Adios Paraiso

October 13th, 2014

POR FIN!!! i got to leave santa cruz again! haha but this time outside outside. im in Trinidad!! this week was a little crazy. First president called us to come to the offices out of no where wednesday. he told me i would finally be leaving the city, and that i actually would have gone earlier if it had not been for the emergency transfers that happened a couple months ago. So i packed my 40 pound suitcase and said goodbye to my beautiful house in paraiso, my home for 6 months. i had to go stay in a hotel with 3 new hermanas who just came in from peru. luckily, hermana uzqueda was there, it was her last day and they had me be her companion for the day to visit a few of her converts. shes the best, shes from tarija, bolivia. after that the asistents and secretaries asked if i could help them out with the greenies. before the gringo asistents got there i had to be a translator for a wee bit, to tell them things like, "the receptionist wants you all to know that you have to stop putting toilet paper in the toilet. you can only put it in the trash can" I also didnt know that probably for a good month at the beginning of my mission haha. then i was in charge of the peruvian elders and hermana to take them to immigrations and the offices in micro haha. our micro crashed a car right as we pulled up to the offices and i was like, bienvenida a bolivia haha. 

Now i am in Trinidad, it is like the poorest parts of montero, with a lot of dirt roads and everyone rides motorcycles and fourwheelers haha. the people are nicer and their lives are slower. it is very beautiful with jungle trees, and the big thing to eat here is alligator. im not kidding. in the elders areas you can actually see small alligators sometimes, but im assuming not around the houses where we are. 

Anways, when i left paraiso, i stopped by my two converts houses. Rafael told me thank you for helping him to get baptized, and that he would work towards a mission. the other day we had a lesson with him using the family history pamphlets and he started crying and said he wanted to do temple work for his uncle who recently died. then i stopped by gabriel. he was very surprised that i would be leaving and told me very sincerely how grateful he was to me that i had never given up on him, even after he didnt show up to his first baptism date and such, and he said that he thought i was a very rare person with a strength inside, and he wanted to be like that. he gave me a present, a scarf with american flags all over it hahahaha. but it was very nice to hear how much it meant to him that i had been there, especially after leaving such a hard area with hardly any baptisms. it is worth it even to touch one life deeply. 

im excited to work here in trinidad and know new people. my new companion is hermana milne. i actually told my president one time that she was probably one of the only girls i was afraid of being companions with. i obviously should not have told him that. we are VERY opposite. she is a homeschooled girl from bountiful utah. but i know if we work hard together everything will be great. keep praying for the people we were teaching in paraiso. president put in two completely different hermanas so im hoping that it wont impede their progress. we had one investigator who was working towards a baptism date for this month. Hermano Grover, Hermana Juanita, and the Longaric family.

Love, Hermana bingham