hello mother dear! I am so excited for you, sounds like the month of October is going to rock! and I hope your booth works out! Please tell grandma I am NOT getting her emails, make sure she has the right email address and what not because I would love to hear from her. I have no idea why my emails take so long, I definitely write at either 11 or 2 so I am sorry, it must be something wrong with the internet. 

   Yes I am happy here! The people here are so incredibly nice it kind of blows my mind! Everyone is always greeting me and kissing me on the cheek and everyone is just friendly and loving. My first month in the field was pretty hard, but this last week we had divisions and so one of the hermana leaders was with me for a day. she is from the states so she speaks english and she was very chill and it helped me a lot to just talk to her and ask her all the questions about stuff I dont understand. it was seriously like a day in disneyland! The thing that helps me the most is my blessing, I read it all the time! It is hard, but yes I am happy and this really is an awesome experience, everyday I experience something new and everyday I feel more and more blessed because seeing how these people live makes me realize how much I have. Even though it has been hard to be homesick, I am so grateful that I have so much at home to miss! 

   My comp is great! This week I made a mission goal to become best friends with every comp I have and so I just talk to her constantly and half the time I am pretty sure I dont make any sense. but I love hearing about her life back home in Bolivia because it is so different than mine so it is so interesting! She comes from a very humble home and has a had a really hard life but she is like the sweetest person on the planet and she is very hard working and super patient! She is very serious and I am very not so we kind of even each other out in that way and I think it is good when it comes to teaching to have both. We get along super well! Well I love you tons and I cant wait to hear where Alex is going to serve!! Give Calvin a big kiss for me when he arrives!

HI HI HI!

I really love that you ask questions because I have no idea what to write about or what would be interesting for you to hear so it is nice to have questions to direct my emails and thoughts. that pic is awesome! I CANT BELIEVE KASI FINALLY BROUGHT HER MAN HOME! AND I CANT BELIEVE I WASNT THERE TO WITNESS IT! man I am so miffed! and I am sorry to hear about Marks dad, I hope that its not too tough for him to handle while he is on his mission. and Caite has not written me yet but tell her hi from Gualemala and that I miss her. 

   and now it is time for questions and answers! The weirdest thing I have eaten I didn't actually eat... I fed it to a dog while she was in the bathroom, how awful am i! it was some sort of nasty meat, I hate the meat here. but it was not really cooked and I don't know what it was. Yes they give me enough money, but maybe that is because I don't really buy anything because I have everything I need and Hermana Mima feeds us everyday. and Sundays are cray, take advantage of the fact that you just get to simply attend church. We leave our house two hours before church starts and stop by all of our investigators and less active member´s houses and try to get them to come to church, then once we are at church we have to do all this stuff and help everyone do everything and teach classes and I never really know what is going on. then at night we have lessons. I eat one meal a day with a member, usually it is Hma Mima because we pay her to feed us but usually on sundays we eat with someone else, actually usually like twice a week. Yesterday we ate with a fam. of investigators we have, they are like the nicest people on the planet, and they are super poor. he is 69 and she is 36 and she breast feeds her 2 year old constantly. yesterday I was sitting on one hammock with me, two chickens, her and her child as she was breast feeding. it was quit the little fiesta. I helped her make tortillas yesterday and my little fingertips are all burned to the bone! they cook them on a scolding hot giant skillet thing on top of a fire and they just flip them and gather them with their bare hands and it freakin hurts! and tortillas are literally just corn and water. we took a bunch of old hard corn, peeled it off the cob, mixed it with water and cooked them. I do get really homesick, like everyday. I think it is mainly because when I cant understand and have no one to talk to it is really hard to keep my mind from wandering and it always wanders home. As for spanish, I can pretty much say whatever I want, because you can always figure out a way to say anything using the words you know, but it is still really hard for me to understand. There are two parts of a conversations, talking and listening, turns out you need both to have an actual conversation. So I can teach but my comp. handles all the questions and small talk. Yes I feel safe for the most part. I definitely stand out a lot more than I would like to, but hermanas have to be in at 8 which is great because all the creepy men come out at night and I go in at night so it works out! The people here are just really super nice! it is hard to tell if our investigators are progressing or not because they always invite us in, always invite us back, but don't always want to be baptized. but i love teaching these people because they really are the nicest people on the planet.  

well I love you and miss you and I cant wait to know where alex is going!!! I am so excited for him!

Love,

Maren

sorry I dont really have any pics because it is pretty awkward to whip out my camera here and also I always forget, also, I do write Ryley, but not every week, just every once and a while so if you feel like forwarding parts of her e mail that would rock! 

Daria mi vida por las frutas de aqui

I am sorry my letter took forever! It was hard for me to go two weeks without writing too. I realized I did not explain my pics last week, there was a pic of a tuk tuk, one with all my favorite people from my district in the ccm, one with elder sleight and elder heiner who both went to Brighton and my comp was in that one too, I would get paired with the only 6 ft. Latina on the planet, but she is great! and the last one was with the kids who were all lined up to get baptized on saturday with their parents but it didn't work out so hopefully this week or next. 

