Pretty crazy that grandpa died a year ago already. Doesn't seem that long. It's kind of sad when somebody dies and you weren't really old enough to understand who they were.
Elder Manrique was in a sort of daze this whole week. He was super out of it and also really smiley. He would whisper to me "I'm here but I'm not here". A lot of this week was buying last minute souvenirs for his family and saying goodbyes. He left yesterday to Bogota.
Richard is the member who we spend almost everyday with. He leaves Barbosa to return to his home in Lima. It will be strange without him.
One of the main families for him to say goodbye to was Mariluz and Miguel. They have been key investigators this cambio, and also good friends. They came to church the first 3 weeks we knew them and always give us cold juice. So we went to their house (kind of out of the way on the other side of Rio Suarez) and there were chains wrapped around the door. We peeked inside a crack and all the furniture was gone. They had fled. We were both hit hard. Manrique was super emotional and thoughtful all day. He told me,
"I'm not just looking in front of me now. Now I'm looking at the man walking up the hill over there, I'm looking at the mountain, not just the stuff right in front of me."
He also said, "Main thing I learned on my mission is: who cares what anybody says."
One cool thing we did was visit Velez with Richard — or this village in the jungle right outside of Velez. Richard knew a friend there whose family owns a bocadillo factory. Really her family owns like all the jungle there so we walked through the jungle up to this lookout point where you could see like 12 different villages and all these fields and expanses of jungle for miles and miles. Really beautiful view. There was also a little school up in the jungle and all these kids were huddled together eating oranges.
We met a really nice family of a woman named Ana. All the kids always flip out whenever we come by. They ask us to sing hymns for them. They came to church.
