Hey, guys, been a bit since I wrote, so a bit to catch up on, which is good. Join the Google photos album to see all the action!
These past couple weeks have been great and going by super super fast. November is already almost over with my birthday right around the corner (tomorrow), and it's all just been going by so fast. It's been raining a lot recently, which we'll get a bit more into later on, but the rain is super crazy here in the capital. I love it.
We've been progressing the work well here, constantly finding new people to teach and serve. A couple service projects we've had were helping some guys move a bunch of cinder blocks and helping a member move to a new house. The mission has helped me realize how much I love service projects like that, and I'm definitely eager to do more of that after the mission, too.
We've also been doing a bit of exploring in parts of the area I've never been to, because usually we spend all of our time in certain specific parts of the area, but I've been wanting to branch a bit to get to know more of where I work. Unfortunately, I quickly learned why we don't spend time in those areas. It's because the houses there are super super popi (rich in Dominican Spanish) and they don't let us in to talk to them. We're talking massive mansions with whole gardens and fountains and Fresh-Prince-of-Bel-Air type stuff, crazy.
Anyway, a little over a week ago we got some insane rain, like Matthew 7:27 type rain, floods and all. We had lunch at a member's house, then it starts raining like crazy, but we waited for it to end so we could work. After staying in the house for like 2 hours after our lunch time had ended, we decided to book it to the house (like a 20-minute walk away) in the pouring rain, which was awesome. We got home at around 4:30 and ended up staying in the house for the rest of the days because it didn't stop raining. As you can imagine, this caused some damage to some neighborhoods, so the day after, Sunday, no one really showed up to church, which is understandable. Then we spent the rest of the day going around the city looking for people in need of help.
Today we celebrated my birthday that's tomorrow by going to the "Jardin Botanico" that's in our area. We got to see a bunch of other missionaries that happened to go that day as well, which was fun. It was a good time.
Lots of good stuff here in the DR, and there's still a lot left to go! I'm really so happy to know I still have over a year left, because I feel I have still so much to learn! I'm just so excited to see what God has in store for me, and I'm learning to put more and more of my trust in Him. After all, when you put your life in God's hands, you start to see God's hands in your life. Thank you all for your support and talk to you again "soon"!
I must go -Elder Barlow
P.S.- We did celebrate Thanksgiving, a member here knew how to make American Thanksgiving food, so we had that, picture below.
