Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas! and a happy New año!

So christmas was quite different this year. I couldn`t really put my finger on it, it was just different for some reason. HAHA How was your christmasses! full of holiday cheer, turkey, presents and snow i hope!

Alright first off talking on skype is super weird. I spend all this time not talking to the fam and then i get the opportunity and i have no idea what to say. I even had a LIST! Of stuff i wanted to say but when i got on skype i guess i forgot how to read and I forgot to tell you people stuff! I Even had VISUALS because you could SEE ME and i FORGOT THEM! Come on elder buma! I had things like milk bags, pil fruit, achichayroo, salteña, all this stuff to show and i didn`t. I apologize, I dropped the ball on that one, next time will be better. Just know that overall the mission is great!

So interesting week like i said. It was awesome and weird.It was awesome cause I got to talk to my MOMMY! Love you! and i also love you other people i talked to too ;)

Anyways, then it was really cool for other reasons too. so here come the stories.

Story Number 1! We went to Veimar`s house and his dad`s nerve thing apparently stopped working so his face looked like it was melting! he couldn`t control his face and i was like GO TO THE HOSPITAL and he was like NO i went to an herbalist lady or some witch doctor I dont know and so he had this thing wrapped around his face with plants inside it which apparently cure that whatever he has which apparently commmon! I get hot at times that i feel like i`m melting but i don`t want to look like it! also it was kind of funny to see that thing on his face with plants in it. it just looked like a kid had stuffed grass in a rag and said that will help, it made me giggle. He`s fine though. His face is better if you`re wondering.

Story Number 2!

Catholics can be very frustrating! I feel your pain a little chel. Even if you teach them EVERYTHING, they understand you, they may even BELIEVE you and then if you ask them to come to church they`re like NOPE I`m catholic, gonna die catholic, tradition. GOSH! Don`t ya want the truth?! Anyways that is from a girl`s parents named Kenya. She`s a super strong member but her mom is FURIOUS that she is a member and only accepts us cause her daughter begged her to. So it`s not the most spiritual lessons. What did you do chel?

story number 3!

I am so grateful for my life! We have this investigator family Arrias and they`re awesome but really poor. They told us that before they were even more poor, they were literally living day to day. It got so bad that their kids started eating leaves from trees they were so hungry. When the hermana told us that story she just started bawling and I`m a big strong man but i ain`t gonna lie, i got choked up when i started talking to her about the love of christ and everything. It also reminded me of my family so i got a little more choked up (It also didn`t help that I had talked with my family one day before) so i just wanted to tell my family thanks for my amazing life and everything i have I love you so much.

I`m pretty much out of time but i just want to remind you all to always be examples of the believers. in every situation, every place, anytime, be an example! Love you all!

Elder buma

Feliz Christmas Day!

Feliz Christmas day!

How`s ya`ll doin?! It`s stinkin awesome here! it literally stinks and it`s literally awesome! hahahahaha man i`m funny.

Anyways it was a sweet and kinda sad week. It was sad cause I found out all these people are going home. One guy from my group and three others who have only been out 2 or 3 months. It`s not for worthiness issues, they just didn`t like Bolivia... That blew... I think they might get transfered to different missions though in the US so i hope they stay out.

On the upside we`re starting to get all christmasy up here in Bolivia! it`s not snowing or cold but still! We`ve been sharing he is the gift like crazy and that has been so fun sharing with people.

So Katerine`s getting baptized on the 17th of January! Also, her little brother wants to be baptized, and we have about four others who are progressing like the familia angulo, Simona Ortega, Rene Rocha, Erik zuñiga, and a few others that can pretty much already be baptized, we just have to get a date down. I`ll keep ya updated.

Yesterday we got to sing with all the missionaries in santa cruz in the big Plaza! It was awesome! There were lights, there was singing, there was also rain but that didn`t matter. At first it was a little rough singing wise and i learned that missionaries are blessed with the gift of tongues, not voices, but it got way better after a bit of practice. it was like a mini temple square! And SO many people came! it was super fun contacting all of them right after singing even though none of them live in my area a lot of people got really interested.

Alright so what is a Bolivian Christmas like you ask? good question. Well on christmas eve everyone stays up until midnight, then right at midnight they stinking light the city up with fireworks! Oh YA! they also eat a big dinner at midnight, open all their presents, then go to bed at like four in the morning. Then the next day they pretty much just sleep. So christmas eve is a way bigger deal.

