Week two en Villa Gorgona, Colombia

Familiaaaa!!!!

Heyyyy ive got week two under my belt!!!  And almost two months as a missionary!!!  Cant believe it!!!!   K first off Dad you are MY HERO for sending me that quote!!!!   My mission prep teachwer at BYU showed us that and i thought it was in preach my gospel, i think it might still be, but i ve looked and havent found it, but YESSS you sent it thanks so much I love that quote!!!!!  K im gonna be real with you guys, my first four maybe five days here (befor my last email) were indeed pretty hard, but now I am sooooo happy here!!!!  Seriously, dont worry the slightest about me, im safe and looooving being a missionary and naturally having a constant smile on my face!!!!   My second day here in the field, teh zone leaders came to inspect our house, and one of them is a gringo and he told me that if i was worried at all to just give myslef some time, that it took him weeks to finally start really enjoying the mish, but after just a few days i started getting to know the people well here and my comp and i started working great and all is well!!!

Alright so really not much is new this week, just typical life in Colombia!!!  But typical life in Colombia is nuts haha!!!  So the main street here in our little townis always a blast, especially at night!!!  its just loud with tons of comotion, and at night its all lit up with neon lights and salsa music blasting from every store haha!!  K so the music is INSANE here, like everything esle too though haha, but ya its no doubt this is the salsa capital of the world!!!  Every single house, even the poorest ones with blankets for front doors, has giant speakers and we will be in the middle of a lesson and the house next to us (that doesnt exactly have sound proof walls, or really anything proof walls, just a few sheets of plywood and maybe some bricks) will start blasting salsa music and we have to finish the lesson almost shouting everything we say...  So ya its crazy haha but i think it keeps things fun and exciting!!!  nothings ever boring in this country, thats for sure!  And of course the music makes it a bit harder to invite the spirit, but even with the music, we still manage to do so and its really neat to feel and to still teach with what we know to be the power of The Lord, despite whats going on in the crazy world around us...

So ya i couldnt be happier here and weve had another great week!!!  My comp really is great!!!  He teaches real well and works real hard and helps me do the same!!!  Weve got a good number of investogators right now too and the work is going well!!!  So i sent some funny stories to will and mark, thinking id have time to send them to you too, ut i dont, so have them share the stories with you, they are pretty good!  And again, i cant thank you guys enough for being such incredible paretns!!!  All the time i find myself in lessons teaching something that you guys taught me, and i always say so too in the lessons, i say ´well, my mom and dad once taught me this...´ and its always something that really helps these investigators and my comp has said to me several times that you guys must be super smart, and ya its true!!!   Im glad to hear that you are doing well and that Jared is doing better!  I know you are the most capable parents there are to continue helping him, so keep it up and keep enjoying your summer, and take good care of teh boat!!  That things gotta last at least two more years!!!  Those pictures you sent are great haha!!!

Alright so im getting the dear elder letters here on my email but not printed, so idk how those work exactly, butim gonna talk to my president in my interivew this week and ask him how exactly it works...  But i love you guys tons and will talk to ya soon!!  you guys have nothing but desires to do good and to do The Lords work, and with that, He will enable you to do it, he has me and he will you too, so keep workin ghard in all you do!!!  And thanks for teh prayers, i feel them every day and they are very apparent here with my constant smile!!  ok and maybe the good six inches of height and white skin help me stand out too, ut the smile is definitely a good factor!!

Les amo

nos vemos

elder Tenney

First Email From Cali/Villa Gorgona

Whatttuuuuppppp!!!!!!  yup im chillin in Cali!!!!  Actually chillin really isnt an appropriate word, more like burning haha but its all good!!!  Sooooo, Cali is suuuuper legit!!!  A really tropical and incredible city!!!  Fairly hilly, with lots of big buildings and rivers that run right through the middle of them, so everything is super green with thick trees that cover the streets and ya its amazing!!!  So i was stoked to find out that my first zone is here in Cali, buttttt, turns out its not what i expected haha...

