"Hello" Mountains and Adele! :)

This week was good!  My new area is very different. The weather is perfect everyday.  The hottest it gets is like 70.  I am now serving in a ward not a branch we have many more members.  The area I am in is on the edge of the city.  Part of our area includes the mountain villages.   It is hard walking up the mountains everyday.  It's literally like hiking Timp, but the view is great!!  In some ways it reminds me of Utah because there are pine trees and a river there. 

We walk up in those mountains every day!

We do a ton of walking.  We don't have bikes here.  Just walk and our area is like the size of Brigham City.  My legs were so sore the first few days but I've pretty much gotten used to it now.

My comp is Elder G from Ecuador.  He talks a lot and has a heavy accent--makes it hard to understand everything he is saying.  But it's the best for improving y Spanish!  We get along well and I like his energy.  He is a hard worker.   We are going to practice together budgeting because when I arrived he had no money and had spent it all on doughnuts!  Haha!  I used almost all my savings to buy dinners for us this week.   Luckily I can cook so we've been eating spaghetti and PB & J's!  I like that he is very clean though.  His desk is always organized and his clothes folded.  I can learn from that!!

New Comp!

I live in a house now.  It has a kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, and extra room where we put all our stuff.   It is little bigger than the apartment in Ibague.

Notice all our water is bottled.

 Yes I was in the earthquake!  It wasn't that big though, just shook the bus station a little. Nothing in our area was destroyed just some things fell of shelves and stuff!  It was pretty cool though.  We are still waiting to hear about further south in the mission where it was closer to the center of the quake.

We are working hard trying to find more effective ways to contact.  We have to work hard to earn their trust because at first sight everyone thinks we are Jehovah Witnesses who like to Bible bash so Colombians avoid them.  That's not us.  It's almost impossible to street contact in this part of Bogota.  Let's just say this is not the safest place in Bogota.  The last missionaries were not that obedient, but my district now is good and we are working hard here.

A few funny things:

• We were teaching an investigator family.  The daughter came out just in her towel from the shower.  She went to wave at us and her towel fell.  We just kept teaching the lesson and pretended we didn't see anything.  
• The other morning I went to cook hot chocolate and the blender exploded and I had hot chocolate all over me.   That was a timely mess!  So much for that white shirt. 
• And Mom, you'll laugh at this one....I was shouting in my sleep one night.  I guess my comp woke up and got scared and told me he hid under his blanket.  Night terrors.  Thanks for the genetic gift.  :)
• Oh my comp told me his favorite hymn was the song Hello by Adele, because he has the music video of two missionaries who made a parody of the song.  He seriously, hands down,  thought it was a hymn.   You  should look up the video.  It's pretty funny.

I've missed Elder Amick a lot since the move.  We are not supposed to write other missionaries in the mission so that's been hard too.  But I have a new friend here in this district, Elder A from Spanish Fork.  He's 7 months in the mission and we get along really well too.  We had some very interesting experiences this week but I'm not going to go into too many details.   Just know I've been protected by the Lord and all is well in Colombia!

Love,
Elder Donaldson