The In"Peru"ving Missionary

By March 16, Peru was in lockdown.  We got to talk to Caden over Google hangouts on March 16 (I think that's what day it was) because Peru was allowing everyone one more morning to go to the store, etc.  We sure hope he likes tuna and saltine crackers! They had enough water even though one of the water bags broke as they were walking home with it all.  The lockdown was set for 15 days. March 16, 2020 - message from Sis. Kristin Richey (Caden's mission mom) Hi Parents! Day 1 of the quarantine was relatively calm. This morning several roads were blocked by the army and police in Lima. Soldiers were present in front of every market to discourage hoarding. Things were calm as people spent the morning making a last minute trip to the market. Each companionship has a two week supply of non-perishable food and water, as well as hand sanitizer. Today many of them were also able to get fresh food such as bread, eggs, milk, and fruit from ...

Well well well, here I am and here you are. Hows life in the states for everyone. Here in Peru we had our first case of corona virus, actually here in Lima, and now that numbers growing of course cause this city is the perfect breeding ground. Eventually if worse comes to worst, the missionaries will be quarantined inside, with our soda crackers and tuna wooohoooo.  The drunk people are starting to get emotional, telling us all their sins and asking us to pray for them. La verdad, its cool to see they want to change but I think it may be the alcohol talking.  Hey but heres the happy part, I had my first baptism here in the mission. The funny thing is that it was outside of our zone in Villa Maria, which is a rather dangerous part of Lima. The experience was celestial though, it was a woman and her daughter, and there were about 9 people there. Maybe thats why it was special, but I'm sure I wont forget it. We also had a ward baptism, of a painter named...

Hey hey I'm still here, ran out of time last week so this time I'll tell you guys about some service we did two weeks ago.  The buildings here in Peru are basically squares and rectangles. They build one and stick rebar pointing up in the walls so if they ever want to expand up, they can. Entonces for this service, we had building materials on the ground, 19 bags of concrete, and a huge pile of sand that, unfortunately, needed to be on top of the roof, which was 5 stories up. The bags were done pretty easy, we just had to yeet them up 10 flights of stairs. The hard part was the sand. For this we had a bucket, some wire, a rope, and a pulley. The rest of our day was shoveling sand in that bucket, hoisting it up through the pulley, and dumping it a corner of the roof. I got unbelievably sunburned from being on the roof for 3 hours, but hey, here we are.  Some other experiences of mine these past two weeks are food storage, crazy people, and trucks hitting each other....