Revenge of the Gringo

October 19, 2009

So I guess I didn't get to send another E-mail. Oh well, I was going to give a play-by-play description of what happened my first week but there is no time for that, that's what I'll use the tapes for.

So... I hope you all have gotten a thingy to play the tapes on and hopefully record your own. And I hope that you sent that stuff I needed cause I still haven't gotten it yet. So Texas is an interesting place. There is a church on every corner, if I had a nickel for every church in Texas I'd be stinking rich. There are so many of all varieties. The most I've seen are Baptist churches, and just about everything else is there, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, Catholic, and some weird ones like the Fellowship of the Woodlands, the Path of Grace, The Ark, and my personal favorite: The Church of Christ Scientist. We ride by it every day and there's always a different message on it's message board, things like: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF PRAYER and whatnot, I've gotten a few pictures of it. I think next Monday I will try to send some pictures, I don't have much that yet, there's not a lot of time to take pictures of things.

So things are pretty good, we have a car but we have to share it with the English Elders so we will be on bikes one day and have the car the next. I was so tired and sore the first week from all the biking we did, especially since we're in a shirt and tie with dress shoes, honestly who came up with that? It's really stupid, we don't even get to wear sun glasses, so when dust and stuff get in my eyes in my contacts when biking I just have to hope I can blink it out. Most of our investigators live in these ghettos, I hate ghettos, they smell bad and there's always these mangy dogs that will try to attack you. We've outrun them on our bikes every time but Elder Astin told me that you just have to kick them in the face, I've not yet had the chance to do it but I'm rather looking forward to it, I've been out only a couple weeks and I hate dogs, they're always after us, there was this one time when a couple of chiuawas (or however you spell it) came out into the road and I thought one of them was about to throw itself into the spokes of my back wheel, it didn't. I was too fast for it. And then there was this one time when were biking along this road, a fast road out in the country and we hear this barking and these two dogs, rather big dogs bolt of this drive way and ran at us howling like wolves, luckily a UPS truck was barreling down the road at 50 mph, the bigger dog stopped just in the time but the smaller one kept going and just barely missed being hit the UPS truck. I wanted it to get hit, stupid dog. But the UPS truck was enough to allow us to escape.

My roughest days so far have been at Church, Sundays are by far the worst days. Spanish wards are really quite dysfunctional, they're all nice people but they won't leave me alone. They absolutely love talking to me and me not understanding a single word they're saying, then someone else will say something and they all laugh and I have no idea what they're saying about me. Ugh, that and a lot of them are always telling me that I need to learn spanish better and what ways I can improve. The worst by far is the Ward Mission Leader, he doesn’t like me at all. The first sunday for the correlation meeting I didn't say anything, I was just trying to figure out what was going on, and at the end of the meeting the WML asks me a question which I did not understand at all. I think I can get the gist of what's going on when other people are talking to others but as soon as someone says something to me, my mind goes blank and I have no idea what they just said. Anyway, before I had a chance to even think about what he just said to me, he starts talking to me in english and starts asking me: "How much time each do day do you spend studying spanish?" "Are you reading your Book of Mormon?" and blah blah blah. He seemed genuinely pissed at my inability to speak spanish. And then he turns to my companion, Elder Astin and tells him in spanish what he should be doing to help me, I actually understood quite a bit of what he was saying to Elder Astin, and he was talking about me as if I weren't there. Now this was irritating enough. But this was in front of everyone at the meeting, his assistant, and two sister missionaries, who are the only other two spanish missionaries in our zone. And then both of them gave me "advice" on what I should be doing to learn spanish. Oh I was ready to kill them, but I held by tongue. And after word Elder Astin told me not to worry about them, and to ignore them in fact, and that I'm right where I should be. According to others, it takes about 3 months before you start getting into it. Ugh, I was fed up with the WML, I wanted to wring his little neck. That's another thing. It's also weird to be the tallest person in sacrament meeting, and I'm not even that tall, the next tallest person is Elder Astin. It's odd.

So I have 13 mintues left so I'll share what I call, revenge of the Gringo. So after all of this time of being berated and lectured and being confused about everything spanish. We had dinner at a member's house one day. The Pinedas. They're a nice family, they're less actives and won't come to church but they love the missionaries and want to have us over all the time. So we were over there eating, it was really good food, tortillas, rice, beans, and this egg-bacon mix of something, goat cheese and this real mexican sour cream, it was so good. They were all talking and laughing and as usual making fun of my spanish, but it wasn't like a mean jesting, I was laughing along too. Anyway they bring out the chili peppers, some jalapenos and some tiny little unidentifiable chilis and other such things. So they start teasing me with them, as if white boys like me had never even tasted something so spicy. I play along and they were daring me to eat one raw as if I didn't know what they were, I was playing along and acting as if I was afraid (Latins get a huge kick out of watching white people eat spicy food). So they're all laughing and teasing me and I'm nodding and laughing and then unexpectedly I grab the biggest, juiciest pepper off the plate and take a big bite out of it, all the way up to the stem, chewed it for a little bit and swallowed it, and continued eating as if nothing happened. They were shocked, they even gasped, even Elder Astin was speechless. I then grabbed another and started squeezing the juice over my food and whatnot. And I didn't tear up or turn red or anything. They were flabbergasted. HA! That's right, I destroyed them, they just got owned. Who's Mr. Gringo now eh? Who can eat your food BETTER THAN YOU CAN, HUH? So yeah, I owned them. Then in my best broken spanish I explained to them that I've been eating chili's all my life and back home in our garden we grew habaneras and even made jelly out of them and ate them in sandwiches. They were utterly shocked that anyone would even do that. And then with Elder Astin's helped I told them about the chemical properties of capsicum, the chemical in chili's that makes them spicy.

So yeah, it was the revenge of the gringo. Victory for me. Well I'm out of time, I hope you all are doing well and please send me food and letters cause I'm getting bored of re-reading the same ones over again. So yeah, Love y'all, peace out.

Elder Rice