Week 8 (July 3rd, 2016)

Panama is incredible!! I see something new and amazing every single day!! New things for this week would include:

 I had oysters at an inactive members house. It was the first meal I didn't finish while being here. He was laughing so hard at me trying to choke them down. He eventually told me to not eat them. I had one more then called it good. 

Lizards. Literally everywhere. We have flies in the United States, they have lizards. Literally all over the place. It's so weird. I have one living in our bathroom in our shack of a house, it lives in our moldy bathroom. Which i did buy some cleaner for it so that will change soon. 

The milk here. So lots of people here just drink the stupid powder milk, and I'm not about that life. So me and my comp went and bought real milk. They keep it in a box. Its ultra-pasteurized, whatever that means, so it doesn't have to be refrigerated before opening. So they sell their milk just in the middle of the dry food area. So strange. But when we opened the milk it tasted delicious. Like for real better than the milk in the states. and it was whole milk. It was so good!! And I'm not worried about getting fat here at all because we walk, so dang hot that we just sweat buckets all the time. And most places don't have air conditioners so its hot inside too. Its terrible!! Just sweaty all the time! I've already lost weight!! I'm going to come back with chicken legs!! 

I had my first experience with hearing gun shots this week. It was definitely different. There are usually fireworks going off all the time at any hour of the day, which is strange because you cant see them all you can do is hear them but this was gunshots. Like 15 of them. It was weird. We were just meeting in an inactive members house and suddenly like 200 yards away just tons of shooting. I don't know where it came from and we didn't get to investigate because we stayed in the house. Then we went and played soccer outside the church with some other elders and a  few less active members. I scored 3 goals. Maybe baseball wasn't my sport after all!! haha!!

Another new experience I had this week was when I turned my head on the bus and BOOM! lady breast feeding! Never saw that in the states. Since then I've seen it like 4 times. and it always cashes me by surprise. And one time I swear the kid was like 4 years old. It was like watching the movie grown ups!!! 

Another new experience I had was with the family that treat us like family. We went in their back yard thing and we saw two 13 year old kids boxing, they had gloves and headgear and we helped ref it. Then i fought a 17 year old kid, but he was scared so we only did from the neck down and the belt up. It was dumb. Way to easy to block everything that he threw at me. That being said it was hard to throw anything back. My best way was just let him hit me in the ribs and then hit him harder right after. And it never hurt. It was fun to be in there but it sucked not being able to really fight. Speaking of fights me and my comp had a little fit. We were supposed to plan for the week, like we have done a hundred times each. so we get ready to plan and he wants to read preach my gospel about planning. Which is fine because I can read in Spanish like a champion. But he wants to read the whole planning section. Its 13 points long and would take forever!! So I try to tell him we aren't reading the whole thing and we can just read the titles and call it good, but he gets all mad and throws his book and says fine, and that was the end of planning and then we didn't talk to each other for like 3 hours. Pretty great!! That was like 3 days ago tho and we are super chill now. Its still really hard to communicate but I am slowly getting better at understanding him. The problem is once I finally understand what he says in Spanish I realize that its really vague and could mean like 13 different things and then I still have no idea what he means by it. Its super difficult to communicate. I can speak to him just fine I just cant understand anything that he says. Not to great! 

The last great and different thing that happened this week is we committed someone to baptism. 3 different people actually. It was great!! I actually taught the lesson to one of them and she said yes to baptism on the 30 of July. Super excited for that! We have another one on the 23rd of July as well. Its going to be great. 

Overall this week has been incredible!! We have got a lot done! We finally had a few less actives show up to church! that helped a lot! there were like 40 people in church, which here feels like million. It was good! Happy fourth of July by the way! I think its dumb they don't celebrate that here. I think the whole world except England should celebrate the holiday, but thats just me. haha