Sunday, August 19, 2007

Second Blog from Mexico.

We are back out on the streets of our Barrio, and looking for families to baptize. We have four and a half sets of investigators as of now. We say four and a half, because we have a single forty-five year old doctor/body builder who says he is interested, but has failed to make any of his commitments.

I am feeling much better, still healing slowly, but feeling stronger every day. Mom’s foot continues to bother her, and I continue to rub it down with arsenic ointment every night and pray for it to go away. She had a priesthood blessing about four weeks ago for it, but it continues to swell up each day. She doesn’t let it slow her down too much.

We have discovered a new (to our knowledge) Mexican tradition. The daughters of Mexican families are honored at two different times in their lives by huge parties and family celebrations. When they are three, the family throws a huge fiesta for them. They put up tents, hire caterers and entertainment, complete with blow up slides trampolines and bungie cords. After the guest of honor retires for the evening the adults break out the booze and the party really gets started. The party goes on `til the wee small hours. The next big event in a young woman’s life is when she turns fifteen. Another big fiesta, this time the guest of honor has an escort of an entourage of young men dressed in military uniforms complete with swords. Their sole purpose is to see that their young lady dances every dance and is never neglected during the evening. No expense is spared in these extravaganzas. The fathers either save for years to provide these parties for their daughters, or else they go into debt. This must be a tremendous hardship on the family finances, as the people in this neighborhood only average about 7500 pesos ($750 a month) To make it they have to have two incomes. With small children it means the dad works two jobs, Many men work 16 hours a day 7 days a week.

We are staying busy, tracting and finding people to teach and baptize. We love it here, the people are very friendly and they are very approachable. We tracted into our very first JW yesterday. She was just home from church and full of the spirit. She was very friendly and invited us in. Then she tried to convert us. I tried to be very patient once I figured out what was going on. I realized that we were wasting valuable time. I finally just bore my testimony to her about the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith, and I invited her to church and then I stood up, 6ft 2in. She stood up, 5ft 2in and invited us to church, we parted on friendly terms. She knows she won’t see us in her church and we know we won’t see her in our church. But we’ll see her in the hereafter, and then she will see the light and hopefully listen to the word.

We hope we will see some posts on this site and comments to our blogs. I hope Cordell will make the blog available to all the immediate family. I’ll study the e-mail about the blog and see if there is anything I can do to make this possible. In the meantime I hope this will work as a means of communication for the family. But, you can always count on Mom’s weekly letters, if and when they get there.

I’m going to try and insert some photos of our new apartment and our old apartment. So you can see what a huge improvement we have made at no additional cost. What a blessing. We are very comfortable here, I hate to think how this last few weeks would have been in our old apartment.

Well enough for now. We will look forward to hearing from you all.

Love Dad and Mom