Not much time to write today because I am in charge of the District Meeting in about 20 minutes. As a district leader I have a cell phone to communicate with the other leaders, and I receive text messages with the top news headlines every other day.

Well this first week was pretty crazy. My new area has almost NO organization. At least in my past areas, the roads were north-south, and east-west. Here they curve and change and change names and it´s pretty difficult to orient myself. There are 6 Elders in my district, All with less than 4 months in the mission (my companion has 8 months, and I 13). It´s a rather young district, but that´s OK. We all have stuff to learn from each other.

It´s hard

because we only have about 7 hours of time on Preparation Day (we still have to study and everything in the morning). And we have to wash cloths, hang them to dry, clean the house, etc. This morning we went to climb a mountain in our area. It has a section convered in sand, so we went to the top and jumped (galloped) down the mountain. I felt like Superman taking such big strides. Then we went to a members house to wash cloths, and her water ran out. We had to take a big blue barrel (like the ones we have) down the street, drop buckets down into a cistern below ground, and pull the water up and empty it into the barrel, then take the barrel back to the house (a big pain) and take bucketfulls of water to the 3rd story of the house to wash the cloths. Needless to say, I am EXHAUSTED today. I will sleep excellently tonight. Our boiler doesn´t work here either, so we use a big resistor that plugs in and sits in a bucket of water to heat it up. It takes about 30 minutes to heat up a bucket about the size of 4 or 5 liters. Then we mix it with cold water to get luke warm water and we shower by dumping bucketfulls over our heads. It does help save water.

Love, Elder Bunker