All kinds of Wars

January 11, 2009

Howdy Family,

How y'all doing? This week has been really long. The four of us are still stuck in that miserable little 2-man apartment it was pushed back yet again to today- Monday. So we've spent two weeks in here and it we hate it, we've been living out of our suitcases and have not done any laundry two weeks. Not fun, at all. Hopefully we will move in today, we should. The roaches probably figured out that we were moving so last night they tried one final attack, they lost and we killed like 30 of them last night. Though this morning we found a silverfish by Elder Smith's bed, which apparently is a sort of bug belonging to the centipede family and they're bites are like bee stings. So hopefully we get out today.

This last week has also been bitterly cold. Friday it got down to 20 degrees at 5:00 PM, we also happened to be on bikes that day. That was real bad. We've seen lots of trailers with broken water pipes spewing water everywhere. Down here water pipes aren't insulated because it usually doesn't get this cold, our apartment management people had sent out a warning a few days before and wanted us to take several precautions to prevent pipes from freezing and then breaking. During that day we stopped in a a convenience store to warm up for a little bit and look at the map. Now we were in the middle of our area of which white people are few and far between. Anyway the guy that ran the store, this jumpy Vietnamese guy was getting antsy about us being there, probably thought we were cops or something. So we bought a couple of sodas and talked to him for a bit, saying sorry that we were hanging around so long. He told us that we shouldn't be here too long because it was "bad for business" and that all the people there don't like white people. We were very well aware of this. So we went to our next appointment which was actually just across the street from that little store, it's a member family and we were talking to them and we found out that indeed we were "bad for business" we were scaring away all the drug dealers. It's a funny part of town, all hispanic except for a significant population of blacks too. It's funny there's these two streets that run parallel to each other both with the name of "Dr. Martin Luther King Avenue" and all the blacks in Conroe live around there. It's kinda funny. So anyway it turns out that there's always these gang wars between the hispanics and the blacks around this area. And these hispanic members had friends that were part of one of these gangs and that's how they stay safe at night. Apparently we (the missionaries) are also under this one gang's protection as we have been observed visiting this family and they've told their friends that we're good and that's why we can walk up to their gate without getting shot. Also we found out from them that just about everyone around there thinks that we are cops posing as missionaries trying to bust all the drug dealers. ... Yeah... Lots of fun, we're not going back there during the night. It's fun during the day but apparently it's in the night is where all the people get mugged and all of the drug dealers and prostitutes come out and people start shooting each other. When they split Conroe in half for the new spanish elders we got the worse side by far.

Hmm... Anything else fun happen? Not much, we've finally found some investigators that might actually progress, it's about time too, all of last transfer we were working with flakey people who weren't going anywhere. So hopefully we will get a couple of baptisms this transfer. My spanish is making rapid strides now, I can hold conversations with people and understand most of what is being said, it's also extremely interesting to hear all the different varieties of spanish. We have people from all over Latin America up here and it's fascinating to hear all the different accents, vocabulary, and grammar usage. I said in my last e-mail that the Argentinian spanish is my favorite, sounds like french and is way more old world-ish than mexican spanish. The 2nd counselor in our ward is from Uruguay and he has the sickest (awesome-ist) accent. I'm doing my own little study on all the different dialects by talking to people and asking them about the language and stuff. Most of them think that central american spanish is the ugliest sounding (Guatemala and Honduras), the most "correct" spanish is in Chile, Peru, and Paraguay. Mexican spanish is the most ghetto and americanized and has the most slang of them all while Spain, Uruguay, and Argentina are the most Europeanish. Fascinating, I'm making lists of vocabulary from all the different places

Well I'm out of time, so that's all I got for today. Have a good week and send me more letters! Peace out.

-- Elder Rice