DR Boca Chica 2nd week‏

Feb. 13, 2012

it feels weird that i am still at the start of my mission but yet i feel like ive been here for so long!! crazy!! so my companion is Elder Jensen from Pleasant Grove, Utah and he is probably the best companion ever! He's been here in this area (Boca Chica) since he first got here which was back in august so he knows this whole area really really well! The members here in this area are a huge help and really help out when we bring new investigators to church.
So this week has been crazy! We have 3 baptisms lined up and one of them is this Saturday. Yep i get my first baptism this Saturday! im super excited but super nervous! Her name is Esperanza and she really wants the gospel in her life. she comes to church every week and is super excited to be baptized! its amazing to see the change in the investigators faces from the first time you start to teach them to when they are getting ready for baptism! they just have this spirit about them that is so amazing! ah i love my mission!
so being here in the DR, there are a bunch of spiders, mosquitoes, flies, dogs and all that stuff. but just this past week my companion was on the back porch doing his laundry and all of a sudden he comes running in the house and tells me to come look at what was on the back porch! haha there was a TARANTULA bigger than my fist!! haha ya we freaked out! things that you hear about the DR are usually true!
my first week here i had to take whats called bucket showers cause we had to wait for a guy to come fix our pipe! ha bucket showers are very interesting! another thing, there are dogs EVERYWHERE!! Everyone here just throws rocks at them so we do the same! haha its kind of entertaining! this week for our service project we made a garden box out of wood for our neighbors! ha buying wood here was an experience!! we don't have bikes in our area and our area is really big so we had to walk to the lumber store which is a long ways away and then after we bought the wood, we had to carry it back! i can only imagine what a couple of white guys dressed up in white shirts and ties carrying a really long 16 foot piece of board would look like to the Dominicans! haha but we are still working on making them cause we have an old school saw and it takes awhile!
hmm what else is new.... we had a meeting in the capital which is like 35 minutes away by bus and i was able to see Jason Carr which was super cool cause there is someone here that i actually know!! oh some other funny things.... girls here like to hiss at you when they "want" you so that is very interesting cause you just have to ignore it! then they say things to you as you walk past them but fortunately i dont really understand that much spanish still so i have no clue what they are saying! so ive never really lived on my own before and being in a new country with new money and no clue where and what food to buy has been a very interesting experience!! they have these little mini stores on every corner called a "colmada" where you can buy little simple things but nothing really substantial. My companion lives off of popcorn and cookies and little things from the colmada so me not knowing anything, tried to eat like that too but that was a bad idea! so i found out that our neighbor who is a really strong member in our ward will make us food if we pay her! so i pay her and my only real substantial meal is lunch! and she makes a TON of food!! oh my goodness! and we have a huge plate of rice every single day! haha i dont think i will ever want to eat rice again after my mission!

things here are going really good and the investigators are really progressing! if everything keeps going as it is, we will probably have 6+ baptisms in the next few weeks! Thats a really amazing number because there are some missionaries that have been in the DR and they only have 2 or 3 and they've been here for over a year! my companion is really good at keeping things simple but yet powerful and with the help of my little bit of Spanish and small testimonys we are making progress! missions are a lot different than what i thought they were going to be but im liking it a bunch! thank you all for your love that you've shown me over the years and i hope all is well back home!!

Love,

Elder Taylor Herring