The Grey City

Hi Everyone!

We have an address, but mail goes to the mission office.  The address is:

Calle Los Agrólogos 368
Urbanización Las Acacias De Monterrico
La Molina
Lima 12
Peru

We are in Líma, in an area called San Luis. We are very definitely on foot.  We have to take a bus from where we live to our area every day, which is kind of crazy, but oh well.  The plane ride was long, but we got dinner... which was not very good.  I slept during most of it, and I had some letters from my district to read, so that was cool.  My companion is pretty awesome!  He is Bolivian, but he took English in school, so he speaks English rather well.  His name is Elder Velasquez, and he is 21, and has been out for 6 months already.  I guess there is some mandatory military service in Bolivia, so that's why he is older, but he has a super strong testimony, and is very good at getting his foot in the door, sometimes literally!  It's pretty great.

My mission president is also pretty great.  He cares a lot about the missionaries, and I was playing piano while waiting for my first interview with him,  and he said I would be able to bless a lot of wards, because most didn't have a pianist!  So I might get quite good at sight reading piano!  On that note, if you have any cool arrangements of hymns, I'd love to practice more melodic and intricate music than just the standard arrangements.  I don't know exactly how that would work, but I could figure something out.

I still have like twenty pages left in Jesus the Christ, because I was too tired to read it on the plane, and the new missionaries are supposed to read three chapters in the Book of Mormon every day, so there isn't a lot of time to read it, but I have learned that the Savior was long suffering, and one thing I learned really deeply is that all of his healings depended on the faith of the healed.  He almost always said something to the effect of "According to your faith..." 

They gave me Spanish scriptures at the CCM, and I I've been consistent in my journal writing so far!  It's crazy how much I'm learning, and how many spiritual experiences I've been able to have!  The best part of the CCM would probably be the teachers that love us.  They were so good!

I have pictures, but I can't find my SD Card reader, so I'll send them next week.  Sorry!  

And now about Peru.

Holy smokes.  It is very, very different than the States.  The weather looks the same as Oregon, with clouds all day, every day, with occasional breaks for sun, but it also gets hot and cloudy!  People get sunburned!  With clouds!  I haven't been sunburned yet, but it does get quite hot!  They call Líma the Grey City, because it is literally always covered in clouds.  

It is also super dusty!  I have to clean and repolish my shoes every day!  because it never rains, it is just super, super dry, fine dust.  I think I'm inhaling it.

There are also a ton of dogs.  They are literally everywhere!  I have never seen so many.  Some are pets, but a lot are just wild!  Therefore, one of the omnipresent smells is dog urine.

But there are also other smells!  We get to walk through a fruit market every day, and it smells awesome!  And you'll walk by a street vendor and smell awesome smells.  It's so interesting!

Also, People live like 2-3 families per door, with one door per level, with usually 3-4 levels per living quarter.  It's very cramped, and everyone builds up!  Also, on the hills, the buildings tower up to 9-10 stories, but they're all so close together, they never fall down.  The stairs are super steep and narrow, and it's just a whole different world.

We have a Pensionísta, who is amazing and loves the elders!  She took some pictures of us that I think she is going to try and send on Facebook.  The food is great, and we get a lot of different types of food.  I don't have a lot of time left, but she has a daughter that is Lucy's age, and she reminds me so much of Lucy!  It's so fun, except I can't understand all the Spanish!

I'll keep telling you about it next week, but I'm doing great!

Love you all!

Peru and Más!

Peru!

I made it to Peru, and have already contacted two people!  We knocked on one guy's door, and he agreed to listen to us, so we gave him a short lesson on the doorstep, and by we, I mean mostly my companion, Elder Velasquez.  It was pretty cool though!  My P-Day is Monday, so I'll email you more then.  Hope everything is well with you, and I'm doing great here!

Love you!

Más!

I apparently have a little more time, so I'll tell you a little about Peru!  It's so different here!  I might get to play piano for some wards here, because apparently something like 70% of the wards don´t have piano players!  I also am basically completely lost without my companion, because the streets are all super crazy!  There are a million cars, and none of them seem to stop for pedestrians, or even sometimes each other!  But everyone seems really nice, and smiles at me.  I say hello to everyone, and most of them say it back, which is very different from Oregon!  I have a place to stay as well, and I'll send pictures on Monday, but it's pretty cool!  The craziest thing though, is I am preaching the gospel in Spanish.  Today!  It's crazy.

Love you!

