Winter is Coming Quick

Dear Family,

So a quick update on the weather here. It has gotten really cold in the last couple of days. It is pretty interesting on a bike with all of the wind and the cold. It snows on and off but nothing really ever makes it to the ground and it is all pretty mild so far. The wind is pretty biting and sometimes it makes it pretty difficult to ride bikes but that hasn't really stopped us from getting anything done. We just keep riding no matter what the conditions are or what part of town that we are in.

The other day we had a english speaking lady tell us that we shouldn't go to certain parts of town because the were to dangerous. I kinda started to laugh and told her that she just told us to stay out of the areas were we spend 90% of our time. I told her that that is where all of the hispanics are and that we would be fine. She then told us the bike route that we should take home to avoid a supposedly dangerous street; it added about 2 miles if we would have taken it so we just went home the normal way. It was kinda funny to think about how crazy that lady was and even though syhe was really nice she didn't seem to know anything about the hispanic part of town and was trying to avoid it as much as possible. I can understand not going to some of those parts of town at night if you are a woman by yourself but this lady was pretty ridiculous. Maybe we need to step outside of our comfort zone a little and try to understand the other people's side before making judgments. It goes the same for hispanics; lots of them have horrible stereotypes of white people and they don't really want to change them at all. We talk to a guy on the train yesterday from La Ciudad de Mexico and he said that he was kind of ashamed at the hispanics here that refuse to learn english. I just think that it is kinda sad that people don't want to learn about other people and their culture.

Anyways, so the story of my foot. First off I will answer a couple questions I am sure some people have: 1 Yes it was the same left foot that every other accident has happen 2 No I was not wearing anything on my feet because I was in my apartment. Ok so it happened this past friday. One of the elders in my apartment had recently bought a root beer is a glass bottle. He had placed it is the fridge to cool down. I had just finished lunch and went to open the fridge to get the pitcher of water and when I opened the fridge the soda fell out of the fridge and broke on top of my foot. It gave me a good long gash out 2 inches. I of course remained calm and hopped to the bathroom and washed it out in the bathtub. There was a decient amount of blood but not anything super huge. So then I wrapped it up and the english elders to us to the hospital( Robert Wood Johnson). We spent about 3 hours there and the stitched me up and sent me on my way. We went home and I jumped on my bike and we got off to our next appointment. So I have 9 stitches on the top of my left foot and it is not slowing me down at all. The first couple days I limped because I didn't want to bend my foot but now everything is fine. All of the members in our branch have given me advice on what I should do to make it heal quickly. I am not sure if everything they have told me is legal to do in the US. One member gave me 4 600mg penicillin pills from when she had a c-section (I am not going to use those). I actually didn't take any drugs except advil that night. It was all a every painless process.

So everything is good here out in the east. A little cold but really fun. We have tamales waiting for us back at our apartment, so we are going to go cook those. One of our investigators gave them to us so I am very excited. \

Love,
Elder Haslam

PS Mom, I really am fine. I tried to convince Sis Winegar to not call you but that did not work. I am perfectly fine and you don't need to worry. This is really just a minor injury, you have seen much worse.