Hello everyone! Good week this week, the work is progressing along. We´re actually finding new investigators every day and some of them have good hopes of progressing, so we´re excited for that. We´ve been working our missionary tails off this week, so we are definitely grateful for P-day today hah. We´ve found a new place for the church building, so we should be moving there in 2 or 3 weeks. Kinda nervous for that and how the transition will go - we´ll try to make it as smooth as possible. I want to turn it into a big public event with announcements and everything, make it an open-house sort of deal. "Come see the new site of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" kind of thing with pamphlets and information and stuff like that. Maybe have every quorum and organization give a brief presentation about what they do and then Elder Faas and I can handle the rest. We´ll run it by the branch president tomorrow in branch council. He isn´t one for executing plans, so we´ll have to push it pretty strong and do a lot of following up, but if we plan it well and execute, it will turn out as a great event for the branch here in Guarambaré. I´ll keep you posted.
The other day, Elder Faas and I had quite the adventure, oh boy. It was Friday night-Saturday morning. Our bedroom has a door that goes to outside, so we have taped up the cracks of the door so the dust and bugs don´t get in. At about 1:20 in the morning, we hear the tape start moving around like somebody was trying to take it off. We thought somebody was trying to jab something into the lock to break in and it was hitting the tape making that noise. We freaked out and turned on the light, pounded on the door, and it stopped. We didn´t hear anybody run off or the gate open or anything like that, so we went and turned on the outside light and went back to sleep. We locked ourselves in the bedroom haha. So we go back to bed (or at least make a horrible fruitless attempt at sleep again), and about 20 minutes later, we hear the tape being messed with again. So we both spring up again. But then we thought wait...if somebody was trying to stick something in the lock to open it, we would hear the metal tool clinking against the metal lock. And the tape is only on the inside of the door, so it´s not like somebody is taking off tape outside the door. It´s gotta be something inside. The sound was coming from Elder Faas´s side of the door, so we turned the light on and I told him to move his bed away from the wall to see if we see anything. Nothing. We move his little table/bedside dresser away from the door, and out jumps a huge fat rat. Oh joy.
Luckily we had a broom in our bedroom, so we were chasing it around trying to kill it. Luckily it was too big that it couldn´t fit through the crack in the bottom of the door and escape (or maybe its a bad thing, because it was so big haha). So we´re like alright, it can´t leave this room, so we have to kill it now or we´ll be freaking out everywhere we go in the house not knowing where it is. But here´s the problem. The bedroom is not very big to begin with. There are 2 beds in there and 2 small dressers, so there is very little open space to whack the rat and many places for him to hide. Underneath our beds there are 2 old matresses that we stashed under there because last week we got new ones from the mission (which are great, by the way haha). So we put one bed in one corner and another bed in the opposite corner and had to coax him out from under the beds into open floor space so we could whack at him with the broom. That was not easy haha, he was a scaredy-rat. We would shake the matress under the bed with the edge of the broom to scare him out, and he would zip over to the other bed in the other corner and hide under there. Ugh. After like half an hour of trying that, we decided to just sit still and let him come out on his own and whack him then. Let me tell you, rats are super smart and super attentive. We would see him peeking his head out from under the bed and he would get brave and come out into open space, but the second I even moved my fingers to get a good grip on the broom to hit him, he bolted back under the bed. He kept a good eye on us. We were like "well crap, we´re never gonna get him because he takes off the second we move a muscle." He happened to come out once, and I took a whack at him so hard (I had the broom, by the way. Elder Faas isn´t one for bugs or animals we can say haha) that I broke the broom off the handle. Blah. So I was left trying to kill him with a stick. Good thing we had 2 other brooms in the house (I don´t know why we had 3 brooms in our house, but we did), so we made sure the rat was on the other side of the room so he wouldn´t run out the door and escape, and Elder Faas left to get the other 2 brooms (he also took the opportunity to take his time and go to the bathroom and leave his companion in the trenches taking grenades by himself with the rat in a fierce battle). This was about at 3am. So we come back with new battle weapons ready to smash this thing.
