Hope you all had a great week. Things are great here in Peru! Last week was General Conference for the church and, as always, it was super spiritual and incredible and I learned a lot. Me and the other English speaking missionaries got to watch it in English! I was super grateful for that. We all went to the stake center here in Ilo to watch it. Unfortunately I got sick last Sunday so I wasn't able to see the second half of the first session on Sunday or the whole second session.. But the good news is I survived my first sickness on the mission! And I'm healthy now so life goes on! Something that I learned from conference is the importance of the Atonement. The Atonement isn't just for big sins that we may have committed. We can use the Atonement "to become increasingly more worthy" (Elder Bednar). I loved this because, really, no one is perfect. We're all trying to be the best we can be in this life and thanks to the Atonement we can become increasingly more and more worthy. How grateful I am for this!

My Spanish is getting better! Woo! I can understand almost everything and I can speak pretty fast. I know I still have a lot to learn, but I'm super grateful for everything I've learned until now!

Last Pday my companion and I were talking about desserts from where we're from (She's from Bolivia). I told her about root beer floats and she had never heard about them! So we made cocacola floats last pday and it was amazing! There's no root beer here, so cocacola was sufficient haha. My companion loved it!

This last Sunday were the elections for the new president of Peru. The propaganda here is INSANE! There's signs and music and parades and flags everywhere for all the candidates. Also, there's a law that says no churches can meet the day of elections. So we didn't have church yesterday. And we don't have church next week because it's our stake conference! We will have the privilege of hearing from Elder Usceda of the 70. I'm pretty sure we're getting a new stake president, hence the presence of a general authority!

The work is going well here in Ilo! I absolutely love being a missionary and helping bring people to the truth. I hope you all have a great week! Love you!

Cuidense<3

Hermana Celardo

ps it's starting to get cold and humid so here's a pic of my crazy hair