So my first zone is a tiny pub called villa gorgona, tiny, an outskirt about half an hour outside of Cali way out in teh middle of the huge valley, and i love it!!!  K it seriously is a whole different world here though, this town is dirt poor, literally, most of the streets are dirt and even parts of some of the houses are made of packed dirt... really poor area, but the people here are amazing!!!  I mean at least i think they are haha i still cant usually understand most of what they say, but im picking up more and more every day!!! 

Our little house is pretty nice though!!!  My companion and i are really happy here and working well together!!!  My trainer is elder Penafiel from Ecuador, and hes a way good missionary whose teaching me lots!!  Teh people here are so open to hear our message, and I already had my first baptism!!  On saturday we baptised a little 14 year old kid whos awesome named Kevin, it was way sweet!!!  The biship confirmed him yesterday, and now weve got another baptism set up already for this saturday!!  The hard part though is keeping the people active and following the rules of our church, but we are working out best at it!!  The chapel though is a good 15 minute bus ride away though closer to Cali, and even though it doesnt cost much, its way too much for most people to pay, so its really hard for a lot of people here to attend, they are seriously so poor, and also only about half of the people in the wad actually have nice church clothes, but it is sooo humbling to see and im so glad to be able to bring the blessed message of the gospel to them!!! 

Alright so kind of a funny note, the first night i got eaten alive by bugs haha, especially on my ankles for some reason, so i put on a ton of bug spray before going to bed the next night, and it worked great every where but my ankles, i dont know what it is about my ankles, but the buys here love them, so i know have converted to the dark side dad, and i now sleep with socks hahaha... but let it be made clear that i did not convert by choice, haha its the only solution i could find, even with my feet bug sprayed and under my covers they still get eaten alive, so ya i am not even more like dad haha...

k it is so dang hot here haha i am an absolute sweat machine, but oddly enough it doesnt bother me too much, i dont usually realize it, but it is really funny at times haha, at times i see a few drops of water on the pages of my scriptures as ive held them open on my lap during a lesson, and the best was after my first interview with the bishop here... I had an interview with the bishop to get to know him the other day (and the poor guy is from the coast with some crazy accent and waaaay fast spanish, i cant understand a dang word he says, i swear its a completely different language haha) and his wife fed us dinner afterwards, this way good soup and chicken, but they were really hot, and i just started sweating like a pig in an oven, and holy cow i dont think ive ever been laughed at harder haha they were absolutely dying laughing at how hard i was sweating, i dont know how they dont sweat so much too, they do a little bit but not like me, so hopefully i will get a little more acustomed to it... but ya finally the bishops wife even escorted me to the bathroom where i used toilet paper to dry off a bit (they are way poor and didnt even have a towel to let me use i dont think, their póor house is just a few bricks and sheets of wood and metal, one of the walls even fell over while we were eating dinner) but ya so that was really funny!!!

alright heres a good story for mom, we helped a family of some members and some investigators paint their house this morning, abnd holy cow it was the most inefficient thing i have ever seen in my life.... including all of my own inefficient workings in my day... they poured water in with the paint, and i asked them why they did that, trying to explain that it would then be too thin, but they told me thats what they are supposed to do because it helps the paint dry faster...  Anyways so i start painting, to make things worse we are painting an orange wall white, and the paint is so dang thin that it took like six dips in the bucket to finally get like a little square foot completely coverd so no orange showed, and then the lady came over and showed me the technique they use to paint, she showed me and told me to do big strokes all the way up and down, and when she did it it just left a super thin coat of white with still tons of orange showing, and when i told her this she said thats just fine, that it will dry faster and then we come back and do another coat...  well after 2 hours we finished the first coat in the two rooms that we were painting and my comp and i had to go, but ya the poor walls look dead aweful right now and have got at least another 4 or 5 coats to go before they are good, all because of this method they have of diluting the paint with water hahaha ohhhh how i would love to see mom set things straight in there and show no tolerance for such inefficiency, i tried to make you proud mom and do so myself haha but the language barrier was just barely too strong...

alright well ya thats it for now!!!!  Espero que ustedes estan felices y disfrutando su verano!!  Estamos sumamente bendecidos para tener este evangelio en nuestras vidas!!  he sido dado mucho en cada momento de mi vida, y por eso yo tambien tengo que dar a los demas, y eso es lo que estoy haciendo!!!

