AMBO

Week Sixty-one!

Well I was moved, I’m now in a little town called Ambo it’s just outside of Huanuco and to get a bus or car here we actually have to go to my old area.  The parents of my pension in Tarapaca live here so it’s pretty fun.  But it is so good here, it has the same weather as Huanuco so you can expect me to be very tan.  My companion is Hermana Wiexler, which is cool she’s a cool kid but it is weird at the same time because she is an Hermana Leader and usually they have a companion that is an Hermana Leader, but I’m still just a normal missionary, so something might happen with that during this change or at the end of it.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how I am the way that I am you know with the whole social disorder thing.  And I kind of just want to share what I like to call My Bullying Story.  Somethings some people know and have heard but I think I kept a lot of things guarded close to me.  But in the mission I have done a lot of growing socially and have realized that I went through a lot more than some people did without even experiencing it.  I have accepted that and would like a lot of people to read this.  Just so they can see things can get better and that its okay to let people help and to ask for help.

I don’t know if these have an effect on things but I only have two memories from Kindergarten.  The time I wet my pants which I have shared often and if you don’t know the story you can ask my mom.  The other I haven’t shared very often but I just remember being in the playroom playing with the Barbie’s by myself.  I don’t remember if anyone joined me after the part I remember but I just remember seeing all the other kids playing together.

I’m sure a lot of things happened between then and my next memory but I’m not sure what.  I just remember there were people who were nice to me but I never really had good friends, (except Sophie she was always there) but my next memory is in the fourth grade.  When someone who I thought was a really good friend came up and told me very bluntly that I was fat.  More than anything I was just sad that a friend would say that because I had heard it from the girls who weren’t really my friends in ways that weren’t so blunt, but it still hurt.  I feel like I have forgiven this person but I know it made me a little bit more introverted to the point I had a really hard time confiding in my friends.

Before I move into the next part I feel like more importantly people realize that I didn’t understand that I was being bullied and that more than anything is the reason that I never really said anything.  Because you always think of bullying as like name calling and punching and stuff, but more than anything people just ignored me and didn’t want me around them.

That’s what happened more than anything in 5th Grade and that’s the reason my 5th grade teacher said it was the year she almost quit teaching.  I did have a few friends I thought and I’m pretty sure that is kind of when my parents realized that I didn’t have very many friends.  I’m sure that I refused help because I didn’t know it was something so bad for people to do.  It was the end of fifth grade that I really realized that people didn’t want to be my friend.  When the cool girls made the rules of popularity for middle school and one was to not be friends with me.  I received notes from the people that were nice to me that I thought were my friends saying that they couldn’t be my friend anymore.  That day I cried harder than I have the whole rest of my life.

Then I started middle school and I kind of brought the rest on myself.  I went emo and started being weird because I thought it was cooler that way anyway.  With that new found persona people started the rumors that I was lesbian, which isn’t anything against lesbians but it makes it really hard to get a boyfriend.  That I cut myself and that I hated all people.

None of which were true but I lived with it anyway.  I did have a good friend in this time.  A girl with the same personality and the same persona and we were friends for quite a few years.

Which leads us into high school.  My sophomore year I was still friends with her but I really started to evaluate my life.  I looked at where I was headed and really analyzed what is it that I wanted for my life, especially when I found out that this girl who was my really good friend got into things like sex and drugs at a young age.

The summer between my sophomore and junior year the bishop challenged the youth to read the whole book of Mormon and that we would have the answers we needed if we did it.  So I read the book of Mormon that summer- the whole thing and I don’t remember a huge all at once change but I can see now that slowly I became more of the person I actually wanted to be and at the start of Junior year and dropped my friends who were doing things against my new found beliefs and went solo.

Then that year the luckiest thing in the world happened.  Two new girls moved to the school from Nevada.  Girls of the church who had personalities like mine who became my first real friends.  That year in seminary there was a young man who was a little weird and we were kind of mean to him at first (sorry Blake) but he was actually really cool.  And Sophie came back more fully into my life and I love her for always being there.  The Lord blessed me so much that year and that’s how I knew the gospel was true because those blessings came after I started doing things right and with my own desires.

It may not sound like the worst story out there, but it really did affect me and I didn’t realize how much until I got to a strange country with people that I didn’t know that I had to force myself to talk to and it was really hard.  I socially did not know how to talk to them I could not carry a normal conversation with someone and that more than anything was the reason the mission was so hard.  It’s still hard sometimes but I now can talk to people and that is the biggest blessing ever.

Trust me it gets better.

I’m so happy to be here and I love the gospel and know that through the atonement of Jesus Christ anything is possible.

Don’t worry about me.

I’m so happy here.

I love you all.

Hermana Peters