Llamas, tequila and drugs

Dear Family,

Well this I learned that the word in Spanish for Llama and flame are the same: "llama". I'm wondering if that's ever caused any confusion. 

In other interesting news we have a new investigator who lives in a place that I can only really describe as far away from the long arm of the law. He makes moonshine out of cactus juice using a makeshift still in his free time. He says it's twice as "good" as the best tequila. 

I'll take his word for it. 

In other news I saw my first drug deal go down a few days ago. Some shady guy pulling white envelopes out of a bush in the semidarkness that another shady guy had been loitering by just a few minutes before.  Needless to say it was interesting. Another thing you notice is the shoes strung up on telephone wires. It's basically an advertisement for drugs being sold in the neighborhood. Different shoe colors = different products. 

As for my gospel knowledge, that increases daily as well. Right now we've been challenged to read the entire Book of Mormon in 85 days - the amount of time it took Joseph Smith to translate it. We're going to be finishing up in March. That works out to 6 pages daily. So that's been fun. It's pushed my reading of the Libro de Mormón into language study time though. If you want to speed up your Spanish learning by the way, read the Book of Mormon in Spanish. And whatever else you can find to read. It helps a lot. 

This week we also found a really friendly family that we've started to teach.  We ran into them while trying to contact a former who used to live in their apartment. They seem very open to learning. So I'm excited about that even though it's looking more and more likely that I'll be transferred soon. 

I've been praying this week to try to find out why I ended up in CA instead of Mexico and I think I've figured out at least one of the reasons. To work on my self-discipline. I think that's something I could improve a lot, and I think I'm challenged more that way here in California. It's pretty easy to break mission rules in the U.S., and I was surprised by how many missionaries don't have a problem with buying movies at Wal Mart and watching them on the DVD players we're supposed to use to show the Restoration video, for example. Things like that (music, magazines, etc). There's really not a whole lot standing in your way with all of that available. It's been a challenge to try to stay obedient, and I hope that by the end of my mission my self discipline will have improved a lot. 

Todavía estoy trabajando. Casi no puedo creer que éste traslado ya se acaba tan pronto. Dile a mama que tenemos que ir a  Perú juntos cuando regreso de la misión. Tal vez a España también. 

- Jake