The Work Goes on in Mexico

FIG. 1

We are starting to get really busy with this missionary work. We have been tracting almost every day, but some days we have to go back and follow up on some of the families we have found to make future appointments. Right now we are working with one new member family where we baptized the mother and the daughter, but could not get the father to accept our message. This couple has a seven year old who will be eight this month and he wants to be baptized. Besides this we are working with two other families, that we feel very positive about.
One family Elva and Manual are what the missionaries call “Christiano”. They believe almost all the same things we do except for the necessity for only one prophet on the earth for the whole world at this time. They think that there is only two outcomes at the final judgment,. If you are good, Heaven, if not the other place. They only accept the Bible, and although they may believe the Book of Mormon is inspired they do not think that it contains the completeness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This family will be tough to convert, but if they are baptized they will be part of the backbone of the church in this part of Mexico.
The other family is from a strong Catholic background, but they are open to our message. Hermalinda and Juan have two married daughters, and two grandsons with another grand baby on the way. They also have two sons still at home, Jyer is 19 and Juan jr. is 13. The 19 year old works as a mechanic right on his street, a few houses down. Every time we saw him he was up to his armpits in grease. When we gave the first lesson to his family, the mother asked us to invite him to church. They had accepted our invitation and wanted him to come too. As we passed by where he works we didn’t see him, but I saw some legs sticking out from under a car, so I went into the tent that they use for a garage and looked under the car. Sure enough it was Jyer, he said he would come to church with his family. I wasn’t convinced he would be ready to go at 7:40 when we stopped by for them. To my pleasant surprise, Jyer opened the door to greet me, dressed all in white, and he was scrubbed spotless. He was the only one ready, and he invited me to come in and sit down. The family came, and they had a great first experience in church. Jyer had to leave after Sunday School to go to work, but I could tell that he had appreciated the experience.
Alma, the lady we baptized with her daughter on General Conference Sunday, was confirmed on Sunday the 14th. Her daughter didn’t make it to the chapel, but she promised that she would be there the 21st. Angelica the wife of our first baptism and Alma struck up a friendship at church and the fun thing we discovered is that they live back to back, only kitty-corner to each other in the adjacent clusters of eight homes each, but they live on two different streets. (See FIG. 1)
Figure 1 shows the outline of the four apartments on the bottom floor of each lot, and where Alma and Angelica live. In reality they are only 30 or 40 feet apart but to walk from one apartment to the other it is several hundred yards. Now imagine that these eight units are repeated side by side for 8 to 10 times on each side of each street. They extend out to the cross street that connects all the streets together. So in order for Angelica to get to Alma’s house she would have to walk past all the houses on Acacia street, turn right at the gate, and walk down to Alamos street, turn right again, and walk past all the houses on Alamos until she reached Alma’s house.
I haven’t said much about the weather here, only that it was usually very pleasant temperature wise, and that it rained a lot. I guess we arrived just as the rainy season was getting started. It rained almost every day for the whole time we have been here so far. Now that seems to have stopped, and it only rains once in awhile. The sky stays blue, very, very blue, and there aren’t too many clouds. The people tell us it is autumn. The trees, at least some of them, are starting to turn fall colors, and the stores are full of toys, Dia de Muerte (Halloween) and Christmas stuff. They don’t have Thanksgiving here.
There is also a lot of winter wear, coats, sweaters, hats, gloves etc. etc. in the stores. I get a kick out of some of the people running around in coats sweaters, sweat shirts, and winter hats, and we just wear our normal short sleeves and feel toasty. I am also seeing space heaters in the stores. The Mexican people all say that it gets really cold here in the winter. We are at a fairly high elevation, 7,000 feet, but we are also at almost the exact same latitude that Guantanimo Bay Cuba is at, and it never got below 70 degrees the whole 18 months I was there. I haven’t bought a temperature gauge, but my guess would be that so far the temperature has not dipped below 65 degrees. I’ll be interested to see just how “cold?” it gets.
Well that’s about enough for now, I don’t want to bore anybody, talking about the weather. I just thought you might find it interesting. I heard this week that it snowed two feet in Rigby Idaho. Maybe there is snow at our house. I hope Billy knows how to handle the snow blower.