Preparing for Departure

I'm so excited to be out in the field!  I leave Monday night, at 11:55pm.  It will be a 6 hour plane ride, so it's going to be a long night!

When we practice teaching investigators, we basically watch a video detailing someones problem in their life, like their family died in a car crash, or they struggle with an addiction that tore apart their family, or they had surgery and now can't have kids, things like that.  We then plan the lesson according to their needs.

If you have questions about what we're being taught here, please ask!  I will definitely try to answer!  One of the cool things we learned is to ask why they're interested in the church, and why they are willing to keep their commitments.  You get to really know people a lot more that way!

So we're now the oldest district in our zone, so our district leader and his companion are now the zone leaders.  Which means I am the new district leader!  It's definitely not an easy task.  I have to try and guide and help a group of 10 18-20 yr old guys, and I am the second youngest, and definitely the smallest.  They seem to listen to me most of the time, but it feels like a pretty heavy burden.

During gym time this week, I played cage soccer a couple times.  Bear in mind, I haven't played soccer since indoor last year, and before that 6th grade.  It was so much fun!  It's like indoor, but there's no roof, and it's just a chain link fence around it.  The doors don't close either, which means it's possible to kick it out of bounds, and also out of the arena.  I realized that because I'm so small, I can just run at people, and use them to change my direction, because they all weigh at least 50 pounds more than I do!  What surprised me though, was how well we held our own against the Mexican teams!  We play in a hotseat fashion, where you have teams of 5, and if you score in 5 minutes, the other team has to come off.  If nobody scores in 5 minutes, both teams come off.  So you can play with 30 people, and get a good amount of playing done!  I also realized, if you're not afraid to get hit by the ball, and can immediately play after being hit, you can surprise people who don't expect you to have little regard for personal safety!

One thing I've noticed here, is how people act when they come from a homogeneous community.  It's really interesting the confidence with which people say very controversial opinions.  I think it definitely has benefited me to grow up in a community where there is, if not diversity, at least a diversity of opinion.

One thing I've learned about Latinos is that they actually do speak faster than we do.  It takes more letters on average to say things in Spanish, due to the fact that they have less sounds available (every letter makes it's sound and no other, with a few exceptions).  This means that to get across ideas at the rate they have them, they have to talk faster, because they have to fit more or longer words into the same space!  It was a really interesting discovery.

I have 30 pages left in Jesus the Christ, and I had some really cool experiences with it.  I would be talking about some opinion I had, or thinking about some issue, and when I read Jesus the Christ, It would directly address that topic!  This happened as I was thinking about the respect deserved by women, and I read an in depth analysis of Christ's attitude towards women!  Also honoring the law, and I read about how Christ's teachings could be practiced under most governments, rather than requiring a systemic body such as was had by the Jews.  Seriously, super cool!

So, I had to pack today.  That was lame.  I have to check the weight of my bags today, even though I'm not leaving until Monday!  I will be wearing one of two outfits every day for 4 days, which I guess isn't bad, but it's kind of sad to see my closet empty.  Oh well.

We were learning about how to help people overcome addiction, and our teacher had us address a habit our companions had, through the gospel, and ask them to commit to stopping it for a day, or for a week.  So, my companion said I should eat less then 3 bags of chips a day.  It was very funny, but also difficult, because they don't sell a lot of healthy food at the store, and I get hungry in between meals.  I did it pretty well though.  It was supposed to help us to empathize with those who have chemical or other addictions, which are by nature much more difficult to overcome than simple habits.  Quite an interesting experience.  

It's been a pretty great 6 weeks, but now the real world starts.  I might get a chance to email on Monday, but if not, the next time you hear from me, I'll be in Peru!

Love you all, and thinking about you too!

--Elder Dahl

Viruses and the Hospital

This week was pretty crazy!  I discovered, at the end of P-Day last week, that the lab we were using was completely infected with a virus.  Luckily, I figured out how to clean everyone in my district's USB and SD cards, and clean the computers for safe usage, but It's going to be nigh on impossible to eradicate, because of the roughly 700 people here, all using the computers, any of which could have their stuff infected, which would in turn infect the computers.  It's not even a clever virus!  It runs every time you plug something in, and it copies itself onto the drive/SD card, and makes it so whenever you click on something in your flash drive, it runs.  I was really annoyed when I found out.  If anybody wants to research it further, the main file it uses is system.jse, and it creates shortcuts on the flash drive to run itself,  it's scheduled to run in the task scheduler, and the file is stored in $APPDATA$\Roaming\Microsoft\system.jse.  If you wanted to know!  Also, side note, the keyboards in Mexico are slightly different.  Which is quite annoying.  The shift key on the left is super small, and there are some extra letters, and there is an extra modifier called the AltGr key, which acts as a different kind of shift for certain symbols.  It's pretty frustrating!

