Mission Life Here In The Jungle

Que Chivo!! The mission is sweet. It is sweet, hard, frustrating, a climb, painful, a blessing, once in a lifetime experience. I will first tell you some things we did and how life is here in El Salvador and then express some difficulties of this week!

So last Monday I was able to clean our fridge!! It was pretty groddy and there are spider webs everywhere in our house though most of the spider webs have nothing in them so that was great to kind of be able to settle in more this week and make it feel a little bit more like home! I got food and had a good breakfast everyday and was able to become more acclimated to the mission life here in the jungle of El Salvador, because quite literally it is a jungle!! There are so many trees and steep hills and mountains and there is a cool bolano about 10 miles from my house! Actually there are three right next to each other.

There is the view after the huge rain storm yesterday evening

aNYWASY AFTER I WAS DONE CLEANING THE FRIDGE I JUST FELT LIKE I SHOULD SAY A PRAYER. i DONT KNOW WHY I JUST FELT LIKE I SHOULD. MY COMP WAS IN THE BANO SO I KNELT woops -  down in the kitchen and started to pray and then the waterfall happened. I had the most gratitude filled prayer I have ever spoken in my life. I prayed for everything and how grateful I was and I realized as I prayed how different it is here and how much less I have and how much less these people here have. They have nothing. I thanked our Father in Heaven for all of my blessings and I was pretty much weeping. The tears were just an accumulation of everything and boy it felt good to just weep. It was a mix of joy and sadness and gratitude and humility.

So that was last week and this week was way faster than last week let me tell you! I have a hard time remembering specific days and what happened on those specific days! Its sweet. On Tuesday night I just went to bed as normal expecting to wake up and do regular stuff on Wednesday. My comps alarm went off at 5:00 am and I was wondering why so I just went back to bed and was gonna wake up at 6:30. But he comes in at 5:50 and tells me to wake up because we have to leave. I sit up in my bed rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and ask why? He says we have a conference for district leaders in the capital, San Salvador that day. He was showered dressed and had eaten and everything and we were supposed to leave at 6:00 am! He didn't tell me that he has a meeting!!! hahaha Isn’t that crazy?? He knew and just didn’t tell me.

That happens a lot though with everything. We will just be walking down the street to an appointment and I’ll keep walking down the street while he stops and buys something and then I realize he stopped and he never says a word. That is just how everything is everyday. I don’t know if he expects me to know, doesn't want to tell me or what but I have become somewhat used to it. It is still really hard and I get frustrated with him sometimes and that makes it hard to really love him. I am trying to see the good though.

That Wednesday we went to the estaca by the temple in San Salvador which is an hour and a half bus ride to the city. I got to see a bunch of my ccm buddies there whose companions are also district leaders!!!!! My companion Elder A from the ccm wasn't there so I was bummed because he is probably the coolest person alive. So while the dls met, all of the other companions and stuff got to talk for an hour so that was a huge blessing to be able to talk with a bunch of elders from my district from the ccm and see how they are doing and get support and be able to actually talk to someone!

Dinner at a members house. A weird soup and chicken and rice

On Friday we were on the other side of our area on the other side of the hill or mountain doing contacts on the street and we come to a house that has a fence around it with kind of spike looking things on the top. This lady comes out about 50 years old and we contact her. We talk about the restoration and we stop talking and she just goes off. The Book of Mormon is not true. How could it be written by prophets and on and on. I was surprised that I understood practically everything that she said, and her daughter too was standing there inside the fence by the gate. We were on the outside. The discussion lasted about fifty minutes. At one point my companion was talking to the daughter and I was solely talking to the mom, who you could see it in her eyes was not having any of it. These are a bible people. Some of them are strictly only bible and will not believe in anything else. So that was this lady.

I was able to listen to her and she asked a pointed question. What do you promise in your preaching and everything you do, what do you promise? I paused for a little had no idea what to say but opened my mouth and it was filled. The words that came out were these. Felicidad. La promesa que verdaderamente podemos hallar paz y solaz en esta vida para que podamos vivir en un estado de felicidad con nuestro padre celestial y su hijo juscristo. Translation is happiness and peace. The promise that we can find happiness and peace in this life so that we can live in a state of happiness with our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. That was all I said and all I needed to say. It was a cool experience. The lady was still very stubborn and said something about the bible and how I was wrong.

I also got told I was going to the inferno by another lady. But the thing I want to say most about this is that these people were trapped. They were the ones standing inside there black fence, like a jail cell with big weeds and bushes growing around them to trap them even further. I felt for their state of confinement in a spiritual sense. It was sad. We usually meet people like that once every day. But we found a guy on Saturday. He is soooo open and wants to learn so we are going back on Wednesday to talk with him. I am really excited, but it is rough with our lessons because my companion teaches in the exact same form every time. It is always the exact some structure and lesson every time. The teaching isn’t exciting or anything so when I try to teach I try to be excited and ask a lot of questions and stuff, but if I ever miss a point or a little sentence my comp will always reteach the point I just taught and if I don’t teach how he teaches he reteaches the same point that I just taught so sometimes I don’t even want to teach, and the hardest part is that after the lesson he never says anything. Never teaches me how to be better or gives advice, just starts off ahead of me and walks to the next lesson without saying anything. But I’ve become used to that occurrence and am trying to ask him to get him to help me and talk to me.

Another investigator named G came to church!!! He is gonna be baptized on the 26 and is a big dude. Kinda tall and really has a belly! He is scared of baptisms so we are working with him and he is scared of prayer which is weird.

Some of the food that we have is a lot of tortillas. These tortillas are corn but cooked on the stove top and super thick. But there are things called pupusas. They are the same tortilla but stuffed with frijoles and queso.. SOOOOOOOOOOOOO delicious. But everyone has them and all the ladys have a little tienda or they make tortillas or they make pupusas. Old old men walk around with their little ice cream dollys ringing bells. Middle aged guys carry huge baskets of bread, like rolls. They walk with their horns, like the super annoying squeeze horns. I’ll have to get a picture with one of them. There are dogs everywhere and garbage everywhere. I wrote you a letter and am sending a letter today.

We did service on Saturday and built a house for a lady! Was crazy poverty but it was sweet. A huge cockroach jumped on my leg when we were moving a big pile of wood metal and garbage. I saw a 4 foot long iguana but couldn't get a picture of it and probably a 4 to 5 inch long scorpion. There are little lizards everywhere and they will just chill inside you house at night or whatever. It is fun! hahah

The service project where we built a house. Super Hot!

Central America is great and I am trying to love it! I hope this email was good. Love you all and I think about you a lot! Straight a"s Benson and Wilson you too. Work hard and you will never regret it!! I will email you in a week! It might be later in the afternoon cuz we might hike the volcano, not sure. Love you and know I am hanging in there and growing more than ever before! 

Love Elder Ostler