Monday, May 30, 2011




Buenas!

Things are going well here, if a bit slowly. I´m in a house with 3 Latinos so I´m starting to understand Spanish better. There aren´t many members here, so we have a contract for lunches. It´s nice in a way but we don´t get a lot of variety. There hasn´t been water in Sabanalarga since yesterday morning so I don´t know how we´re going to do laundry. We have a few barrels out back with water for showering.

There are bonuses to living in colombia, of course. For instance, here you can still find normal Trix, with the different shapes instead of round balls. And there are these sandwich cookies called cocosettes...mmmmmmmm. This week I had agua de maiz and agua de panela. Agua de maiz is more or less jugo de corn. Agua de panela...panela is completely unrefined sugar, like brown sugar only more so.

The conference was really good. There´s some nice scenery (coastline!) in between Barranquilla and Santa Marta. When we got there they asked me to play the prelude music. Well Elder Nash was late and I ended up playing for about 3 hours before he showed up. I played every hymn that I knew 2 times and was working on my 3rd time going through the hymnbook. It was nice. The conference itself was also really good, I learned a lot.

My companion (Elder Luque from Bolivia) is a lot of fun and we´re doing well together. He just loves people and is really good at talking to people. I´ve already learned a lot from him and I think this is going to be a good transfer.

Gah, I want to write a letter to Travis but there´s no time. The power shut off in the middle of my letter and we spent an hour waiting for it to come back on...anyway, My companion wants on so I´m going to end this. Until next week!

Elder Coffman


Surprise! I´m no longer in Valledupar. I got a call Wednesday night that the next morning I was leaving for Sabanalarga. I was sad to leave Valledupar and Elder Staples, the house that was finally clean...and José and Katyana as well. But here I am in Sabanalarga. It´s a big name for a little town an hour´s bus ride from Barranquilla. I don´t know how many people there are, and if anybody wants to send me the wiki page that might be interesting. It´s cooler than Valledupar, which is very nice, and it also doesn´t rain very much here.

My new companion is Elder Luque, from Bolivia. He´s really nice and I´ve already learned a lot from him. We can more or less communicate...my Spanish still needs a lot of work. We´re re-opening the area, which means that neither of us knows the area and we started with almost zero investigators. But, the people here are amazing! It seems like every other person is willing to listen to us, and what´s more they actually understand what we´re teaching. The branch here is tiny (16-ish attended yesterday) but I think it´s going to grow rapidly. I ended up teaching the priesthood meeting with zero preparation and speaking for 15 minutes in the sacrament meeting but it went pretty well nonetheless.

The house is also the chapel so it´s actually pretty clean, which is very nice. Our room drips in 3 places and occasionally rains flakes of plaster, but hey what´s a little asbestos to supplement your diet of rice and platanos? :p Right now I´m in Barranquilla for a conference with Elder Nash, of the 70. It starts tomorrow.

gah, no time. Adios!

Monday, May 16, 2011

May 16,2011








Familia,

This week has had its ups and downs. The house we moved into was gross. Ants everywhere, and this week alone mice have gotten into our food 3 times. By now it´s much better...after a week of cleaning in every spare moment it´s probably one of the better houses in the mission, minus the mice...we had somebody fumigate for the ants and soon somebody´s going to come with poison for the mice. What we´re going to do about the salamanders, I don´t know. Ignore them, probably.

Freijoa and pineapple were 2 new jugos I had this week. The pineapple was super good, the freijoa almost really good except for the strange texture. Oh, and there are these things called mamónes, which are strange. I don´t know how to describe them, you´ll just have to look them up. The work is...going. Almost nobody came to church of our investigators, and we invited a lot. José Manjarrez and his not-yet-wife are awesome. They finally read, and they were both asking really deep questions even though they are just starting. Oh, and there´s a story about José and a Jehova´s Witness that I don´t have time to get into now. They are working on getting married and now that they are finally reading the Book of Mormon I think they´ll progress quickly. They´re both awesome people and it´s been great to have the opportunity to teach them.

Other stuff...my spanish is improving a lot, I´m starting to understand people a lot more. I feel comfortable as a missionary now, more or less. I still have lots to learn, but that never changes.

Photos:

The house before cleaning. gag...I can´t believe the people before us left us their dishes to wash! There was a pot full of bloated spaghetti, among other things...gah! And then the fridge...
Ben


May 9, 2011


Hola familia...We moved today so I have basically no time to write.
But I guess that{s ok because I got to talk on skype this week. I was
going to send some pages from my journal but the camera died in the
middle of sending them.

Better luck next week, I guess.

Elder Coffman

May 3, 2011


About the picture...I keep forgetting to bring my camera when I write letters so I guess it will have to wait until next week. I´ll try to remember!
Things are going really well, we are teaching a lot of lessons and some of our investigators came to church this week. And we keep finding more people! Yesterday the problem was that we couldn´t go to all of our appointments, but that´s a good problem to have. Transfers...didn´t affect this area much, my companion and I are staying here and so are a lot of the other missionaries. Did I mention we are living with 8 missionaries in one house? It´s a big house, but still it get´s pretty crazy sometimes. The zone leaders are looking for a new house, and I´m very excited at the thought of having an apartment to myself and a companion.
We went on exchanges this week and it was a lot of fun. I was with an elder from Chile and it was very different, we just had more fun than usual. I hope I can go on exchanges with him again later. I think I need to lighten up a little bit, because missionary work can be a lot of fun.
The mission rules changed, and now we can eat fish and drink boiled water. The boiled water is great because we have had to refuse lots of jugos from people that don´t have a filter in the house, and refusing them is always a bummer.
I hadn´t heard about Garrett or Andrew&Sarah...there´s going to be kids all over the place when I get home. Well, even more so than usual. I´ll be calling from Skype at around 2, my account is elder.coffman and I´m not sure if we will be able to get a camera here or not, so maybe you won´t be able to see me. we´ll see, I guess. Or not.
I´m so slow at writing! Sorry for the short letters, I don´t know why but my brain freezes up when I get in front of the computer. I have to go!

Elder Coffman