Hey,
I made up for my lost email of last week by sending mom a
really long email this week.
I am sure that it's all tough for you, the family must
just be so different without either of us there. It is really weird for me to
think that when I come home Riley won't be there, and when he comes home he
won't be this scrawny little kid he will be like grown up or something. People
at the start of my mission thought I looked about 16 or 17. Apparently now I am
starting to look older. And I feel older.
There is this fatigue that just never goes away. Riley is
going to do great though. He is going to be the greenie that every trainer
dreams of. Except he might be a bit shy at first. It is always tough to have a
companion who doesn't talk very much. I can't wait to get his emails and start
to see what type of misisonary he is and what his mission is like. I think it
will make me think back a lot to the start of my mission.
I'm glad he wore the tie. I didn't know if he would like
it or not. I feel stupid about the badge though. I am sure he can't wear that
in Guatamala as I would guess they use a word that isn't Elder for the badges
in Spanish.
Haha Ryan seriously sent the best emails ever.
And about time Sean got rid of that girl. Hopefully he
can find a good one or start thinking again about a mission or something. That
would be cool but I'm sure is a lot of work.
And I checked my blog... it hasn't been updated in so
long. How come that stopped? I would send more photos but it is impossible
here. Once I get back to the mainland I will.
Oh ya, thanks so much for all those photos! Honestly,
those were so good to see. The highlight of my week maybe. I was laughing at a
few of them, everyone just looks so normal and happy and funny. Send me some of
Elder Steed Jr.
And you gotta love those dumb 16 year old boys. Trying to
knock back a gallon of milk. I bet with some training/conditioning you could do
it.
Alyssa has no boyfriend yet I hope?
But you can't start the countdown for Riley to come home
right when he leaves... haha it is such a massive amount of time. C.S. Lewis
remarked that when viewing things of very large size, at a certain point humans
stop seeing in quantity and they start to see in quality.
The sublime. Like a mountain, or outer space. Or a two
year mission on the first night in the MTC. Time is weird on a mission. Riley
will be gone for so long but when he comes home it will seem like it went by so
fast.
Okay, and to close. The Chav story. Have I told you
before what a chav is? In this country the government gives you money if you
don't have a job. And they give you a house. Or if you have a child. And the
more children you have, the more they give you. And they call it socialism.
So they make these huge estates of government housing,
and then everyone who doesn't have a job or is too lazy to look for one gets
put in these estates. For generations they just waste away and breed and have
more kids and get more money and no one is married and they have no work ethic
or determination or motive for even being alive.
They have their own culture, vocabulary, clothes, it is
like a different world. The closest thing I can think of that you would know of
is natives on a reserve. But it is different even than that. So these are
Chavs. People who were born on these estates, who have children on these
estates, and who will die on these estates. It is incredible to see. But
anyways, we occasionally will venture into these estates and do some knocking.
We met a few last week and they accepted our offer to do some service. We
talked to one for maybe 10 mintues at the door, and asked her if there is
anything we could do for her in her garden or something. She said yes, then
proceeded to show us round back to the garden. She pointed to the shed, and
told us we need to move the shed to the other side of the garden. And that the
tools were in the shed. We were like... we meant maybe another day? We were
dressed in ties. But we cycled home, got changed, and then came back. The tools
she provided for us were a scewdriver, and a wrench.
And she said move the shed. So this shed is massive, and
we needed to take it apart. So we try to start unscrweing it. It is held
together by the most random assortment of screws and nails that are mostly
stripped/damaged. We have absolutely no luck with the screwdriver. She is
sitting on a lawn chair watching the whole time. Her two sons, aged
16 and 18, and inside playing xbox. We tell her the
problem. She starts going door to door to her neighbors asking for a drill. She
comes back and says we need to come back tomorrow, because she found a drill
for tommorow. And while we are there, we might as well help her clean up her
yard. So chavs have the dirtiest yards/houses ever. Her yard is filled with
years worth of crap. Our job is to move it all into a big pile in the center of
the yard. We do. We throw in a matress, old bikes, lawn chairs, wallpaper,
sacks of garbage, an old swimming pool, a bunch of firewood, parts of the fence,
the old shed door, like just the craziest pile of stuff. And then she gets a
jerry can full of gasoline, sticks a newspaper in the opening and lights it on
fire. I have some awesome video of this. It was like a moltov cocktail. She
said it is too expensive to take rubbish to the tip, so she wanted to burn it.
Needless to say, in a couple of mintues there was a raging inferno of like 30
feet in her backyard and it must have been the most enviornmentally unfriendly
fire ever built. Her neighbor noticed, and rather than calling the police
dragged over an uprooted tree from her backyard, and tossed that on top. This
was a huge tree.
We were sure the fire department would be there any
mintue, so we got out of there. When we went back the next day, no police or
fire services bothered to show up. There was a huge black ring in her backyard
and ashes everywhere. True to her word, she had procured a power drill. With
one drill bit and a dead battery. We somehow managed to take the shed down into
four walls and a roof. She watched. Her sons helped by coming outside at the
end and kicking the shed apart when there were a few scews we couldn't get out.
She wants us to reassemble it next. But where she wants it put isn't level. And
she has no way to level it. She said she doesn't care, we should just rebuild
it there anyways. I can barely even comprehend this. But we might do it one
day. We helped her neighbor clean out her rodent cages. Rats, mice, gerbils,
rabbits. Disgusting. But that is a whole different story.
Hope you can understand slightly now what a chav is. I
will be sure to show you some when you come to the UK next summer.
Have a good week. Good luck Riley and all his stuff.
Don't be too sad, it is the perfect place for him to be.
Love Elder Steed
No comments:
Post a Comment