ANNOUCEMENT so yesterday after singing the president offered to give us a ride home to our house and he told us something. There`s gonna be another mission in bolivia in six months! It`s gonna take part of our mission and it`s gonna be the la paz north mission! AH! it`s still six months away but it freaked me out!

What the junk I totally forgot! It`s raining non stop here now and bolivians are super cool and they managed to turn this city into a giant bowl so the water comes up to our shins everywhere we go... It`s awesome! we get home and it looks like we took a shower. One day my comp forgot his rain jacket and he totally fell in a huge puddle! After that he didn`t even give a crap he just trucked through all the giant lakes until we got home. It was pretty amazing. Rain is fun. 

Alright i think that`s it for this week. Can`t think of much else... Love you all! Talk to you soon! (That last sentence is just for people who are related to me) but i love the rest of you too!

Elder buma

12/15/14

Ok time for another glimpse of my life in Bolivia! Get ready folks!

Alright so you know how we had a butt load of investigators attend last week. Well like five of them said it was really boring so they don´t want to go back... CRAP! uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I don´t know what to tell those people. Maybe i should go all evangelical on their behinds and yell IF YOU DON¨T COME TO CHURCH YOU¨L BURN IN HELLFIRE! What do you guys think. Will that help?

We still have four people committed to baptism though! Elmer, Erika, Caterine, y Rene. Funny story Elmer´s birth name is Elder. Weird right! He thought we just all had the same name as him when we first met him so I explained what elder meant and he understood. Anyways, they´re all progressing pretty well but their baptisms are set for after the transfer so if i get moved out of viru viru i won´t get those baptisms. sad i know. but just as long as they get baptized by someone it´s ok.

So we had an activity in valle sanchez this week right. So me and elder coello went with the zone leaders there in trufi. which is basically a van. Anyways I had no idea what i was doing to get into my seat. There was only one seat left inbetween the driver and the passenger and i came in from the back so i had to climb over this seat thing to get into my seat. And you people know I´m not the most graceful butterfly so you can imagine that i was struggling pretty bad to get into my seat and so long story short i basically presented my bottom to the entire van for like a minute while i was struggling to get into my seat. One guy started filming me so guess who´s gonna be famous on YouTube?! ME! hahahahhahaha whoops. At least i broke the ice with a lot of people and gave out a lot of he is the gift cards. I think that actually was planned by our father in heaven.

Anyways we got to the activity which was meant for investigators to get to know the church and they were expecting like fifty investigators to come... they got two there... it was only a little awkward when the number of missionaries outnumbers the number of investigators. poor elders in valle sanchez. they felt sooooo bad. And to make things worse the branch president there went to the one KFC that´s in this place in the center of the city which is an hour away and very expensive and got KFC for fifty people... Well I enjoyed it. hahahaha I got KFC! Man I missed american things.

The stake president even went to that activity and at the end he offered to take me and my comp back to our area which was nice. It was really weird though. He´s actually got quite a bit of moneyand his car is nice and leather and just like a normal car in America, air conditioning and everything! It was a very cool thirty minute drive.

Alright shout out to the greatest woman in the world. MY MOM! I got your package this week and holy cow was it awesome! Cheez itz, beef jerky, Reeces! MAN it was awesome. Elder Robinson, Elder Zaldivar, and I only cried a little. It was awesome. Also pixi stix are awesome and we did the pixi stix challenge where our zone leader elder robinson got on the ground and we just started dumping them in his mouth. We got to thirty when things finally went south and he started laughing and got the weird sludge pixi spit on the floor... THANKS MOM! Oh! also the awesome turkey craft you sent me I´m using those in a family home evening tonight. YOU ROCK!

I love you all, I´m out of time. Stay classy

Elder Buma

December 8, 2014

Hola personas!

sorry about last week, I know you were all crushed that you didn`t get an update on the amazing mission life of elder buma. Van a desculpar. Anyways, I`m writing this first so that i don`t forget this week.