We sang a musical number on Sunday, and it was awesome!  We sang Joseph Smith's First Prayer, to the tune of Come Thou Fount, in Spanish.  It was pretty great, and then on the last verse, the piano dropped out and we had a guy in our district who sounds like a professional singer sing the last verse in English, in a different key.  He had sheet music detailing the key change, but it was too difficult for our accompanist to play.  So, guess who got to figure out how to transition to the new key?  I did!  It was awesome!  I had the accompanist play two more chords, each one going up a fifth from the last, and it ended right in the key we wanted, and sounded so smooth and natural!  It was so satisfying!

We also watched The Testaments on Sunday, and it was so powerful.  My favorite part is at the end, when Helam hears Christ call his name, and the expression on his face, as he immediately recognizes the voice of our Savior, and the love he feels for him.  It was so powerful, and I felt the spirit so strongly.  It was incredible.

So apparently in Mexico, the Coke tastes better.  Not that I care, because I don't drink Coke, but my companion does.  Also, the CCM is continuously under construction, so there are a ton of workers in here all the time.  The workers bring their own lunches, and guess what they bring in.  3 liter bottles of Mexican coke.  So, naturally, my companion has been pestering me all week to help him go ask a worker to bring him a coke from the outside. He's also trying very hard to get street tacos, which are supposed to be phenomenal here!

Then, on Monday night, disaster struck.  Our district leader could not stop using the restroom.  It got to be 6 times in an hour, and it wasn't healthy at all.  Finally, on Tuesday morning, he went to the hospital with his companion.  We all missed them, and His companion stayed until Wednesday morning, when we began switching off.  We thought he might have had a parasite, but as it turns out, I think the biggest problem was severe dehydration.  He was on an IV, but he could eat and talk and everything, it was mostly just waiting out the disease.  So I got to go visit him this morning, and you can see some pictures of the hospital, which is surprisingly well equipped. Anyway, I wasn't there permanently, I was just there to be the companion of the elder who was staying with him. A nurse said we could get a Krispy Kreme donut, and we took her up on her offer.  Just so you understand, I've been eating basically convenience store candy and chips, and cafeteria Mexican food for 4 weeks.  That fresh Krispy Kreme donut was literally amazing!  I got a Jelly filled one, and it tasted just like home.   Also, our District Leader came home today, and is feeling much better!

Speaking of Krispy Kreme, thank you so much for the donuts!  They were a huge highlight of my week!  Just FYI, One of the Hermana's birthday is on the 23rd, so if you wanted to send me more food, a couple days before that would be awesome, because I think we're having a party.

My maestra finds us videos of people to be our investigators, and she seems to pull a lot of them from the addiction recovery resources of the church.  Consequently, all of the videos have some pretty heavy stuff in them, but to see the transformation in the people is amazing!  It really helps me understand that literally anybody could be ready to listen!  "For my ways are not your ways" and all that!

Also on Tuesday we watched a live broadcast from Provo of David A. Bednar, and it was incredible!  He was explaining one way we can study the general conference talks is by analyzing the main doctrine or principle, the invitation to action, and the promised blessings.  He also said that the themes that emerge in conference are divinely orchestrated, because they have no idea what everyone is going to talk about, they are all inspired by the spirit.  It's super cool!  He also said that as you study the general conference talks, you should record the thoughts you have while reading it, especially the ones you didn't have while hearing it.  As you attempt to answer those questions using the scriptures and the talk, you repeat the process.  As a result, you can learn directly from the prophets, and the spirit, and really feast on the words of Christ.  It's incredible.

Then, on Wednesday, we got to watch another talk by David A. Bednar, and it was awesome!  He was talking about recognizing the spirit, and said that you shouldn't worry about it.  He said that you will rarely be able to recognize a spiritual prompting before action.  It may be years before you can recognize it, but as long as you do what you think is right, you will be an instrument in the Lord's hands.

We then watched the video, which I have seen before, entitled Earthly Father, Heavenly Father.  It is such a beautiful video, and It inspires me to be as selfless as my Father in Heaven.  It is so powerful, and I invite you all to watch it.  I'm so grateful for my earthly father, and how he has helped me come to know my Heavenly Father.  It is really eye opening.

