Bermejo Part 2

I would like to tell you all a bit more about Bermejo.  Bermejo was formerly part of the mission Cochabamba, Bolivia, but is now part of the Santa Cruz mission due to the mission split in Santa Cruz.  This is the first transfer cycle in which missionaries from the Santa Cruz mission have entered into Bermejo, so the majority of the missionaries here are from the Cochabamba mission.  The Cochabamba mission was extremely loose in regards to following the mission rules, so many of the missionaries have a lot of trouble with obeying the rules and as their district leader, I will be helping them to obey better.

We have an investigator who is a member referral.  When we talked to him for the first time, he told us that he had a Book of Mormon, he read it all, and that he knew that it is true.  He wants to get baptized, but he didn´t want to come to church because he had a bad experience with a member at church.  After teaching him 2 or 3 times, he asked us, "I have to go to church, don´t I".  "Yeah, yeah you do," I replied.  He came to church yesterday and stayed for the whole 3 hours and is excited to get baptized the 28th of September.

In other news, Bermejo is hot...really hot.  Spring is just barely starting and I´m already dying of heat.  I don't think I´ll ever think of Utah summer as hot ever again because I´m pretty sure that the peak of summer in Utah is like the winter here.

Elder Casdorph

Bermejo

I received the call Wednesday at 9:30 pm that I was getting transferred to Bermejo, Tarija, Bolivia and that I had to be ready at Thursdsay 4:00 am to go to the airport. I arrived at the airport at 5:30 am, checked my bags, and departed for Cochabamba at 6:30 am. After a layover in Cochabamba, we took off again headed for Tarija we arrived in Tarija at 9 am where they dispatched us to the bus terminal to take a trufi (a van that´s something in-between a taxi and a bus) to Bermejo.  At the terminal, they told us that it would be impossible to go to Bermejo because the road to Bermejo was blocked off by some protesters and that we would have to wait until the protests stopped.  I went to eat lunch with another elder who was waiting for his companion to arrive from Santa Cruz and then returned to the terminal where we waited until 6:30 pm when we received news that the protests had ended.  After the 3 hour trufi ride, I arrived in Bermejo at 9:30 at night.  I met my companion, we planned for the next day and I prepared a tiny bit for the district meeting the following day (by the way I got called as a district leader a month and a half ago).

I´ll let you all know more about Bermejo next week, but basically it´s a smallish town on the Argentinian border that´s a lot like Yacuiba.  It´s the hottest part of the Bolivia, Santa Cruz mission and one of the top 3 hottest places in all of Bolivia (possibly the hottest, depending on who you ask).  It´s extremely dusty (as you can see in the pics) and the air usually had a thick haze of dust that almost looks like fog.  It was formerly part of the Cochabamba mission and as such, more than half of the missionaries are from the Cochabamba mission as well.  I´ll let you all know more next week, but I´ll tell you right now that it´s really hot and it´s only going to get hotter (as hot as 50 degrees celcius).

Until Next Time,
Elder

Casdorph