Gangosos

February 7, 2011

Hello fam...

Well this week's e-mail ought to be slightly longer and more interesting than last week's. First of all it was stinking cold all of last week. Like brutally cold, the average was 30 throughout most of the week. We had heard from the people that it was supposed to snow on Friday, they were pretty freaked out, all the schools planned to close down that day and nobody was going to work, all of the businesses were to shut down, you'd think the plague or something was on it's way. We didn't think it was going to happen. Well come Friday and sure enough it didn't snow. It was really cold though. And it actually helped us out a lot. It was so cold that nobody wanted to leave their homes so it was really easy for us to finally catch people at home. Few if any people were outside, driving or whatever, it was like a ghost town, absolutely still and frozen outside. We were the only people out their driving around.

On Tuesday Hna. Hernandez taught us how to make gorditas and pupusas. As you can see in the pictures, it's really easy actually. A gordita is basically the same thing as a pupusa except that after you cook it, you slice it open and insert whatever you want. A pupusa you seal up whatever you want in it before you cook it. That's only difference, oh and pupusas are fried in grease, whereas with gorditas you can chose to dry cook it in a pan or cook it in oil, either way it was way easy. Or so I thought.

A couple days later I attempted to make a monster pupusa at our apartment. We already had all of the necessary ingredients, I had planned to make a huge pupusa with beans, onion, and cheese in it. Well my first mistake was to put too much beans in it, so that it all wouldn't fit inside the dough, there wasn't enough to wrap around all of the beans and stuff. So I thought I just make more and build around it, like an igloo. So I made more dough and made this mountain of dough and beans and dropped it in the pan. It weighed like 2 pounds. I wasn't going to cook it in oil or grease or anything but even so the abomination was too huge to be maneuvered effectively and the beans and stuff would start to ooze out of the cracks forming in the crust of my tectonic nightmare. After flipping it over a couple times it started to break apart, thus forming new continents, the whole experience reminded me of the super continent of Pangea that was around several millions of years ago and how it started to break up and drift thus forming the continents as we know them today.

Well my monster pupusa under went a similar experience, and the dough was so thick still that the outer crust was blackening while the inner just barely warm. I gave up and dumped the abomination in the trash. I decided to try again but making smaller ones, and I was out of beans so I made two normal sized ham and cheese pupusas. And they were pretty good. I'm definitely going to be making more such creations this week. And tomorrow Hna. Hernandez is going to teach us how to make sopes.

Well... Moving on to the next notable madness of the week. I got a letter from Dad on Saturday describing the great ineffectiveness of a ward he was in on his mission. It's really funny, because it foreshadowed the events of the following day. Sunday was to be Stake Conference, but it was some kind of regional type conference where it was to be broadcasted to us from Salt Lake. We alerted all of our investigators and made intensive plans to get everyone to church at the right time. Well come sunday and we show up to the church an hour or so before it's to start. We get there and the bishop and his wife were right there in a the door and basically said: "Oh elders thank goodness you're here, do you know how to set the machines up?" Well... To their credit they did find the projector. Well the next couple hours demonstrated..well I won't go there..

For some reason they couldn't receive anything through the satellite receiver, they couldn't get any signal at all out if it. And in the best priesthood leadership fashion they were pushing random buttons, flipping switches, plugging and unplugging things and whatnot. All of this about a half-hour before the broadcast was to start. One elder who had been in this ward for the last general conference said this was exactly what happened last conference. They didn't think about it till an hour beforehand and they started randomly messing with things until they gave up and let the missionaries mess with it until it started. They said that last year they didn't get it working until a half-hour into the first session, and they didn't get it in spanish until the 2nd session.

One elder in our district, Elder White, before his mission worked for a few years selling and installing cable systems and satellite dishes, and he was the one who had got it to work for the previous conference. So just picture about 20 or so men in suits in the gym crowded around a tiny door that lead into the room with the satellite box watching two bishops randomly push buttons for an hour. I stood in the back with Elder White (they wouldn't let him look at it just yet). And he was saying all they needed to do was let it reboot. It's exactly what happened last conference, you just had to turn it on and let it sit for a few minutes. But they wouldn't wait, they wanted it working right then.

So we're standing there and this crazy old white guy, I think he is the elder's quorum president, in the english ward kept suggesting we give the box a priesthood blessing. Everyone ignored him, then he started pestering us, the missionaries, to give the box a blessing, we kind of ignored him, and then told him that we can't give inanimate objects blessings and that maybe we could say a prayer or something.

While He was arguing with some of the elders about that, my companion heroically fixed an outlet in the primary room. We had wheeled a TV into the primary room for people to watch, when my companion noticed that the telephone outlet was askew and the actual line could not be reached really easy. Now one thing about Elder Green is that he can't sit still, he has to always be doing something, and not just like keeping himself entertained, he has to always being doing something to "fix" the situation and show everyone how intelligent and useful he is. So he daringly spent twenty minutes taking apart this outlet with his keys and putting it all back together again, making a big of it and how useful he is to everyone.... Yeah...

Well during this I was talking to some of the elders of the spanish ward who had been there for a really long time and had said that by now they had learned NOT to invite investigators to general conference or anything that had to be broadcasted to the chapel. Which seemed like a good idea, We had three investigators there, and they along with everyone else was sitting around wondering what was going on. The conference was being broadcasted to the stake center several miles north, the stake center next to the mission office. Towards the end the white people in the english ward started complaining loudly, that they had been told to come here and not to the other building, and they started making a big scene and lots more wonderful things... Somebody called somebody high up and supposedly, Salt Lake told them that the "line was fried". Elder White finally got a chance to look at it and it indeed appeared that the line was fried or something because he couldn't get it to work.

So to make a long and sad story short they recorded the broadcast at the stake center and said that they would show it at 1:00 and we would all have to drive up to the stake center for it. Well our investigators weren't too happy about that, and even after we got rides for them, and gave them directions and offered to guide them there and everything not a single one of them showed up to it....

It was a good conference though. President Monson and Elder Ballard spoke. It was great, we were pretty bummed that none of our investigators came. This all could have been avoided had they decided make sure everything worked the night before or something. But that kind of foresight would be asking a little too much now wouldn't it? XD

So that's how the week was. Lots of madness and cold, and it's all just very funny... It's all so ridiculous that I just laugh at it all now. Elder Green was rather upset and frustrated at all of this but I've learned just to laugh it off and don't worry about such things. Sure it was disappointing that our investigators missed out on hearing the prophet speak but whatever... There's nothing we can do about it except laugh.... Okay. I'm done, other pictures include this crazy car we saw in someone's driveway, my new nametag, and some Chihuahua puppies that were so cold that this family made little sweaters for them and hammocks for them out of their hats. So that's all I have to say, yesterday it was 70 degrees so it was back to short sleeves. I love you all and hope you have a great time... peace...

-- Elder Arroz