Les amo

Nos vemos

Elder Tenney

July 15, 2014 (First Email from CALI)

Yoooooo ya boys comming to ya live from Caaaaliiii Cooolombiaaa!!!!

Alright im sitting in the mission office right now and they are giving us all a few minutes to say we made it safe!!  So, ya we made it safe!!  i just found out my first zone too is here in Cali, an area called Calima!!!!  Cali is sweeeet, its way different than Bogota, ive been surprised, but i think its maybe cooler (well hotter haha) cuz its way more tropical looking, a lot more like the tropical and almost jungle like south american city i thought it would be... well ya so i gotta go but wish me luck and keep enjoying your summer!!  You should hear from me again this monday, and i should finally be on a regular pday schedule haha

les amo

Nos vemos

Elder Tenney

July 11, 2014 (Last Email from the CCM)

Hello Family,

Alright random favor, can you guys look up the conversion to metric for me for 6 feet and 1 inch?  The latinos are always asking me how tall i am and i dont know what to tell them in metric, and can you also look up 6´8 cuz i wanna tell them i have two good friends at that height haha (farns and graham).  Its hilarious, im not even the tallest grino here, elder jones has got me by an inch or two and we got 15 more gringos this block, a few of them taller than me, but whenever the latinos ask me how old i am and i say 19 they are like ¨WOA¨ and im like what and they say that im really tall for my age, which leads me to a few thoughts, first im thinking ´well i woulndt be much taller if i were older, people stop growing around my age, so at this point my height doestn really correlate with my age haha but oh well¨ and second i tell them that im not even that tall for an american, that im probably a little above average but not much, and they say ¨hay mas altos????¨ and i say ya lots, and then i point out elder jones and the other gringos taller than me and they are stunned, like they havent noticed the other gringos yet haha, idk but ya its always really funny, happens probably every other day

So this being my last two week block i entered latino world!!!  My companion is hilarious, from bucaramunga colombia or something like that... So i love him to death but i cant understand the poor guy to save my life hahaha...  Apparently everyone from his city has a way different accent than most colombians.  his spanish is still really clear, but waaaayyyyyyy fast haha and he hasnt really learned to slow it down haha but thats alright because im getting way better at understanding because of it.  Ahh but oh man the first few days with him were an experience haha, he would always stand up around a group of elders and tell them to listen and then just spit rapid speed spanish leaving them all laughing really hard, so he quickly became popular amongst all the latinos because hes apparently really funny, but all the time id just be sitting there having no idea what on earth he said and why it was so funny haha and am just couresty laugh on my own... but over the past week and a half ive learned a lot.  When hes not going as fast i can get a fair amount of what he says, and even when he is talking way fast i can pick out a good amount of words and actually tell where the words start and stop, so ive still got a long ways to go but im progressing!!!  hes awesome though, hes always got the biggest smile, and even though hes only been a member for a little over a year (k this leads to another cool side story) he knows a lot about the gospel, hes our district leader, and i love teaching and working with him!!!

So for the side story, he was baptized a little over a year ago by a greeny gringo from idaho, and his city hes from (my companion) is in the north most part of the bogota north mission, and the elder who baptized him who goes home soonish is here in bogota and came by the CCM the other night to say hi to him!!!  And so it was waaaayy cool for me to see a gringo speaking awesome spanish, and even more impressive a gringo who could understand my companion, and so see that this kid baptized my companion who is now serving himself and gonna be an awesome missionary!!!  Made me way excited to get out to Cali where i hope to do the same!!

