*In my letter, I asked Allison to describe the fruit she loved so much. -Cari

the fruit*? small, green on the outside, pink on the inside with lots of seeds, kinda like a more dense tomato. we taught a lesson to that jw lady later in the week, and it went really well. so i now feel no shame to continue to charm our way into peoples homes by climbing their fruit trees.

my adventure for this week involved hopping stones in a swamp in my proseliting clothes. haha. our area is huge, and theres a little swampy valley in between two of the neighborhoods. it takes like, half an hour to walk the streets around the swamp, so we decided to be hard core and just walk through it. its now a regular path we take.
id love to send pictures but the second world is really getting me down in that respect. i still havent figured out how i can do it.

on thursday, after our great lesson with the jw, we realized we were running late to meet louis, who was baptised on saturday, to walk with him to the hospital to visit his baby son, who was there because of congestion. we ended up running across our entire area, like, 8 miles, up and down hills, to get there in twenty minutes. we then ran another 2 miles or so up some more hills to get to the hospital… and.. yeah. i guess i shouldnt have been so surprised, but…

uruguayan hospitals are scary as hell. eeeeeeeeesh. if your illness doesnt kill you here, i bet the hospital stay will.

that reminds me. we were at a members house the other day, and the family had lived in the states a few years ago. they then spent the whole time trying to get me to say that the houses in uruguay are really trashy compared to those in the states. i pretended not to understand them… cuz im pretty sure im not here to criticize peoples houses. even if its true. doesnt seem super christlike.

and i almost wasnt very christlike the other day… i almost wanted to punch a pregnant woman in the face. we were eating with a member, and she called me fat. this is a normal, inoffensive topic of conversation here, but it still pisses me off, mostly cuz i have, miraculously, not gained any weight in my mission. and also cuz i am still a gringa who still finds that incredibly rude.

then, while piling white rice covered in vegetable oil and breaded deep fried red meat on my plate, and lathering mayonnaise on top, she warned me to lay off the bread, cuz itll make me gain weight. it wasnt her so much, as its just the irony is a little frustrating in general. i suppose these people dont realize what theyre forcefeeding me. they dont understand the sheer force of will it requires for me to eat that stuff. ugh.

so if anybody wants to send me peanut butter and raisinets, that would be awesome. cuz hell, if im gonna get fat, i might as well enjoy the journey.

anyway, i really do like salto though. those thirteen year old girls are super funny. they like to give me fashion advice, and encourage me all the time to wear my hair down and wear makeup. its rad that they have no idea what sort of bumble and bumble using, mac makeup wearing rockstar i was in my previous life. they play with my hair during lessons.

oh, and the next day after my surprise marathon, i got to shovel a huge ditch for the zone service project where we help people build houses.

i have hit the point of my mission wherein i am experiencing physical exhaustion. im running miles over hills and eating the equivalent of nothing but crisco. ugh.

but anyway, i feel mostly alright about it cuz the work is going sooo good here. were looking at 8 baptisms this month. 8! we dead seriously had someone call us and ask us to be baptised last week. it was incredible. and incredibly funny, cuz in our zone conference last week, the president told us specificially that this would never happen. ha!

i am really happy here, even if i feel like i am enduring physical torture. it makes it all worth it to see so many cool people in silly looking white jumpsuits.