"Christmas Dinner"

Hey Merry Christmas everyone! It's basically the Christmas season right? But we also basically celebrated thanksgiving this week so I'm kind of torn.

This week President came to visit Beni! He also came accompanied by the assistants and Hermana Cabezas. We were all super excited since they said Wednesday night we were going to go to a restaurant for a special "Christmas Dinner", even though it was only November 28th. They wouldn't be in Beni anytime soon so they decided to celebrate christmas with us right now. But then Tuesday morning the assistants called and said they wasn't going to be any Christmas dinner and that we were just going to have a special lunch on Thursday when we had our zone conference. "President Cabezas did us dirty" as Elder Yocom put it. So we didn't get dinner, but we did have churrasco (Bolivan steak basically, they grill big chunks of meat and serve it with cheesy rice and fried yuca. Its really fetching delicious) for lunch on Thursday. I basically counted that as a late Thanksgiving dinner instead of a Christmas dinner.  Sister Cabezas also gave us all Santa hats and fruitcake! The fruitcake was nasty but I ate it anyway. Why do people like that stuff?

The assistants also stayed in our house for the two days they were here since we have bunk beds and some extra space. They're both really chill. One of them is named Elder Angulo, and he was here in Central 2 for six months earlier in his mission, so he gave us some handy advice about the area and got really excited when he found out his converts are still going to church. He got me a lot more excited about my area and it went great.

Saturday we participated in the worldwide day of service for December 1st! our ward got together and cut all the really tall grass outside of a children's hospital here. Cutting grass doesn't sound like something it should take a whole ward to do, but there was a lot of it, and here in Trinidad, we didn't have any working weed whackers. So we all went to town with machetes and little shovels. I was going ham with the machete and hermana Paico was all like "Elder Bingham is Indiana Jones". Which is true. 

Then the rest of Saturday it RAINED. Really hard. All of the streets in our area got flooded and it was useless trying to proselyte, so we ended up just staying in the house from like 4:30 until the end of the day. Now all the streets in our area are really muddy and we go out in boots sí o sí.

But thats about all that went down this week. Thanks for the emails and the package! Love you guys!

Service outside the hospital! I finally got to wear one of those yellow vests

The flooded street outside our pension. This one didn't even have that much water compared to the rest.
Flooding is a bad problem here in Trinidad

here's the package mom! the sour patch watermelons not included in this pic because
I ate them all immediately after opening the package. Don't judge me

Wilderness explorer Elder Bingham spots a capybara (I think that's its name) chilling in the swampy jungle

Wilderness explorer Elder Bingham spots a snake in the canal! I pushed a tiny frog in front of its mouth
but it didn't even try to eat it. I was disappointed.