05/26/22 Nasty Jello: Just gotta get outta this prison cell-- subject line brought to you by the Griffin sibs

Hola!! This week I was literally soooo busy. It feels like I'm running around left and right, 24/7, never getting a moment to breathe... every day I have classes from 9-12, then lunch, then gym time (typically running 2 miles in under 15 minutes :) and then yoga for me), then clean up and study time, and then more classes from 4-7, dinner from 7-7:30, and more class from 7:30-9, and get ready for bed from 9-10:30. In other words, we have almost no free time ever...which is fine!! Just a little stressful. 

A few highlights from this week: 

We got rain (!!!!) a couple days ago and it was a glorious sight... it doesn't rain in my mission, so whatever rain I get here will be the last I'll see for 17 months. Aaaaannnnddd.... the wind and rain and general storminess knocked over a tree... ONTO a house!!! Two houses down from mine!! So overall very exciting. The girls who lived there had just moved out the weekend before so that was a little miracle. It didn't actually break anything somehow, and they moved some elders in there just barely, as far as I know. 

Two sisters from my casa shared a little story about this... so first... back story: there was a situation where our washer and dryer were leaking everywhere.... my room that I share with the sisters in my district is right by the laundry room, so the water was making puddles outside my room... and getting closer to flooding our room every day. 3-4 times this past week I have used all 6 mops in our casa to clean up the water leaking from the washers and dryers. For all our problems, everyone says "go to reception!! go to reception!" well here's a little secret... reception is not helpful... at all. After a week or a week and a half of asking for help and trying to get help and telling everyone who would listen... we FINALLY got it fixed yesterday, after asking our branch president, he texted the director of the entire CCM (Centro de Capacitación de Misional or in english, MTC) and the director got someone on it immediately.

Ok now the really cool story from the sisters in my casa: because of the laundry situation, all of us have had to do laundry in some buildings that are across the campus from our casa... inconvenient, but it is what it is. The problem is, we don't have keys to get into that building, so we have had to hope that it's open, ask for keys, etc. 

These two sisters were doing their laundry between classes, and had an interesting experience of praying for the door to be open and for them to be able to get in, and it worked all day... until right after dinner when they were going to take their laundry back to the casa, they couldn't get in! And they couldn't find someone to open it for them either... one of the sisters told the other, "I am fully convinced that we couldn't get our laundry for a reason... God has been opening that door for us all day, we absolutely would have been struck by lightning or something if we had been able to open it just now!" Later, we came to find out that the tree fell over into the house that is two doors down from ours, and crashed down over the path (that each of us 19 sisters that live in that casa go up and down every single day).... and it fell right after dinner, exactly when those two sisters would have been carrying their laundry home. 

One thing I love about being here is hearing the stories and miracles of others!! This is an amazing example of that and I am so impressed by the girls in my casa. 

My comp reminded me of the other exciting thing that happened this week... at some point I got a Dr. Pepper from the tienda here, and while drinking it... some splashed... into my eye. So, I didn't really worry about it, UNTIL the next day, my eye was all red and splotchy, and my teacher sent me to the Enfermeria. My comp and I are very familiar with the people there because we are in there a lot because of her fractured thumb... it took like over an hour, but eventually I got some eye drops and my comp got a new wrap put around her hand... they invited us to come back on Thursday and we told them we would be happy to come wed or fri because thurs is our p day... so we're going in tomorrow to see if it's all healed up or not. (Her hand, not my eye-my eye is fine.) 

The food here is interesting... sometimes it's really good, and sometimes it is truly truly terrible. Today for lunch, for example, our options were excessively dry, bland chicken, OR dripping wet, boiled steak... so instead of either of those I picked bland, oily noodles with vegetables. Good times. It's so weird because other times both options look good... the other night we had the option of potato casserole stuff with ham, or spaghetti with ground beef... both good options here! Or we'll have pizza and tacos al pastor- which are two of my favorite things here. One of the weirdest things about here, though, is that with pretty much every meal, they serve jello cubes... which if you know me well, you know I'm a big fan of Jello! But... I'm also kind of allergic to sugar substitutes... well every single flavor of Jello tastes like sucralose/sugar substitute. It's terrible!! Like, how could they ruin Jello for me!!! I eat cereal a lot more often than I would like. And I miss having a kitchen more than any other thing about being in the states. 

Overall I feel really ready to be off to Chile. I wanted to go on a mission to teach, and although my language skills aren't perfect and my teaching skills could use work, I have always been one to learn better by being thrown into the fire. The faster I get to Chile and have to actually apply what I'm learning, the faster I will be able to adjust and learn in the way that I learn... buuuuttt that's not how this work, so for two more weeks (more like 1 1/2 now) I'm just persevering through it. 

Welp, this is pretty long and it es el tiempo de cena ahora (time for dinner now), so I will leave you all with that. 

All the love, xoxo Hna. Griffin