Today I was given a Spanish book as a gift from a nice Mexican woman I’ve met here in Urbi. This is pretty cool because I barely know her and she was willing to talk to me and help me learn Spanish.
This day started out with our regular workout routine. We woke up around 9am and were done with our workout by 10:45. Following this I went back and had some breakfast for a while and got ready for the day. We had nothing to do all day except teach an English class later on around 6pm for the jovenes. Since I had a lot of free time, I decided to visit Tonya (Lina’s sister who owns a tienda) and Elli.
During my visit with Tonya I talked with her about their store and how things were going. We also talked about where I’m from and other things in the US. After we were done talking I bought some chips and a drink from their store and walked up the road a few houses to Elli’s shop. Elli runs what’s called a jarcería, which is a cleaning supplies shop. When I walked over she quickly invited me in and soon we were talking like we were old friends. During my visit with Elli we talked about random things in the house like outlets, electric cable plugs, and she told me how they build the houses in the Urbi village. During our conversation I wrote down words that I didn’t understand and got her to explain them to me. She was very patient and I enjoyed our talk.
Elli is from Uruguay so she has a different accent than most of the people here. She also talks really loudly so sometimes I wanted to move a little farther away so her voice wouldn’t be so loud. Anyway, I wound up telling her that I wanted to read a book in Spanish and she responded that she had a book for me. I can’t believe how generous the people are here sometimes, because before I knew it she had put a book in my hands and told me it was mine. I asked her if she was sure about giving me the book and then she asked me to spell my name for her. She took out a pen and wrote in Spanish “To Zach with care” in the front of the book and handed back to me. I was very happy to receive this gift as I don’t receive gifts even from my oldest friends that often. The book is called “Retrato en Sepia” by Isabel Allende. I hope to start reading it soon.
Following my visit with Elli I regressed back to my home where I stayed for a little while. From there I went over to the mission house so we could start preparing for the English class at 6. For our English class with the jovenes we had about 6 students show up which was nice (our previous week we only had one show up). We played games with them and taught them some basic phrases in English like “My name is” and “How are you?”. I brought some Jolly Ranchers from the US and I decided to give them out to the kids when they were able to remember an English word after one of our games. They seemed to like this a lot so I’m glad I brought the candies along. During one of our games I told them I liked to sing so they told me to sing. I promised I would sing at the end of the class if they were good, and at the end of the class they demanded I sang. I couldn’t think of what to sing so I just sang the chorus of “Poker Face”. They laughed and liked that (Lady Gaga is pretty popular here) so I felt I had done a good job.
After we had finished our English class, we were thinking our night was over. So we were surprised when a few adults from the church showed up and asked if we knew there was a Bible study tonight. The past two Wednesdays we had a party or something else going on so we had never been to a Bible study like this. After a while the Bible study started and the adults were talking about Romans 8. The passage at the end of the chapter talks about how nothing can separate us from God. They had a good discussion and after it was over Andrew and I locked up the house.
After we locked up, we headed over to Juan and Nancy’s house because they had invited us to eat dinner with them. At this point it was pretty late for dinner (around 9:30pm), but we ate anyway. While we were eating we also played Halo with Juan’s two sons and that was fun. I stayed over at their house until about 11:30pm and then I said I needed to leave because I was tired. I’m glad I got to enjoy this day with the Mexican people and I’ve learned a lot about their hospitality. Hopefully I can take some of that back with me to the States.
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