There's so much time between P-days!

Seriously, when they put 10 days in between p-days that's a little much -- we start going crazy. 

Andres came by and got us 80 JetBars and we were so happy and we got some really good stickers and it's way awesome.  Tuesday, the 5 of us leave the CCM and go on 'tour' for a couple hours and I'll buy more JetBars then too. [Andrés is our family's friend from Peru that we are working to bring up here as a (high school) foreign exchange student next fall (donations are welcome).  He is Colombian and moved back to Bogota with his family this past spring.]

My bag got repaired so now it doesn't have a massive hole, but along with my glasses I don't know how long it'll last.

We are getting better at teaching "investigatores", but still we need practice with the commitmetns that we need to do. 

My companions are better at Spanish but have a long way to go. 

I've learned that even though I may not enter their bromance and all, I can just not say anything and slowly hide their socks and everything will be fine. I haven't actually hid their socks but that is a new idea. 

Elder David A. Evans came and talked to us and it was a really big deal because General Authorities hardly ever come to this CCM and so we basically all got trained how to act around him and it was a really big deal. We all thought he'd talk in Spanish, but he got here and we learned he didn't say more than two words of Spanish and all the teachers freaked out getting headsets and a translator for all the Latinos and I was laughing. 

We have an elder here named Elder Vernales and he's a pro soccer player from Peru and he's played a game in that big circle stadium in Cajamarca that we always drove past. We talk alot and make fun of his companion because he speaks nearly none Spanish. 

Also I got sick this week from doing something dumb but it only lasted like 12 hours and so I only missed like 3 hours of class. And I was totally fine for Proselyting.

In actuality, half the missionaries in the CCM are held together by temple visits, p-day, and proselyting because the CCM is honestly so boring and other missionaries say that the CCM seems as long as your entire rest of the mission. So, yesterday we went our first proselyting and it was in some town I can't remember the name but it starts with an F and it looked like a big version of Cajamarca and less cramped. Not only was it nice to not look at the same little piece of land and volleyball courts that we spend all our time on, but it was so great to do really missionary work. We got 8 contacts and handed out 3 Books of Mormons -- I put two s's on that just for those of you who belive it should be 'Books of Mormon' or 'Book of Mormons' and no one cares -- and they were good hand outs too. They seem really interested in investigating the church. One didn't have religion but believed in God and wanted to see what the church was like and seemed actually interested in what we had to say, and the other kept complaining about the Catholic church and was like 'I think we should be able to speak to God and he should respond instead of giving a prayer to a priest for him to pray for me' and a bunch of other stuff and I was like you really need to go to our church. And then we tried talking to some Jehova's Witness lady and she tried to just shoot down the Church but she didn't actually know enough about the Church to do so which ended up being annoying and slightly entertaining. She told us it was bad that we didn't try to talk to everyone and that JW include even poor and rich and we were like we are literally talking to everyone we pass I'm sorry if the people we pass aren't rich or poor enough for you and then she got after us saying the Bible says to send people forth two by two and since we are a trio, we were disobeying the Bible and so I asked her what to do when you have 5 and she said you go in two, and then in three and I just said goodbye and we left. 

But, honestly, it was really rough understanding what people were saying. I guess people talk really slow in the CCM no matter who you are because I literally got like one word yesterday.

Elder Tolman is now making it really difficult for Elder Lauritzen to have, like, a good experience at all. He's very difficult for the entire district including our teachers because he just doesn't work well with others and doesn't take advice and doesn't learn Spanish. I'll try to get a picture with Elder Vernales because we have almost matching ties and he's also a cool kid. 

Hey Dad, make sure my card is ready to work with any ATM down here because when we go on tour on Tuesday I'll need to take out around $150,000 and the less trouble that is the better mission I'll have.  [approx. $150 US]

I've learned a lot about faith here. Before, I'd kinda only ask for things that would basically be happening anyway or assume that if it didn't happen it was just that God didn't want it to happen or that it was a learning experience. That was faithless. Here, I learn that what happens around us depends on faith and that they really are in control. My prayers are consistently answered and it's in obvious ways so that I can recognize them -- like me being healed quickly or finding lost items: once one person brought it to me, and another time I asked the laundry lady because I left it in my shirt and she said she hadn't seen it, but later called me over and gave it to me again and I lost it promptly 10 minutes later and then found it again and now it's locked safe and I'll never lose it again. These things and more are not things that were happening before i used faith as like a real thing.

There could be more, but time moves in a fashion here and so I literally do not remember details that aren't in my journal and I don't have the time to read my journal to remember the details so this is from a glance. 

Love,

the Young Elder Hicken