A little bit of key information about our bedroom: its walls are made out of a sandy rock, it´s a rough texture like sandpaper shaped like rocks. That goes about halfway up the wall, and then it converts to just walls with paint. In case anybody doesn´t know, rats are phenomenal climbers. I also was unaware of this fact until we saw the thing run up our wall trying to escape. Seriously, Spiderman´s got nothing on this rat. He zipped up that wall like he was running on flat floor. We took a whack at him on the wall, but he got to the paint part and fell off and plopped on the floor haha, so we missed. It was really funny, when he fell off the wall, sometimes he would land on the old matress on the floor and bounce around 2 or 3 times before righting himself hahah. Really funny. But anyway, we were like "That´s how we´re gonna get this thing. We hafta wait until he climbs up the wall and then Barry Bonds him into oblivion". So we played homerun derby for a while, but with little success. It´s harder than it looks haha. We tried to have Elder Faas shake the bed and make noise on one side of the bed so he would get scared and run out the other side - where I would be waiting to smash him into smitherines with the broom. That almost worked, but he got wise to it after 3 or 4 times when I missed him and stopped coming out the other side. He´d come out the middle of the bed or something and run to the other side of the room. Oh my goodness he jumped at me. Rats jump! I was completely unaware of that. He jumped at me, and let me tell you...that scared me so bad that I jumped so high and lost my footing and fell onto my bed. Who knew rats jump?!
That was the basic routine for the course of the next 2 or 3 hours of the morning. He had started climibing from under the bed onto the top of our beds all over our sheets and under our pillows and stuff and it was really gross. Eventually, he went back to trying to climb the walls to get out - and that was his downfall. The whole time, he had been on Elder Faas´s side of the room where the door into the rest of the house is climbing up the doorframe, and we couldn´t get him. I swore that I´d smacked him good once or twice, but he kept running around like a champion sprinter. Then he went over to my side of the room. On my side is the window with curtains. He jumped on the end of the curtains one time haha and we tried to smack him there, but didn´t want to break the window so we didn´t hit him hard and he just fell off. Then one time, he climbed up a little more towards the center of the room towards the window and the curtains, but this time he went under the curtains, between the window and the curtains where we couldn´t see him. This actually turned out to be a good thing, because he thought he was hidden and wouldn´t suicide jump off the wall to avoid the broom when we swung at him. He stayed still, and we were like "Where is he??". I saw a little part of the curtains move towards the top of the window, and I gave a lightining-fast whack right where I saw it, and he fell to the floor - this time he didn´t scurry away. Out of respect for my mom (if she hasn´t vomitted already), I won´t give the details about this part. Let´s just say that I hit him under the curtains, but he wasn´t totally dead. So we finished him off and actually did a victory cheer haha. That dumb rat woke us up at 1:30 in the morning, and finally at 6:05 he was dead. That was the longest night of my entire mission haha, oh boy.
We cleaned him up and threw him in a bag outside to the trash. When we went to go clean up the room, it turns out that we actually had whacked him a good 3 or 4 times, because he had left blood stains on the floor, matress, sheets, nightstand, and stuff like that. Man that guy was a fighter, he was wounded but didn´t slow down in the slightest until the finishing smack. So we were just totally grossed out and felt like everything we touched was infected and all nasty. He got blood on my ipod, so I had to throw my sweet ipod cover away :(. Hmph. So it was like 6:30, and we were like how are we going to clean all this up? Well, the abuela of Lais (one of the members) washes our clothes and we´re super close with her. So we bundled up our blankets and pillowcases and everything that could be washed - and figured we might as well bring our dirty clothes while we´re at it so she could do it all in one day haha - and went over to their house at 6:50 in the morning. We clap outside, and she´s like what the heck do you want at this time of the day? And so she comes out and we tell her the story, and she´s just dying laughing at us haha. She was cracking up, I´ve never seen an old lady laugh so hard. She took our clothes and blankets to wash, and we asked her what we needed to buy to clean and sanitize everything in the room. We walked over to the store that opens at 7 and bought a bunch of cleaning stuff. We´re really good friends with the people in the store, and they were like "wow, why are you guys here so early and not all dressed up like usual?". I was just like "we´ve had a really long night and it´s a long story, but does this work for rat blood?" hahaha. They laughed at us too. So we went home and super sanitized and cleaned EVERYTHING in that room - walls, floor, door, door handle, bed, matress, bedframe, everything. By the time we finished all that, we only had time to shower, change clothes, and start the normal day of teaching haha. What a disaster that day was, we were seriously walking around like zombies. I don´t know how we survived that day. We got home, planned, and were out before our heads even hit the pillows. It was quite an adventure that I must say I´ll never forget for the rest of my life haha. We laughed super hard afterward and when we went to abuela´s to get all our clothes and blankets. It was pretty funny.
Sooo, I was going to type out a story from the Ensign that I liked hahah, but now there´s no time. But next week I´ll get back to it. Love and miss you all, hope you got a good laugh at my expense! :)
-Elder Moore
No comments:
Post a Comment