Haha look what i found in the middle of Bucaramanga.
All of Colombia is trying to make me trunky : (
With Elder Mooney — friend from Mexico MTC. We are in the same zone!
Hey family, week 99!
I have a memory of meeting an investigator named Doris my first day in the field, and I use that memory as reference for how long I have been here. Seems like it happened 10 years ago. It's weird thinking I have seen Elder Porras more recently than you guys.
PiedeCuesta is going awesome. We have pretty much put together a hiking club of members/investigators. A few times a week we all get up at about 4:30 AM to start the day.
PiedeCuesta is a center for the Guerrilla. They aren't centered within the city limits, but they are in the outskirts and surrounding farmland. Colombian Guerrilla is still going strong. It started with good ideas (cheaper education, easier access to food/water), but got totally corrupted with narcos.
This week we visited a sector of our area called NuevaColombia. INTENSE.
This is an up-to-date pic I got off Google.
There are a few members who live out here that we went to visit. NuevaColombia is an area with extreme poverty and pretty much 90% illegal settlements. In Spanish it's called invasión. It is so dusty. You walk 3 meters and have dust in your eyes.
We visited the shack of a member named Carolina who is our Gospel Principles teacher. We were the first missionaries to get to her house. She lives way up at the top of the mountain. She lives alone with her chickens, a duck, and a blind dog. She makes a bike trip to Piedecuesta every day (12 km to get there, really gnarly terrain) and lives off what she makes from selling the eggs her gallinas give her.
All the houses there are shacks with corrugated metal roofing. We would just walk down the street and kids would come out shocked. They just gasped "gringooooo" when we walked by haha.
One cool thing was going to an open house in Cañaveral (one of my old wards). Two of my converts are there and one of them is the ward mission leader who led the whole operation. Julian Roman. So awesome remembering our lessons with him and answering his questions, and now seeing him leading all the missionaries. He and his sister Angelica are some of my very favorite people in Colombia.
I have gotten along with people in every area, but in every single area I've had, there is the one family who I love more than everyone else.
One thing I've been doing these last few weeks is networking like a boss. Anytime I meet someone cool I give them my Facebook or Instagram de una vez.
Also heard one of the best songs ever:
GRAN TRIBULACION BY MARINO
Look it up.
Hiking Club with Stake Patriarch and Hermano Vargas.
On one hike this week, we ran into the Mayor of Piedecuesta
who bikes up the mountain a few times a week.
