Trucks, service, and crazy people (March 2, 2020)

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. These will probably be out of order. 

When our pensionista can't cook for us, we go to an approved restaurant. We were eating and then we heard a huge crash of metal on metal. Turns out that a garbage truck had run into another truck that collects propane tanks. Lima is really scared rights now with gas trucks because of what happened about a month ago, so everybody in the restaurant was freaking out, but nothing really bad happened so esta bien. 

We get quite a few insults being large gringos in white shirts and ties, but we also draw attention from the crazy people because they know we'll at least try to listen to them. While going through a market as a shortcut, an old guy with two walking sticks stopped us and started calling us "walking angles" but bashing what we taught. We eventually got through the market and started quickly walking away and thought that was the end of it, then we here sticks hitting the ground, turned around and he was running after us. Cool story.

Theres a family in the ward we tried to visit, but when they opened the door, in their living room/garage was a pool full of water and six people swimming and their entire house was wet. Needless to say, we didn't stay long. 

We were told by the office to but a ton of food for storage, we've also been receiving texts from a company that tracks earthquakes, so fingers crossed we don't need that extra food and water. 

Chicken fighting is a sport here.

All is well here in Peru, though weird it can be. Today I saw a frog get blended into a fruit smoothie, que bueno, but yeah. I'll try to send more photos, sweet is the work. 

The in'peru'ving missionary,

Elder Baird