    Alexs mission pic is adorable, I am so excited for him! My guess is..... ENGLAND! 

Now for your questions, I live in this little apartment just my comp. and me but I do have a lot of other roommates who are not humans like spiders ants and lizards all over the place. I wash my clothes in my house with my hands on something called a pila. every single person here has one and one side is filled with water and the other side is a drain and you do dishes, cook, wash your clothes yada yada with it. My comp was shocked that I had never washed my clothes with my hands before, I haven't done or seen pretty much everything here so she probably thinks I’m a spoiled brat, which I kind of am so thats valid.

my mission president is new, we are his second transfer. he is a little tiny man from panama and he and his wife are very sweet! As for the language... as you can see from my subject last week, I still have much to learn. My spanish is pretty good in the morning but it gradually decreases throughout the day and once like 6 hits my brain is full. I am not really scared to talk even if i know i am saying it wrong because people understand that I am learning and they usually understand even if it doesn't make sense. there are a few words that I mix up constantly, beans and pamphlets, orange and spider, and knife and curly. so I am always saying freaky crap like, hey comp. lets buy spiders to eat because I love them! or hey read this bean, it will tell you all about our church! and last week a little girl in church was playing with my hair and told me it was beautiful and I responded with, thank you, your hair looks like a knife, so she probably wont ever talk to me again. I am getting really good at talking with my hands so thats fun! but I am very lucky to have a Latina comp. because I am learning really fast. I literally cant speak english unless I want to talk to myself, which I do more often than not. Last p day we painted the house of one of our investigators and today we played soccer, volleyball and basketball. It was a freakin blast!! I love sports so dang much!! I am so fried and I had no idea I could sweat that much but I loved it! soccer rocks! I love playing with the latinos! on pday we go into town and buy stuff then at night we have lessons. 

   so this week we did not have running water so I just didn't shower, ha ha ha just kidding mom, I shower everyday. but I did shower with a bucket so that was interesting! My area is Tzununa, its super pretty and its like a little town inside the city of Reu. the fruit here is to die for! every time I eat an orange or a tomato all my cares go away and I am in heaven!

 My comp learned a new phrase, I think she got this one from one of the members. The phrase is I love you baby and she says it to me all the time. its hilarious! she asked me if it was common to use that and I told her it totes was, I never thought I would hear that everyday on my mission. Well I luv ya and I hope you have a fantastic week! 

Maren, her companion and Elder Heiner from our stake

• odios perros‏

• HI HI!! so I haven't read your letters yet because I want to write first in case I don't have enough time and I am going to print them all off cuz i have lots.

  so yes I am in Reu, yes its really poor, yes its really hot and yes it rains a lot. I am convinced that this is where they filmed Tarzan, its so green here it is nuts, its gorgeous!

   so my comp. rocks! she is from Bolivia, she is like 6 feet tall and she is so nice! she reminds me of Sandy so that pulls on my heart strings everyday. She speaks quite a bit of English, we came to the conclusion that she knows just about as much english as i know spanish so we communicate quite well until it comes to compound sentences, complicated words, or anything deep. she says the word freak like every five seconds. its hilarious. I love it! she said she picked it up from one of the Elders. 

   So Reu is nothing like the city whatsoever. I thought the city was poor, no. here in Reu they have Tuk Tuks everywhere. Tuk tuks are Guatemalans version of a taxi, it is basically a gokart with a roof. you pay 5 quets, which is equal to about 60 cents in dollars, and they take you anywhere you want to go. there are no sidewalks here so there are always people walking in the streets and tuk tuks just zoom in and out of people. 

   So we do have a cook, she makes us lunch every day. Her name is Hermana Mima but I accidentally called her mamma mia and she laughed her head off so now we call her mamma mia. its super hot here all the time and we eat hot soup like everyday with weird meat floating around. yesterday she threw a dead fish on my plate with bones, scales, skin, eyeballs, tail, the whole deal! so its a good thing I really love fish, oh wait... so I closed my eyes and ate it and it was actually really good! minus the fact that I didn't know how to eat it so I was pulling little fish ribs out of my mouth the whole meal and I looked like an idiot. and we have tortillas and beans for every meal every day. but her and her family are great! I love them! even though they talk a million miles an hour and I understand them like 40 percent of the time. 

  so on Saturday it rained like you would not believe! the streets were rivers and I was walking in water half way up my leg from 3 00 so 8 00. the lightning was brighter than I have ever seen and the thunder shook the whole earth i’m pretty sure. we were with the ward mission leader, lester, and my jaw dropped when I heard the thunder and he laughed and told me that was nothing!

    so yeah guat is great! I have no idea where we are going, where we are, what we are doing, or what we are talking about like 100 percent of the time but its okay because I like observing and wrapping my head around the fact that I am actually here! well I hope you have an excellent week, I love you so much!