Alright well not much has happened this past week, just the typical classes and practice lessons and all which are going well, but have been completely in spanish lately, instead of just partly, and they split up us gringos on our last block, so other than at meals with the other gringos all i hear is spanish... soooo much spanish, its great, im learning a ton!!!  But some days it seriously is like getting punched in the brain cuz my head hurts from concentrating so hard all day on what everyone is saying... But something waaaay cool that ive noticed that doesnt surprise me is this:  I can always understand waaaay better and speak way better during lessons, the gift of tongues is mind blowing, and so for this i have learned to love teaching lessons even more and am stoked to get to Cali!!  The other day our investigator asked us a question about an analogy she heard comparing the restauration to a broken mirror and she explained how she didnt understand it, and she expalined rather quickly, yet i caught every word and without even realizing it opened my mouth and words flew out in spanish easily clarifying the analogy, after wards my comanion and i even laughed with each other a bit cuz i have never spoken spanish like that in my life, but ya i testify that the gift of tongues is real and it feels incredible to have it haha... except closing prayers are not something i really enjoy anymore, because after the prayer ending our lessons my spanish is cut in half again and im back to the stumbling gringo who asks everyone to repeat everything four times before they give up and walk away... but ya its fun haha!! 

We went proselyting again the other day!!  to answer your question mom about talking to the natives, its a bit scary with the first one or two each time we go out, but after that we get comfortable and its a blast!!  I still cant get most of what they say but im seeing improvement, OH but i did have one way funny story proselyting this time!!!  We were talking to a guy who said he doesnt want to join any church but that he loves learning what all have to offer, there was some weird word for guys like him in spanish, a term used for people who i guess believe everything but dont pertain to any one church, cant rememver the word, but anyways, he said hes seen a lot of us missionaries walking around but never talked to us, but that hes noticed we always have a gringo with a latino, and he asked me if I was sent here by the see-uh to patrol the drug action here in colombia, and i was like whats the see-uh, and after he tried to explain it to me for a few minutes I finally realized he was talking about the CIA!!!!   hahaha so ya he asked me if us gringo missionaries are sent here by the CIA to monitor the drug trafficking and ya i stumbled a lot to explain no, that im just a missionary with a message i know to be true, and ya but that was super funny haha!!! 

alright well they are kicking me off now, but its good to hear from you all again!! keep me posted!!!  I leave early tuesday for Cali and should be able to email real quick when i get there, but i dont inow for sure, so it could be a week from monday before the next email! 

les amo

nos vemos

Elder Tenney

July 1, 2014

Things are still chill here in Colombia!!  A few more world cup games have kept this city lively!!  Apparently Colombia is actually doing really well, way better than expected, but i also could just be getting the biased opinions of all the teachers here... but as you probably know, their best player tore his acl right before the cup, and so now it sounds like theyve got a Kevin Ware situation and all the rest of the guys on their team are playing suuuper hard and well and eeryone here is stoked about it and really have their hopes up haha, Im kinda scared now to see what happens when this glory streak falls apart...

Alright so i said before that the food is decent here right?  Well just when i was starting to actually really like it the shift of meals we would get all changed and weve has some pretty interesting stuff put on our plates lately.  The best of this, the other day we got some sort of T-bone pork thing, where we all had a slice of pork with two rib bones in it coming off of a vertebrae, and some sort of unexplained third bone coming out of some of them.  But anyways, I draw your attention to the vertebrae bone in the meat, ya it still had what we are pretty confident was the spinal chord in it, since there was a little circle whole in the bone stuffed with stretchy and rubbery tissue in it which we concluded was either spinal chord or some similarly functioning tissue... weird stuff... so what did we do?  Ya we dared each other to eat it of course and called anyone who wouldnt do it whimps... So i mean to defend my man card i did partake, yes, hahaha it was a blast, we all plucked out the white guck and had it ready on our fork and ate it on a third count, it was tangy and couldnt really be bitten, so after a few attempts of trying to chew it and getting more grossed out with each chomp i just kind of swallowed it and we all laughed and looked at each other with hilarious expressions wondering first what on earth we had just done, and second how freaky it is that soon we are gonna have stuff much worse than that put on our plates out in the field, and we are gonna have to eat it with composure, not with grossed out faces and laughter like we did here haha, but so ya that was fun!!

