Soooooo...this week was definitely more interesting than the cows. It started out with Hermana Whitmore and her new companion coming last Monday to be the first hermanas in Azogues, the city about an hour north of us that´s in our zone. They´ve been living with us since they still don´t have a house, but I don´t mind. Hermana Whitmore and I are bffs from when we lived together for two months in Santa Rosa. She can stay as loooooong as she wants. But yeah, the week was pretty normal until Wednesday rolled around...
It all started after lunch. We had gone to Santa María del Vergel, the far end of our sector up in the hills. We had gone off of the main paved road onto a dirt road to go visit a less active family that lived there. I´ve probably walked down this dirt road at least a dozen times in the two weeks I had been here, and it barely slopes downhill at all. It was not steep at all. But here I am, walking as usual, when my foot suddenly twists weirdly underneath me and I instantly fall to the ground. I literally just laid there for several seconds just wondering how I even fell. There was literally nothing there. But I scraped my left knee pretty badly, and my right foot, that I had fallen on, really really hurt. So we limped the 40-50 yards or so to this member´s house to clean up my knee. After that when I realized that it hurt way too much to walk, we called the nurses and they told me to elevate my foot and ice it for 20 minutes. So we went inside the house, and the abuelita brings me some frozen peas and goes to get the abuelito. The abuelito walks into the room where I´m lying on the couch, and suddenly he thinks he´s an experienced doctor that knows exactly what he´s doing. He started feeling up my foot, asking where it hurt, and when I nearly screamed as he pressed where it hurt the most, he just kept massaging that exact spot, saying it was necessary. So I´m lying on the couch, dying, yelping in pain, and my companion was just like, "Uh, hermano, maybe we shouldn´t do that...maybe you could just leave it be..." but he kept at it. His accent is so thick that no one can understand him, but the abuelita explained to us that he thought these two bones in my foot were dislocated, and that if we pushed them back into place, it would stop hurting. We were almost completely positive that was not the correct solution, but he was convinced that that was what it was. Then all of a sudden he started getting ready to "push them back in" and we started to freak out. Hermana Adams got up and was trying to stop him, saying "Hermano I really think that we shouldn´t do this...we´re just gonna go to a hospital and have a doctor look at this hermano please STOP." Between her and the abuelita, they convinced him to call a taxi and to just let it be, but then he just pressed the ice onto my foot and it hurt really bad. Although I was in a ton of pain, it was actually extremely funny the whole situation.
We got a taxi back to the house (the taxi driver spoke perfect English, which really threw us off at first, but it was super cool and we talked to him about the gospel and it was super spiritual and neat), and then from there the nurses told us to go the emergency room. We went, and they took some X-rays and lo and behold: I had fractured a bone in my foot. The solution? They put my foot in a cast. After that, we had to wait two hours to leave the hospital because the mission was having trouble paying since I had come back so recently that they still hadn´t put me back on the insurance yet, but we eventually left at 9 o´clock at night. The next morning the nurses dropped off some crutches, and we´ve just been staying in the house ever since. I´ve only had permission from the mission president to go to the first hour of church yesterday, and today I could only leave to write. It´s been rough. We´re pretty sure we´re going to die from being inside for so long. My companion has washed every piece of clothing she owns, it seems. Worse, today there are cambios, so we´ll see if we stay here or not. I think we might, since I can´t really go anywhere or carry two giant suitcases, but who knows. I really don´t want to leave, and I really want to go out and work. It´s been hard.
The worst part of all of this? While we were in the hospital on Wednesday, the family that we´ve been teaching, this single mom with her two kids, texted us saying that they no longer wanted to listen to us and were going to stay with their religion. Her son was going to get baptized this past Saturday, three days after. She and the daughter were going to get baptized in a few weeks. The next night, Hermana Adams went with Hermana Whitmore and the zone leaders to go talk to them, and I guess the mom´s parents called and said some really really bad things about the church and since she was afraid of her parents (a grown woman who takes care of her own family), she just decided she didn´t want to know more. We had been teaching them for a month, before I even got there. The son who was getting baptized was crying, this 14-year-old kid, because he really wanted to be baptized. It was awful. She knows this is the truth too, but nope. It was really upsetting. So now we have no investigators, which is actually kind of a good thing because we couldn´t visit them if we had them anyway. Yupppp.
I don´t want you to worry about me, I´m doing fine. My foot actually doesn´t hurt me at all, and personally I think Presidente is overreacting just a teeeeeeny bit. But gotta be obedient, no matter how frustrating and upsetting it is. But don´t worry about me, I´m going to be fine. I´ll only have a cast for a month, two weeks with crutches and two weeks with a...heel thing that I can walk with (I don´t know how to translate with the doctor said). I´ve gotten pretty good at walking with crutches, so I should be fine.
I love you all and think about you even more than usual (since I literally have nothing else to do this whole week). Take care,
Love,
Hermana Iverson
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