So to catch you all up and the stuff that`s gone down. First off I learned some new words haha. So here`s the story. It was thanksgiving right and I, being the super nice missionary decided to buy some ice cream and oreos to make some milkshakes for the elders in my house so they could have an awesome thanksgiving. Well I went to the little market thing and there was only ice cream that`s called, ron con pasas. The picture on the thing looked like it was vanilla with chocolate chips or something so i was like PERFECT. Well Ron does not mean vanilla and pasas does not mean chocolate chip... Anyways, i`m getting ahead of myself. So i bring the icecream back, we put oreos in it, mix it up, and BOOM we got milkshake and started drinkin. It was a really weird taste though, just really weird and we kind of just thought that it was the bolivian ice cream wasn`t as high quality. Anyways, after downing our kind of disappointing milkshakes we went to our rooms and i heard ELDER BUMA! Elder robinson had looked at the empty ice cream thing and he informed me that i had not bought vanilla with chocolate chips, i had in fact bought RUM with raisins... I laughed. Haha so we all had rum raisin ice cream. hahaha. I told my president in my interview with him and he laughed too.

I had my first interview with the pres. It was awesome. Man whenever I talk to him I can just feel his spiritual power. He`s gonna be in the next avengers movie, i know it.

We also had a multi zone conference and guess who led that bad boy, ME! it was awesome, we felt the spirit and we talked about He is the Gift. MAN that iniciative is cool! Apparently you all have cards to pass out too so DO IT! the only problem with that initiative is that in spanish it`s el es la dadiva and no one knows what dadiva means so we have to explain that it means regalo. The people here generally aren`t super edumacated so that`s a little hard sometimes but it`s still an awesome iniciative.

So zone meetings are not my fave. Very long, just a little boring, and for the past three months instead of district meeting we`ve had zone meetings every week from 10 to 12:30 to basically retrain the entire mission. So they`re really long and not gonna lie, I`ve fallen asleep the past four times, mouth open, snoring, the whole shebang. So it goes without saying they always pick on me to do the practices at the end because i slept through the whole thing. They even had me teach the class one time so i wouln`t fall asleep. Haha ya that`s something i could probably improve on. hahahahahah

So the latino elders here are suposed to learn english right? well i dont know how but they always learn the words faggot and the n word very quickly and it`s all i can do to keep from laughing and tell them to stop saying that. I`m like Cam from modern family when he listens to kids swear. It`s fun.

We got Nine people to come to church this week and four of them have a date for the end of the month! Woo! man, it`s been a bit since my last baptism so i`m excited. We really work A LOT with less actives so sometimes we dont have a lot of time with investigators so i`m stoked. I`ll let you know how it goes.

Well i think that`s it. Hmmmm. what else, oH, i have a bug in my stomach that doesnt really hurt but i`ve gotten very bad gas to the point that my companion now sleeps with air freshener... poor guy... hahahahahahaha

Love you all. See ya soon fam.

Elder buma

Pictures!

11/10/14

Hola familia y amigos! Como estan. Todo bien. Claro que si todo esta bien aya! Ustedes estan en lo mejor pais del mundo!

AMERICA! man america`s awesome right? i was just thinking about that cause every bolivian here always talks to me about america. The weird thing is that they all think that japan and china are way more advanced than america... WHAT?! don`t you dare say that china or japan is better than america! They all think that america is fighting china right now and that china is just straight cities and there`s no country or anything... they all have interesting ideas about the world and sometimes i just have to keep my proud american mouth shut and nod and agree. it`s a little difficult sometimes haha.

Anyways, it`s been a little interesting week. It`s still got it`s really fun moments but everyone in the house is really stressed cause the work is kind of slow right now, companionship issues with some of the other elders, and stress. So in the house it`s been just a bit hard. Everyone keeps saying that they`re trunky which blows. cause when everyone just keeps talking about being trunky it makes you trunky, so that wasn`t very fun. But whatever missions aren`t perfect.

OH! i ate cow stomach this week! and guess what! I totally know why no one in america eats cow stomach... cause it`s nasty junk! hahahaha. and my pensionista knew that i`d hate it too! she handed it to me and just started laughing! that evil little lady. Still love her though. I`m totally gonna come home and make panza for you people. It`s great, i promise. You`ll only want to puke a little. 

So in our pensionista their kids always watch disney movies while we eat and not gonna lie, sometimes in the corner of my eye i see what`s they`re watching sometimes while i`m enjoying my cow stomach. They watched frozen this week. Man i miss that... dang. oh well. 

this week me and my companion got so much food! literally everyone made us churazco which is like a barbecue basically so we almost died from too much food. that was awesome! Go BEEF.