Other than just typical class the only other exciting stuff that has gone on in the past few days is the prank battle Elder Winchester and I are in!  He always gives me crap for having shoes with laces cuz it takes me maybe a few seconds longer to get ready in the morning haha, so one day he stole one of my laces as a joke and i went a few days with just one shoe lace and one shoe that was constantly almost falling off (until i finally got down my suitcase to wear my other shoes).  He then hid it by tying it into the volleyball net, right in plain sight, and i still didnt notice it for a few days haha, but when i finally did, i got him back pretty good!  I took it down late one night when he wasnt around (he didnt know that i had finally noticed it there) and then when we came to set up the net the next day during gym he saw that it was gone and kind of paniced thinking one of the workers had taken it or something (there is construction on the side of the gym so workers are always walking by and moving the net).  He confessed to me that he had put my lace in the net and had now lost it, and i made sure he asked all the workers if they had taken it, acting like i didnt know where it was... it was hilarious seeing him stumbling to explain the situation in spanish to the workers haha... and then i tied the lace onto the waist string on his sweat pants he wears at night, so when he put them on that night he saw it and realized that i had had it the whole time and everyone laughed a ton and it was a blast!!!  Then some of the latinos in our room helped me lift his bed up and take the bars that hold it up out, except the ones on the end, so that his bed sat there ok with nobody on it, but that night he ran and jumped onto it and it collapsed and we all laughed super hard and i took the lead with my second point!!  He tied it up big time this morning though cuz he took the screws out on my closed door and set my door back neatly so that when i opened it it collapsed, falling hard to the ground with a loud thud and scaring me pretty good... i give him props for that and gotta think of something good now... so thats been a blast!!!

Well its all still going well, weve got a new block of latinos coming in today and i will have one of them as my companion now that its my last block, ive loved it here but am now really looking forward to move on and get to Cali too... Keep enjoying life in the states, sigan leyendo las escrituras cada dia y miren para oporunidades para compartir este evangelio, tambien sigan pagando el diesmo porque necesitamos mas comida dulce (snacks in some of the classrooms) aqui en el CCM, enserio jaja, yo se whoops so i hit some button that sent that right before i finished it, the keyboards son un poco diferente aqui en Sur America, pero yo se que esta iglesia es la iglesia verdadera y que ustedes estan haciendo todo lo que necesitan hacer para seguir el ejemplo de Jesucristo.  Lo hagan mas, y ayuden a otras personas para seguir Su ejemplo tambien!

les amo

nos vemos

Elder Tenney

June 27, 2014

The past week and a half absolutely flew by and was a blast!!!  We went to the temple again, and other than that we just had normal classes everyday... except for yesterday WE WENT PROSELYTING!!!  It was leeeeggggiiittttt!!!!!  It was hard but i could get used to doing it everyday and am now even more excited to get out of the MTC in two and a half weeks!!!  So one of the Brazilian elders left last tuesday for his mission field, so now since my companions and i were in a three some, i got put with this brazilians old companion, elder Soares.  He doesnt speak english haha but its gotten both of us a lot better at spanish working together, and its been a lot of fun working with him, hes a great guy!

So we all hoped on a bus and drove a few minutes north to a chapel from which we all branched out and went proselyting for three hours!!  It was awesome!!  We couldnt take out cameras unfortunately, but there were some amazing sights as we did it!  Everysingle house is unique and colorful, but super run down and they have huge gates around them, probably ten feet tall, most with barbed wire on the top and some even with electric wire!!!  INSANE!!!  Also there was a light layer of fog that sat over the mountains (which we were fairly close to) and it made them look absolutely heavenly!!!  (you like my missionary vocabularly thats coming over me).  Also there was a park near by and some shopping centers which made it easy to aways find plenty of people to talk to.  I didnt understand much of what any of them said haha, but luckily my companion did (spanish is way too easy for brazilians haha they pick it up so fast, my comp Elder Soares didnt know any spanish before and is already practically fluent) and I was able to say almost whatever I wanted and they understood me just fine, so that was good!!  So we werent supposed to spend too much time teaching lessons to anyone, mainly just introduce our church and get reference addresses and all and tell them other missionares could come teach them later.  There were a few who were strong headed catholics and tried to bible bash with us, but not too many who didnt want to listen at all, almost everyone was actually really receptive and interested!!! 

