September 19, 2011

Kind of a crazy week this week. This Saturday we are baptizing a complete Family se llama La Familia Acuña. They are a super super humble family who live in a wooden house smaller than most sheds. They are some of my favorite people that I have met here. The parents are Fransisco who is 24 and Maria who is 30. They have four kids; Rocco 9, Leo 5, Jeremias 2, and Melodi 1. They are always trying to give us all of their food even though they can't afford it. This Tuesday they insisted on giving us lunch and we accepted. The whole week I was hoping that they would make us anything but asado (pretty much a bbq). When poor people give us food, they want to make it something really special, and the special food of Argentina is asado. When poor people here make asado, they don't have enough money to buy the good meat, so they end up buying all the meat they the other people don't want, like the fat, small intestines, large intestines, stomach, liver, blood sausage, and some kind of mystery sausage I have not figured out yet. But as soon as we got close to their house, I smelled the asado, and almost broke down in the street. I literally started to get really nervous and my hands started to sweat. Poor Elder Oporto had to drag me the rest of the way. Right before going in, I said a little desperate prayer to help me enjoy the food and to remember that the familia Acuña was sacrificing a lot to give it to me. The asado was the typical poor person asado and I ate as much as I possibly could and did my best to put on a face like I was enjoying it. It turned out to be better than a lot of other asados I have had and I left the house feeling lucky. As we walked away from the Familia Acuñas house, Elder Oporto leaned over to me and asked me if I knew were the bathroom is in the Familia Acuñas house. I had not really thought about it until then, but the tiny little shack that is the Familia Acuñas didnt have a bathroom. And then Elder Oporto asked me if I saw where Fransisco (Dad Acuña) was cooking the asado. I then remembered that Fransisco had been cooking the asado in a little enclosed area of the Acuña house lot. I asked Elder Oporto what the point of all these questions was and he told me that Fransisco had cooked all the asado right next to the bucket the all of the Acuña family uses as a toilet. I didn't think much of it, but just thought it was kinda gross. The night after eating at the Familia Acuña, I woke up at about 4 in the morning with the feeling like seven people had just kicked me all at the same time all over my body, but especially in my stomach. I ran to the bathroom and got real sick in every way possible. I stayed in the bathroom for the rest of the night and into the next day too. Elder Oporto woke up just like every other morning and was totally fine. haha. I slept on the bathroom floor as close to the toilet as I could for about 8 hours. Needless to say I was using a lot of water, flushing the toilet every few minutes. This would be okay in the United States, but in Argentina, every house uses a water pump. Whenever someone in the house turns on a faucet, or flushes the toilet, or uses the shower, the motor has to pump water into the house. If you leave the motor pumping for too long, the motor burns out, and you don't have water anymore. This happened to me. All of the sudden, stopped working all over the house and I wanted to die. haha. There was still a lot of sick to be had. We called the missionary who takes care of all of the missionary housing and he said that someone would come to fix the pump in 3 days. I'm not giving anymore details as to what happened to get rid of the sick, but it was gross. Luckily we have a nice neighbor who let us use their toilet.  We can bathed at the church and bought bottled water. Overall it was such a bad experience, but luckily it is over.

Other than that we have having a lot of fun and success. We are baptizing a lot, and I am doing really well. Funny part of week: I still don't know why, but there was a stampede of sheep in front of our house.  Hundreds and hundreds of running sheep. It was like Jumanji. And it just so happens that my companion is strangely deathly afraid of sheep. He hid in the farthest part of the house from the street for a long time after the sheep stampede.