New Area

¡Muy Buenos Días!

So funny story…..

¨Elder Groneman, se va a Satélite 2, zona Equipetrol. Misión Norte.¨

Yup, I got transferred, again. But don´t worry, it gets even better… so on Thursday I went to the other side of Santa Cruz to Equipetrol, the stake closest to Montero, another smallish city that´s completely separate from Santa Cruz, but not too far away, an hour and a half or so. And so I went there and all was well, had a new companion and everything. I really liked Satélite because it was all motos (motorcycles) and they´re really useful for taxis when you have to walk forever away. My companion was new in the area too, but we met several members the same day and had a whole plan with the branch president (yes, a branch this time, and again with a house for the chapel) of how we were going to work with the members.

The next morning…

I get out of the shower. Elder V (my new companion): ¨Elder Groneman. Surprise! Emergency tranfer! You´re goin to Guayaramerín!¨ En serio. I had one day in Satélite. One day. But Guayaramerín! The Beni! (in other words, the jungle of Bolivia).

So now I´m here in Guayaramerín! Everyone always wants to go to the Beni so I´m really excited to be here. Guayaramerín is a small town on the Banks of the river Mamoré, the border between Bolivia and Brazil. It´s all the way up in the north part of Bolivia and it´s absolutely beautiful! I already have reales, the money from Brazil, because the people living in Guajaramerím, the Brazilian city on the other side of the river always come here to shop, so they use both Bolivianos and Reales, and there´s a lot of Portuguese too. And I´m really lucky too because my area is right on the river so I see Brazil everyday, and also the jungle that surrounds the city because the city´s not too big. The dirt is bright red, and basically I´m in heaven right now. I honestly feel like I´ve been here before. We have a new branch president here as of yesterday, and for the first time in awhile, it´s a member and not a missionary! When I first got here, the first 2 questions everyone asked: ¨What happened to Elder H?¨ Followed by, pointing to me, ¨Oh, so he´s the new branch president then?¨ Ya, no. The district here (it´s not a stake quite yet) already decided that a member was going to preside here, so I dodged that bullet haha!

And Janessa! ¡¿En serio?! Gonna love Santa Cruz! But I think that´s in the other misión. I´m officially in the Santa Cruz North Mission, and the south misión is called the Santa Cruz Mission, it dosn´t say South, so I´m thinking that that´s the South misión. That would´ve been fun to be in the same misión, but the south is still really cool because it has Tarija, Yacuiba, Corumbá (in Brazil), and several other places that are really cool (or so I´ve heard…. I don´t really know because I´ve only been in La Merced, the stake in Plan 3000, the ghetto of Santa Cruz haha). But you´ll love it. The best misión in the world just got split in 2, so North or South, you can´t go wrong.

So, I´m going to try to answer some questions now… Yes, we have 1 hour 15 minutes for internet here in Guayara. In Santa Cruz it´s 1 hour, the internet´s just a little bit faster there. Ya, I haven´t gotten all of the Dear Elder things yet. I got a few about a month ago, but nothing after that, but now that I´m not in Santa Cruz, it´ll take even longer because all of the mail goes to the misión offices first. But ya, I really like them because I was reading over the ones that I received and found out that I´m forgetting a lot of the emails that you send every week and it´s nice to read them several times haha.

¡Felicidades a Parker! Chamber President! That´ll be fun. I loved chamber…. Until everything fell apart haha. But you´ll be a great president.

Anyway…. That´s about it for this week I think….

¡Tenga un buen día!

Amor,

Elder Groneman