1st El Salvador Email! January 25, 2010

Hello everyone!!

Well I´m here, I´ve made it! First of all, El Salvador is sooooo sweet!! it´s way pretty and green and tropical, and most of all super poor. More poor than I thought it was going to be. So I got off the plane and met President Perez and Hermana Perez, they are both super nice. President is pretty hard to understand because he has a bit of a lisp haha but he seems like a really nice guy. We then went to the church and we ate breakfast and got told a little bit about the mission and had interviews and doctor check ups. Then we went to get our temporary residencies which took foreeeeevvver so by the time we got back it was close to night time and we all got separated and half of us slept at the assistance house and the other half and the office house. I was with Elder Dennis and Elder Marchant so I was way happy about that. So then the next morning I took my first cold shower.. yikes! haha and then we went back to the chapel to receive our new companions and areas.

So you ready for the big news..? I have been assigned to Custatancingo, which is an area just outside of San Salvador. I love it! My companion is Elder Montoya. I have some good news and some bad about him. The bad news is he doesn´t speak a WORD of English... and he is from Chile and talks super super fast and doesn´t pronounce any of the S´s in words so its super hard to understand him. The good news is.. he doesn´t speak a word of English. haha so hopefully that just means that I will learn that much quicker. He is a pretty cool guy though and we get along pretty well so no worries there.

Wow where to begin with this week.. the first night we went tracting and taught 4 lessons (by we I mean Elder Montoya) on the spot in the smallest houses I have ever seen. They are made out of tin mostly and dirt.. it´s a huge wake up. It´s way sad the conditions in which these people live in.. I feel way bad for the little kids especially. So just a few experiences I have already had: The second day we taught a lesson to this guy who has like 8 dogs and one of them was sitting on the couch no joke like eating itself.. literally! I think it had really bad fleas. There are dogs EVERYWHERE here and they are all crazy mixes. I´ve seen some pretty funky breeds that I didn´t even know existed haha. Then we were walking back to the house a couple nights ago and this lady walked up to me absolutely smashed and started talking to me. I asked her how she was and she said "really bad" and I asked if she had been drinking alcohol and she was like "no, beer" haha I laughed way hard. Keep in mind that this whole time there was a cop sitting right by us and he could care less. There are pretty much no laws here, the only thing cops do is keep the gangs in check. So yeah she then stood up after a while and fell flat on her face... scared the crap out of me!! So we helped her up and told her to go back to her house and sleep for a really long time haha.

Well I wont lie to you guys this week has been really tough. I don´t understand pretty much anything anybody is saying... you always here people say, when you get to the country you´ll ask "what language were they teaching me in the mtc?" well yeah that´s exactly how I feel. It´s really frustrating sometimes.. especially just for keeping happy and positive ya know cause I literally don´t have really anybody to just talk to most of the day and vent. I was really withering down and getting pretty upset and then a couple days ago we went on splits with some ward missionaries and I went with a guy named William. He is the president of the elders quorum and has been a convert for 1 year. He is going to serve a mission in Honduras in a couple months. But most importantly he speaks some English! So we talked for a while and he is awesome. He really cheered me up and made me feel better about the language, he said I sound really good and I will learn the language really fast, I hope he wasn´t just trying to make me feel better ha.

So last night I had dinner at the Bishops house which was pretty fun. The Mom isn´t my favorite person in the world however.. she would ask me a question and I´d say I don´t understand and she´d just laugh.. yeah I almost smacked her. haha but they have a little eight year old girl named Jenny and she is way cute. She is learning the parts of the body in English for her school so she always comes up to me and points to my stomach and says "estomach!" haha it´s so funny. She loves having me ask her how to say parts of the body in English. So I love the package you guys gave me! Just when I was at my lowest low sitting in my room I remembered I had that tape so I listened to it and it got to me pretty bad. It cheered me up a ton it was so good to hear your guys´s voices and advice. Thanks so much!! So the food here is pretty good, and I haven´t gotten sick at all so that´s way good. hopefully it stays that way! Well I don´t have too much more for you guys but I don´t know what my home address is so I will have to just check next week so for now just send it to the address you have, I think they are pretty good at getting them to the zone leaders. I love you all and miss you. Thanks for all your love and support, hope to hear from you soon!

love Nick