Saying hi from Bolivar

It's August 20, 2012 and our next email from Elder Merrill has arrived! Moms all over of course worry about their kids eating right and that perhaps gets multiplied exponentially when they go off to a foreign country but Elder Merrill puts our mind at ease about that and other areas of responsibilities:

Nothing new this week really, I am just doing work and continuing with the training. I haven´t caught anything bad, in fact, I feel fine really. Thankfully, it hasn´t been too much of a climate change, more from really hot to pleasantly cool. Although I don´t have peanut butter, they do have alot of other really good things here. And I´m keeping a well balanced diet of fruit and bread and meat and all that stuff. I also created a budget with the money that I automatically receive each month too, so I shouldn´t run into any problems during the month or have to borrow money from home to survive. I live in an odd place really, where everything is really nice or really run down. No real ´´middle ground´´ to the living conditions really. I live in a city surrounded by fields, so when I´m working in the city, I forget that I´m in the middle of nowhere, and when I´m in the fields, I forget that there´s a city right next to me.

 He gives a little insight into traffic over there:

P-day is just finishing up now. Nothing much to do around here for fun really... Nothing fun that´s missionary appropriate anyway. We just stayed in our apartment and took a nap. Not that that´s a bad thing really, after all the walking that we do, we´re glad to have a day to sleep a little and rest. It´s been a hectic week for us, we had to go to a missionary conference and then we had to work in some other areas, all of which required taking buses. I don´t know about the rest of the foreign countries, but traffic outside of the U.S. seems to be pretty crazy. Stop signs don´t exist here, and stoplights only appear in the very center of town. Funny enough though, there haven´t been any crashes or anything. I guess that they want to keep the car in a best condition as possible, as it´s costly to replace and they really don´t have much money in the first place.

Elder Merrill finishes up with some comments about his work and the weather:

I just got back from an appointment with an investigator who said he was going to read the Book of Mormon, and asked if we could come back. Naturally we did, and he told us that we were pretty much like every other religion and that he wasn´t interested. Man, things get tough sometimes, but the important thing is to keep on trying and enduring to the end, right? This town is small, so a lot of people have talked with the missionaries before, but we find a bunch of new investigators anyway, so we´re kept pretty busy for the moment.

I hope that the heat hasn´t been too bad over there, I know that it can be rough; walking around in South Carolina was no picnic, but at least you guys get some rain right? It´s pretty much the end of winter here, just beginning to turn into spring for us. It´s not to terribly cold at all, I think that we just missed that part here. It´ll be weird listening to Christmas music during the middle of a hot afternoon in December. I hope that I get to Skype home to you guys then. 

 Yes Elder Merrill, that would be pretty awesome if you could Skype home! Guess we will find out in a few months.