I love you all, and think about you all the time!

--Elder Dahl

Gifts from God

I got your mtcmexico letter, which was pretty awesome!  I didn't realize that cost money though... how much is it?  My clothes are working great!  I do laundry between one and two times a week, and the laundry detergent packets are 4 pesos, so like 20 cents.  And I'm still a little congested, but much better.  The weather is so warm in mexico, I haven't touched my sweaters or my jacket.  Working out is great!  The gym is well equipped, and I can feel and see myself getting stronger.  It's awesome!  I uploaded pictures of my schedule, so you can see a sample of it.  I mostly shower after gym time now, but I might still get up really early to shower.  I feel like I'm missing a lot of music... If you have any ideas, you can upload them to the drive, and I can pull it down.  I haven't gotten the card yet, but I'll let you know.

They do have a barber here, and a dry cleaning service, but they charge for dry cleaning.  I took my suit to be dry cleaned today, and it was 60 pesos, roughly $3!  It's dirt cheap!  I haven't gotten a haircut, but I'll probably get one right before I leave.  I really look forward to gym time, because I get to wake up from the inherent tiredness I have.  That's probably the hardest part, being constantly tired.  My Spanish is pretty great!  I can hold a decently complex conversation in Spanish, and I'm at the point now where they can explain a lot of words in Spanish, and I can understand.  It also helps that there is a lot of informal sign language!  And go Haven!  That's awesome! [Haven had to do a cultural project for Spanish, so she listened to a conference talk in Spanish and wrote a summary.]

I loved conference as well!  I definitely missed you, but I sent a picture of one of the bags of snacks I ate during conference, and it was amazing!

I wanted to tell you something really cool.  In my patriarchal blessing, which I don't have yet but remember portions of, it says something to the effect of I will realize how great a blessing it is to have you guys as my parents.  That is so true!   I have been interacting with the missionaries here, and they have all told me how much they appreciate my knowledge of the doctrine, and my testimony, and my knowledge of how to use the scriptures.  There's been some hard times here, but it all comes back to the scriptures, and I don't know where they all are, but I know key words and phrases, and so I'm able to pull it out of the index.  So because you always used the scriptures in teaching us, I now have a bank of knowledge to pull from.   It's like it says in D&C, "take not thought before hand what ye should say, but treasure up the words of life continually, and it shall be given you the portion that shall be meted unto every man."  That's from memory, so it might be a little off, but I have seriously felt that in my life!

Also, another really cool thing happened!  I was feeling pretty homesick around conference time, and the hermanas wrote us all letters.  In my letter, of which I uploaded a picture, they said all the stuff that people back home said about me!  It made me realize that I can be at home wherever I am.  It was definitely a gift from God.

I also have developed a pretty strong relationship with one of the other elders.  He was really annoyed one day, and so I went on a walk with him, and he totally confided in me, and asked for my help.  He said I reminded him of his older brother, which was super cool!

The morning of Saturday session, I went on a mile run with one of the other elders.  The air is much thinner at this elevation, which I didn't realize at all.  So my legs felt fine, but my lungs were on fire!  So I need to do more cardio.  It's basically like altitude training!

I'm also really starting to feel the Spirit during our lessons!  Our teacher, who was role playing an investigator, came up to us after our lesson, and said that the person she was role playing didn't understand a lot of the words we said, so much that it should have been unintelligible, but she understood what we were trying to say, and if we had asked her to be baptized then, she would have.  I've discovered it's about figuring out what that investigator needs right then, and using that in your lesson.  Every lesson, you need to find a way to solve their problems, be they long term, or ones that come up during your lesson.  It was super cool.  And the whole thing was in Spanish!

Also, we as a district now have a goal to speak only Spanish from 8:30am-9:30pm.  It's pretty hard, and we get breaks for P-Day, but it really helps!  I am learning so much more than I ever did in Spanish class in High School.  This is the way all knowledge should be received, with prayer and diligent effort!

Thanks for everything you did and are doing for me!

Love you!

P.S. Also, I'm writing all of my things in cursive now, because I finally got fed up with my handwriting.  It's surprisingly easy, and my handwriting already looks a thousand times better, which doesn't mean much, but It's still pretty awesome!  I don't know all the letters, but I'm learning, and when I get back, Caleb and I will be able to write to each other, and nobody else will understand a word!  But seriously, it's pretty fun!