Convos about religion

9.17.10

Today is the final day of cultural week at the high school, so I went with Alba and watched some people sing, awards, typical stuff, food, prizes, kinda boring. I was able to talk to one of the Doctors from Peace Corps because I'm still sick with a bad cough. She told me of a few things that I should go to buy at the pharmacy for my cough/cold/infection, whatever it is. After lunch Alba went with me to San Vicente to get the meds.

From there we went to the church in San Vicente and visited her two friends who are nuns there, both from Brazil; one’s name is Maria, the other Christiana or something. Maria was trying to convince Alba to buy a lot of bingo tables for a bingo event at the church on Oct. 31. She was making us laugh how excited she was about it and all the people in Alba’s family she said should buy one, including me haha.

On the way back, Alba was asking me how I knew that she was once a nun, cuz she thought that someone must have told me about it or something. A few days ago I had asked her if she wanted to be a nun just because of the way she was talking. We were having a conversation about religion at the time and she talked about all these classes that she's taken. I guess I’m the first person that’s asked her without previously knowing. She told me she was a nun at one point in time for 4 months, but then her parents put the stop to it. She would come home on weekends and they would give her money to go back on the bus, and one weekend they wouldn't give her money so she couldn't go back, and she said she got back into her old lifestyle where she didn't have such a structured schedule as when she was a nun. I explained to her that I could kinda tell by the way talks about God and religion, I was just curious because it seems like a big part of her life. I also told her about my experiences where I was pretty religious in high school and beginning of college, but my views or thoughts changed when I met people in college who are really good people but don’t believe in God. In a previous conversation I had said something like, sometimes God lets bad things happen to good people, and she thought I was referring to myself and wanted to know an example of that kind of situation. We didn’t talk much more about it because I didn’t really know how to explain how my views had changed or why, and the reasons I did know I didn’t want to share with her at this point.