, at the Lima Temple
 
Hey everyone,

It’s pretty awesome here. I really like the food. It’s almost always some kind of meat with some kind of rice plus a side dish and a dessert. Sometimes there are potatoes instead of rice.
 
Elder Laidlaw and I get along well. He is huge and we are going to the same mission. We share our room with two Latino Elders. Elder Feller is 22 and from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He joined the church 2 years ago because his tango partner was LDS. He speaks a similar amount of English to the amount of Spanish I speak. He is outgoing and likes American rock music. The other is Elder Cotrina. He is 18 from Lima. He’s very shy. We didn’t think he spoke English hardly at all until yesterday we found out that he speaks perfect English. I’m not sure how it took us a week to figure that one out. I hope we didn’t say anything too weird in front of him since we thought he couldn’t understand us. We all get along well and have our hour of exercise at the same time every day.

Elder Howlett and his roommates
The MTC is beautiful outside and the weather is awesome except that it gets a little too hot most afternoons. We spend most of the day with our district where we have teachers who teach us about the Church in Spanish. That’s how you learn Spanish I guess because we don’t have any just Spanish classes. For the first half of the day our teacher is Miluska Loyaza. She speaks a moderate amount of English and really likes me and my companion. She gives me her ice cream at lunch. Also if she calls you in a year and a half it is because I gave her our home number and told her she could stay at our house because she wants to see Temple Square when she goes to BYU Idaho for a year. In the afternoon our teachers are Hermano Espinoza and Hermano Hvaita (pronounced white-a) Hermano Espinoza is probably the most excited person I’ve ever met. He speaks very little English but has a lot of energy and was Peru’s Tae Kwon Do champion. He gets married in November. Elder Hvaita speaks better English and gets married in a month. I’ve gotten to know my district well because we spend half of every day in those classes. Besides that we have workshops and firesides with more missionaries.
Elders Howlett and Laidlaw with a little
Elder from Colombia

There are less than 100 missionaries here which is nice. It is weird that Provo is overflowing but this MTC is at less than half capacity.
flags representing Elders currently at the MTC
The showers have a unique feature. They choose their own temperature and switch from scalding to freezing every 30 seconds. Literally. And when I say literally I don’t mean figuratively. It makes it kind of hard to shower actually.

 
Today was p-day and it is almost over. It was a ton of fun. First we went and did a session at the Lima temple and then went shopping at a Walmart-like store and then to a little church store. At the grocery store I spent 26 nuevo sols on drinks and snacks. Some stuff was really inexpensive and some was incredibly expensive. Pringles there are over 4 dollars per can. But I got 16 small bags of chips for about 2ish dollars. I think it’s 2.5 ns to 1 dollar.
Peru MTC grounds
I pretty much feel fine but my companion and a lot of other people have gotten sick.
Easter wasn’t anything too special but we did have an awesome sacrament meeting.
I’m out of time now.

love y’all,


Elder Howlett
 
 
 

 

There are two juices every day
 and there are 'tons' of juices.
Pictured are passion fruit and watermelon