Sarah Takes Piura

A Friend Found

Sister Stringham found Sister Mahas in the Lima MTC

A Friend Made

 Hola Amigas!

I made it to the land of Peru. Hurray! We arrived way early on Sunday so we got about 2 hours of sleep and then had a full on jam packed Sunday. Seriously was the LONGEST day of my life it felt like an eternity! But I am loving it here! I kind of knew my companion before I even got here (well through facebook). We are the only sisters in our district that are both new, so it is a major struggle. We don´t know any of the rules still and no one tells us either! I think we broke every rule on our first day. We set our alarm for 6:45 oops... took pictures (you can only do that on p-day), sat across from each other at lunch, was late to many meetings. So we are very very slowly figuring things out. Due to our flight cancellation my comp and I are three days behind everyone else so we have to do double studying but we have NO time to do it. The hardest part is definitely espanol. Wow it is hard to learn a language, and it´s hard not to compare yourself with others who have been out the same amount of time but are wayy better at spanish. I will get it though in time. The food is RICE, pasta, bread, and loads of meat. It´s pretty good it reminds me a lot of Costa Rica, but without beans. All the sisters are envious of my comp and I. Every other sister has to share a room with six and they share one community bathroom with three showers and three toilets to twelve people. Somehow Hermana Kaeding and I got our OWN room!! with our OWN bathroom!! We must be doing something right. My companion´s name is Hermana Adriana Kaeding. AND I LOVE HER. She is from Provo, Utah. We are almost the same person we get along sooooo well. It is such a blessing. It´s almost a curse because we laugh way way too much. We just can´t help it! I swear everything in the CCM is extremely funny. I laugh at dumbest things. We are just so happy. I think we are laughing off all of our stress and nerves and that is the only way we know how to cope with it all.

Last night we had to teach our first fake investigator named Mario. Oh man oh man. It was a blow. How are we supposed to teach a whole lesson when we can´t speak a lick of spanish! We had only gotten our language books a few hours before so we knew absolutely nada! Everyone else knows already how to pray, say their testimony, and the first lesson. Yeah we missed all of that. So we just bore our testimonies and then sat there trying not to burst out laughing because it was soooooo bad. Mario cut us off (it was supposed to be 15 minutes). He told us what we already knew, yeah it was bad. But he shared a really good scripture with us, Alma 42:32. He said we need to be patient, have dilligence and faith. He said to just go by the spirit, but the spirit can only go by what you know and we don´t know much haha. We have to teach him tomorrow again twice... Spanish is very dificil. On our first day Hermana Kaeding was talking to me about where we need to go to get our badge and she said ´´Hermana Gonzales,´´ then she looked at me I just stared back at her and said,´´what´s that?´´ hahaha my spanish. helpp.

Today we went to the temple and a grocery store. We take a bus the temple. I think I breathed in the sweat of the guy standing next to me. They pack a billion people in those things. We were all just spooning each other standing up. It was an adventure! The temple is so pretty and so tiny inside! I had to get an extra large dress and the largest shoes. Ápparantly they don´t carry ´´Sarah´´ sizes in Peru. I forgot my running shoes so I ran in flip flops yesterday. We tried to find some but no one wears a size 10 over here dang it!!!

It is a joyous life I live. Very Busy. Stressful. But I seem to not ever get nervous or stressed. We just laugh it off like I said, a little too much.

Love you all!