OK so you guys have been watching the world cup right?!?!?!  Well im not allowed to watch it of course, but ive sure heard it haha!!!  The first day Colombia had a game a little while ago, we were just sitting in our classroom with personal study (we later realized the teachers gave us personal study becase they were all watching the game in their office haha) and everybody driving by was honking their horns constantly (they already honk a lot, but even more this day) when all of the sudden we hear this ROOAAARRR of cheering from LITERALLY EVERY DIRECTION!!!!  IT WAS INSAAANNNEEEE!!!!  From above us, below us, and on everyside, the whole city literally erruplted in cheer at the exact same time!!!!!  I think the ground shook, and it was easily the most incredible thing i have ever heard!!!!  Haha so ya thats how the world cup is here, pretty exciting!!!  ITs happened several times since, and its a blast to somewhat be apart of haha!!!

Alright so way cool thing President Dyer told us, I asked why we dont use the formal you subject and tense with God while praying, since we use more formal words in english such as thee and thou and all, and he taught us that those terms are actually what used to be an informal tense in english, but theyve been dropped from the language over the years.  People used to talk to family members and good friends with thee and thou (lets be real though, can you imagine how funnty that  must have been haha) but that those words have been preserved just for the sake of praying to our Heavenly Father, who is our father and thus should be communicated with in a familiar tense.  So ya thats one of the many neat things President Dyer is always teaching us, he is absolutely brilliant!

So the latino group this block are a lot smaller in number and not as receptive of us gringos and our poor spanish haha, the first few days when they would talk to us and we wouldnt understand, we would ask them to slow down and they would still just repeat whatever they said just as fast, and after a few times they would just rolll their eyes and walk away, so thats been a bummer, and also I got called as district leader and they were all way suprised at first that this norte americano who doesnt even speak their language got called, but its all good.  We have a ton of fun playing volleyball with them everyday though!!!  They are pretty good and its always a blast!! 

K so one last really interesting story.  So our investigators we have here in the CCM are just teachers being actors of course, but they are acting like real people who the techers themselves taught on their missions, which makes it seem really real and is pretty neat!  The other day we were teaching one named Daniel, and he had just moved here from Paraguay where he lived with his mom (he moved in here with his dad) and he had been telling us he has trouble sleeping and stuff, and he finally confesed to us that the reason he moved here is because he killed a guy in paraguay.  It was somewhat self defense, but he smashed a beer bottle against a guys head and killed him, and ran away here to Colombia.  So its been unreal trying to work through this with him, and we just learned that we are going to have to learn how to report this to government authorities too with the bisop.   But anyways, its just crazy to think that there are so many people around here with real problems like this, who would kill (sorry this is a horrible innappropriate pun haha) to know that there is a Savior who enabled the power of redemption and enablement to them.  So ya, that is just one more big reason why i couldnt be happier to be serving a mission, I miss you guys tons, but there are poor unfortuate people out there who need this gospel desperately, and i couldnt be luckier to have the opportunity to take it to them!!!  Entonces, yo se que Jesucristo ha tomado sobre si la pena de todos los pecados del mundo, y tambien toda la pena que hemos tenido y que tendremos aqui en la tierra.  Yo se que no hay un mensaje mas importante, y no hay ninguna cosa que quiero mas que quiero compartir este mensaje y ser un herramiento en las manos del Senor. 

Les amo

Nos vemos

Elder Tenney