Conquista

     Ever since the first day in the mission home when I heard that only one area of the mission ever gets remotely cold, I wanted to serve in that area. And now, here I am! I'm fairly certain I'll be here until the end of my mission. Conquista is very different from the rest of Bahia. As in, there is NOTHING in Conquista that even close to resembles the rest of Bahia. It's a pretty calm, less-hot, wealthy area with more white folk than I've seen since leaving São Paulo. There's no loud music playing on the streets, no drunk people dancing in the streets, the sidewalks are well-kept, grass trimmed, parks filled with healthy happy families. Where am I??

    And yet, we are not working in these pretty, well-kept areas. Oh no, the group of investigators that was passed on to me from the sisters before live waaaaay up the hills in the middle of nowhere where it's barren and dangerous. I guess it's so hard to teach rich people that the missionaries before me decided it was worth the long and treaturous walk to find the more humble folk. I decided to be rebelious this last week and I told Sister Quispe, "No! Let's work close to the church like President asked us to and let's talk to these families!" So we spent a morning talking to the servants of rich people through intercoms, trying every approach we could think of to get the home owners to come talk to us. One actually let us in because when she asked, "Who is it?" I said, "It's us!" and she assumed we must be friends, so she unlocked the huge front gate by pressing a button up in her bedroom and said, "Come on in!"  We thought that was pretty cool, but we still had to be recieved by the house keeper lady first and when she saw that we were intruders she kindly accepted a booklet for herself and escorted us out.

   Well, that was a fun experience. We're going to keep trying. But at the same time we need to keep up with the humble folk up in the hills, so we go there every day and, I gotta admit, they are the most open and humble people I've ever worked with yet. They accept the gospel so easilly and they actually come to church when they say they will! It's a fun area.

    The only thing is that we have to head for home at 5:00 because it gets a little sketchy at night. So here our schedule is completely different than the rest of the mission. I'm used to studying in the morning and then going out to work for the rest of the day and not coming home until well after dark. Now we head out to work in the morning and study at night. I'm still adjusting to that. It feels like such a sin to be at home so early in the day. Weird.

    Sister Quispe is a spicy little Peruvian that is so much the Hispanic version of Reana that it makes me want to cry. She has me laughing so hard ALL THE TIME! She's got a thick Spanish accent and long hair that is always full and perfect. She has a lot of desire to work hard and she's always talking about her goals as she flips and fluffs her perfect hair and speaks very fast, slurring all her words together in a very Spanish way. More on her next time.

    Well, I am extremely happy in this area and excited to work! The Bishop here is less than thrilled with missionaries, so I'm excited to work with him and see if we can change that. My goal is to learn how to work better with ward leaders before I go home so I can be of more use to my home ward.

  I love you all!

-Sister Whitaker