Nicky has been on his mission for just short of four months now. He’s been isolated on an island in the Caribbean living the missionary standards long enough that he hasn’t experienced 6-7, and he doesn’t know what Labubus are.
(How would it be?)
Here are some tid bits and thoughts from the mission experience so far:
I’ve realized that Puerto Rico is the perfect mission. You get the convenience of the US Postal Service and Amazon, but you also get the essence of serving foreign and experiencing a different culture, and you get to learn Spanish. I can mail a package to PR in three days, and my son gets to play in the jungle and still shop at Walmart. There is nowhere else on earth with that combination of perks! Hooray for the US territories!
Nicky is so much like Scotty. I laugh at how often he sends us photos that make me say, “I have a picture of Dad doing the exact same thing!”
Nicky loves the animals in Puerto Rico. He’s always chasing lizards and catching frogs. They have some rhesus monkeys in Puerto Rico. Most of the monkey population is on a tiny island, but there are occasional sightings on the main island. I have every confidence in Nicky that he can find one before he comes home. Nicky can find anything!
Nicky keeps acquiring new possessions in weird ways. He and his companion made the (somewhat poor) decision to wash their underwear together one time, and then after Nicky’s companion transferred to another area, Nicky discovered that he had more underwear than he brought to the mission with him! He has an old, stinky shirt that an elderly Puerto Rican man gave him. He says it’s his favorite shirt, and he won’t wash it because he wants it to keep the stinky smell it had when the guy gave it to him. Somehow Nicky ended up with one of the AP’s pants. He also has a bottle of soap that his former companion left behind, and he just keeps putting water in it and shaking it up, believing the sudsing effect will last forever, and he won’t have to buy soap for his entire mission.
It rains there everyday. It’s pretty normal for a thunder storm to pass through while we are on our weekly phone calls.
Nicky’s Spanish has really clicked in the last two weeks. Missionaries often describe the transition when something just “clicks.” We could tell when it happened! He’s started forgetting English words, and when he talks to us, he goes in and out of Spanish. He’s started dreaming in Spanish. And his current companion doesn’t speak English, so that has forced him to really buckle down on the language. This week when we were talking, our neighbor was walking down the street so I hollered at him (because Nicky loves this guy) and had him come over and say hi to Nicky. Our neighbor speaks Spanish, so he and Nicky had their entire conversation in Spanish, and I was just in awe at the fact that my son speaks Spanish!
Later in our conversation, Nicky started speaking in Spanish to a missionary in the background (another Elder who doesn’t speak English), and he said “mi mama,” and I was so happy because that’s me! I’m “mi mama!” And there was something so tender about hearing my son call me “mi mama!” But then I was like, “Wait a minute! What are you saying about me?”
(Turns out, the Elder had just learned how to say “shut up” in English, and Nicky thinks it’s hilarious, so Nicky was telling him to come say “shut up” for “mi mama,” and he refused!)
Nicky says that serving a mission is really hard, and there are days he wants to just give up, and he thinks, “Why am I doing this?” But he always finds one thing every day to be grateful for, and he said at the end of the day when he looks out his window and sees the jungle, it makes him so happy.
He loves Puerto Rico!
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