Anyways we`re a little frustrated with investigators not keeping commitments but we`re still pushing along. Veimar already has a calling as ward missionary so he`s been accompanying us like every day haha. he looooves it. he keeps laughing and saying that two days ago he was the investigator and now he`s the missionary ahaha man he`s literally just the best guy ever. you people just got to meet him.

i can`t really think of anything else right now... dang! a bunch of other junk happened this week too but i can`t think! Hmmmm... sorry, just imagine me preaching powerfully, dripping sweat, and all that good stuff. 

i love your stinking guts, peace out

Elder buma

Baptism and pictures!

Alrighty so time for yet another chapter in the book of the missionary life of elder buma.

So this week was cool. Numbers wise it wasn`t as good cause we had to do some random junk but it was cool all the same.

First off. We had an intercambio this week! I totally forgot how to say that in english... It`s when two companionships switch companions for the day... anyways so I had a different companion for the day and it was another gringo! Elder Wade. He`s also from my group and when we found out we`d be companions we were just like... CRAAAAP! he`s awesome  and actually one of my besties here but you know, we still aren`t the best at spanish... But me being super smart planned an awesome day. So in our area there`s actually some pretty nice areas and in those areas there are some people who know some english! Also, there`s this one investigator from south africa named simon and he actually speaks better english than he speaks spanish! hahaha! So that day we actually taught two lessons in english and only one in spanish. Man am I good or what?! hahaha. Oh and the spanish lesson was actually pretty sweet too. We must have gotten something across to him cause he actually came to church yesterday. GO GRINGOS!

That was just such a good day too cause we got to speak in english, joke around, talk about stuff that we have in common and hmmmm... what else. Oh ya! a morbidly obese, COMPLETELY nude guy (seriously, totally nude, yucky) was just walking up and down the street we were passing by and he kind of started to follow us so we pretty much ran away. I`m all up for preaching the gospel to strangers but i got to draw the line somewhere. My personal line is that they at least have to have boxers on. You may say im discriminating but hey, that`s just me

So the intercambio weas great. We also had a baptism this week! Veimar Moreno. He`s 18 and not only is he awesome but he wants to go on a mission and is already helping us out get new investigators and junk. Man he`s cool. It was funny though he told me that when i finish my mission i have to come back and we`re going to do a tour of bolivia. He was telling us all about cool places in bolivia and it was awesome, there`s only one problem. Every single place he talked about is out of my mission haha. So i asked him where in my mission we`ll tour when I come back like riberalta or cobija or trinidad and guess what he told me. He said. Those places are terrible. They`re worse than the devil`s armpit and I never want to go to any of those places... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA so apparently my mission is like the stinkhole of bolivia... HAHAHA man that made me laugh... and cry just a little ;)

So Veimar`s baptism was awesome and guess who baptized him? ME! And I got it right on my second try! haha the first time he didn`t get the way under... But the second time i made sure that fool went all the way under. HAHA after the second time he told me. Dude i thought you were trying to drown me or something... HAHAHAHAHA so i guess i`m not the most graceful baptizer haha. But he felt the spirit and he`s awesome so it`sall good. HAHA I also kind of forgot to tell him that his confirmation wo0uld be during sacrament meeting the next day  so when they called him up to be confirmed he had NO idea what was going on. After we confirmed him he asked me. Was that where I receive the gift of the holy ghost and everything? I didn`t know it would be during sacrament meeting... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA so i taught him all the doctrine and everything and he`s got a testimony but maybe I should make sure he knows when exactly all the ordinances are going down... It was my first baptism without my trainer and I`m training so cut me some slack! HAHA i`m a goober

So Bolivia`s cool and I realized that popped collars and ripped jeans are still really popular here. haha that made me giggle. Also their testimony meetings are awesome here. There is NEVER a silent moment. Everyone wants to bear their testimony and theyre all way good testimonies too. I love these members.

Crap! We were also a trio for one day. Elder camargo`s comp was in the hospital with another missionary so he came to work with us and he pretty much is awesome. He know`s how to teach and he also just took my clothes out of my hand at night and washed my clothes for me! I didn`t have to wash clothes for the first time in like a month! It was a great day. The title of that story is called, Enjoy Laundry Machines.

Alright, I`m out of time so until next week ya? alright it`s a date. ;)

Love you people

Elder Buma