May 31 2010

HOLA FAMILIA!

That´s so awesome, thanks ton for the pictures! It´s great to see everyone is doing soooo well! Not to mention that mom played a game! Sounds like the world turned on itself hearing what happened with Al in Thailand and with Mom playing games...I just don´t know what to believe anymore.

Wow, that chinese food sounds good. The food is almost always the same here. Rice, beans, meat. Every day. I´ve had cheese like, 3 times since I´ve been here. That was probably my biggest shock food wise. I was expecting cheddar to fall from the sky, but I have yet to have any. There are some interesting cheeses in Mexico though, the most popular is something like feta mixed with mozarella, taste and texture. It´s weird, but good. That and they put hotdogs in everything. Eggs? Hotdogs. Beans? Hotdogs. Pizzas? HOTDOGS!

A hike up the mountain? Sounds good. I´ve honestly lost a lot of weight since I´ve been here. Walking for hours on end doesn´t really bother me that much. Just as long as the sun isn´t too extreme.

I can´t believe it´s still snowing! That´s ridiculous! I´m so jealous. People always ask me, is there a lot of snow in Utah? I say ya, it snowed last week according to my parents, but it should start warming up pretty soon. I´ve been saying that for like, a month now.

As far as things go in Mexico, all is well. My Spanish is at the point where I can hold my own in a conversation without very much trouble. Maybe a word here or there that I don´t know, but I can at least understand the gist of the sentence.

This week we had some amazing miracles happen to allow us to baptize 2 more people this next week. We were desperate to find 2 more people to baptize to complete our goal, and all of our investigators fell through for various reasons, so we looked in the area book for former investigators. We found a couple and decided to go visit them during the day. They weren´t there. Elder Mata said that he had searched for these people before a bunch of times but never found them. So we go through the day wondering what we will do, doing all we can to serve the Lord righteously. We get to about 9:00 when we had an appointment with a young couple who are awesome, but they were sleeping when we went by so we had nothing else to do for the night. We start walking home and we had one more contact we needed to make before the day ended, so we decided we would contact this lady walking towards us. We start talking and we find out she was one of the formers we went looking for, and that she had prayed and knew the church was true, and wanted to be baptized! We met with her family yesterday, and now her sons are in teaching. They both drink and smoke but are super interested in the gospel, and we´re really excited to be able to help another family leave behind such stupid vices of the world.

We also had another investigator, a 9 year old by the name of Karla. Now, Karla´s Dad is a fully active member, but he didn´t want her to be baptized. He said she isn´t ready because she still fights with her sisters. We have been teaching her (and him) for the past 4 months or so with little to no success. We and other Elders had explained all the doctrine, all the promised blessings and consequences, and his response was always, I understand, I don´t want her to be baptized. We decided she would be our 3rd baptism, and prayed and fasted our guts out for the Lord to help open his heart. We made a lesson plan all full of possible scriptures we could use to convince hm into agreeing, and they were pretty harsh. We got in the lesson, and a spirit of absolute love prevailed, and we completely abandoned our lesson plan and taught by the Spirit. At the end he agreed it was the best thing for his daughter to be baptized and recieve the gift of the Holy Ghost.

This gospel is true. There is a God, and he is very active in His work. I truly cannot say enough to praise Him. I feel like I understand at least a small part why Grandpa Newell´s favorite scripture was what it was.

The field is white, already to harvest, and it is my extreme honor to be counted among the servants of the Lord, and to serve the people here in Mexico.

The people are awesome. Even though there are many weird, and stupid things, the spirit of the people is one of work, love, and family. Well, that and crosses, EVERYWHERE. My favorite is that all the busses have playboy bunny stickers all over the place, and then a bunch of crosses hanging right next to them. But everybody loves their family here. It´s great to see people on weekends having huge cookouts with their families in the street.

So, you all thought it was gone, but it is time for the triumphant return of, THE MUNDANE THING OF THE WEEK!!!!!!!
Speed bumps. Their everywhere. The cops can´t control people driving (cars are crazy down here. You will often see four wheelers just driving down the street by a 12 year old.) and everybody loves to go really fast, so they put speed bumps down every 30 feet to control people´s speed. This presents some problems for police and ambulances however, so they all drive around in super tricked out hum-vees that just bounce right over them, skipping about 10 feet every time they go by.

Well, I think that´s all I got this week. MORE PICTURES NEXT WEEK! YAAAAAY! WOOOH! APPLAUSE!

Les amo familia, para siempre les honraré y servir.

Elder Newell