First Area - Tarapoto

Well I made it to the jungle! I’m in an area called Tarapoto. It’s in the mountains!! It’s so beautiful here. Tarapoto is about an hour plane ride from Iquitos. My companion is Hermana Vega! She´s Latina but she’s from California so she can speak English so that’s super helpful. I understand sooooo much Spanish its super cool, except when people start directly asking me stuff then I have no idea what they’re saying (; cause I understand what people are saying by hearing the words I know, so when they talk a lot I understand the topic haha but also I’m suuuper good at pretending to know what they’re talking about when really I have no idea(;

I live in a room with cement floors and stone walls. But there’s a spiral staircase that leads up to it from the outside so that makes me happy haha the only thing that I hate about it is that I alllllways have these little ants all over my desk and this morning I had 9798734 little spiders in my bed it was the worst but I’m all tough now so it’s cool haha.

We have 2 different pencionistas and I love them both so much!! They take really good care of us and the food is really good!! Here they have every fruit you can think of and the fruit trees grow everywhere it’s so cool! My pencionistas names are Rosio and Mariesol. And we live above the home of Luzmilla who does our laundry and also we teach her family all the time.

My first time I went proselyting was in Iquitos. My comp is a sister leader and had a meeting so I went as a trio with other sisters!! It was so cool, the people are so accepting. It was sooo funny though, there was a group of little girls all 6 to 9 and we were talking to them outside and then we went in this lady’s house to teach them and I sat down and we started talking about the power of prayer and then I start hearing giggling and all 10 girls were standing outside the bedroom door and they all started to touch my hair and the lady of the house was just staring at me like, what in the world is going on hahahaha it was so funny.. I had to shoo them out! All of them wanted like 10 hugs when we left though.

Everyone gets around here by the mototaxi cars, they’re sweet I like them alot. Oh we taught this one lady Elva, She’s a reference and we taught her about the plan of salvation and at the end of the lesson we invited her to give the closing prayer but she didn’t know how and she is just the most hilarious lady with the biggest laugh and she was just cracking up cause she didn’t want to give the prayer so Hna Vega stood up and walked over to her and whispered a prayer in her ear, like little kids in primary, it was so cute. 

In another lesson we started out by singing a song but I had no idea what the song even was, so it was terrible but I feel like all the Peruvians, bless their hearts, are tone deaf, but it wasn’t that big of a deal (; but yeah this place is super super cool!

Love you!!

Hermana Jackson

Looking down a trail by their humble little home.