DECEMBER 21st, 2009

This place is insane it´s called Santo Domingo it is so old and dirty and hot, and HUMID!! I bet I´ve lost 5 pounds this week in sweat but the good news is we have a baptism set up for 2 people on the 2nd of January, so I´ll either get to baptize a 14 year old boy named Esteven or a 21 yr old guy named Julio. The people are so poor but they seriously love us. They think we are rockstars because we are 2 gringos from the US they are obsesses with pictures. I´ll try to send you some later today through my hotmail account though. They live in a place called the Viviana Plumba. It is like the poorest place in this city, they are so humble. Ha! The kids think that I am so weird because I am tall and have blue eyes. Ha! Its funny and they think it is awesome that I play “futbal Americano” Ha! and I beat their brothers in arm wrestling so they think I am so strong. Ha!
They are so awesome though the people here are so much nicer than in America. But there is this crazy lady who tries to like hook up with us. They call her “La Loca”, ha ha, she´s this crazy black prostitute. We have to run inside the member’s houses until she leaves.
The people here live on dirt seriously everything is dirt and it rains so hard every night and it is always muddy. And then in the day its sunny and hot which is why I sweat so much and my clothes are filthy. I´ve met some awesome members though and I am going to try to take some more pictures as time goes. The food is decent, it depends, we don’t eat very much maybe 3 times a day if we are lucky and its always rice and chicken or rice and fish and they always eat fried platanas which are real similar to bananas. There are bananas everywhere here, seriously everywhere. That is what the homeless people live off of.
I´m so exhausted from the day though being out in the sun sweating and trying to translate everything everyone says. Each day I learn more and more. I can only understand probably 30 percent of what they say because they talk so fast. Tell everyone that I love them and hopefully I can start writing some hand written letters, it is just hard with time and everything and getting mail to this city is hard. We have to go to Quito which is like a 3 to 4 hour bus ride we have to go tomorrow at 3 in the morning to get my Ecuador ID. But I´ll email you more info this week for sure about the number to call to on Christmas.
Love you guys!