Week 61 - In to the Office

Hey!

sorry its been so long since writing. but p day is now wednesday and so i will now be writing you on wednesday.

first up thanks dad for your answers to my questions helped a lot, sorry i didnt really have time to reply and then like two weeks passed.

So whats happened?
im now the executive secretary, as a secretary we study in the morning from like 8-10 depending, and then we start doing our jobs as secretaries until like 130-2 ish when we go to the food and stay the rest of the afternoon in our area. before the secretaries had a house in their area, but now we sleep in the offices which are out of the area and the mission. vease -look at- the attached image
so the offices are like a house of three floors downstairs there are like pure closets and bunk beds, there are like 15 beds downstairs and two half baths. the middle floor is the office floor with pres´ office my and the financial secs office and an open room that the materials sec and the registros sec use as their office and a half bath. upstairs is the kitchen two master bedrooms a seperate bathroom with two showers and a room with 3 bunk beds. hahahaha there is the layout of the office if you were interested.

i´m being trained as the executive visas and green cards secretary. so i deal with going to migracion and making sure all the elders are legal in mexico. so we have to go to the migracion building which is like an hour away in metro like a bunch ive been secretary for like what a full week and we´ve gone twice. migracion is in like this super nice part of mexico like super nice. hahaha its super weird to go there after being in my past areas, there is such inequality.

idk the ward im in right now is called leandro valle there are us and another set of missionaries in the ward so we are leandro valle 2. this area again is a semi tough ward, not a lot going on in the progress of the members and bishopric but ay vamos. for the first part of the week we´re just getting to know the members and stuff like that i still don´t feel like i know anyone here. after like 14 months in the same stake and over 6 months in each of my first areas you get to know like everyone at church and a lot of people in the stake, here a different stake and a new area is like super weird cause like i dont know who the people in sacrament meeting are where they live if they´re members active or less active..... all stuff that ive got to learn over again.

about my old area. no the other elders dont just absorb it, no one works the area at all. like there are literally 0 elders there. so ya its kinda sad the converts and inv. get left hanging until the area gets opened again later, the area would have just been absorbed had there been two sets of elders in the ward, but... we were the only ones.

supposedly when the wave of missionaries came like a year and a half ago, the mission age change, it robbed all the missionaries that would be coming right now so in the next three months ish we are sending 40 elders and sisters home and only like 15 missionaries are coming, something like that at least. so the the next little while we´re going to be closing at lot of areas in the mission for lack of missionaries to work them.

secretary life is fun, work on stuff, help president out, being around like 4 other missionaries, getting to go to rich part of the city like once a week, there´s a sick tianguis, or like farmers market right out front of the offices. there being a Walmart so real food shopping is an option. so its a good time here.
the area was pretty dead we´re starting her up we found two new investigators last night, they look pretty promising. their mom is a member, these are women of like 35 years old and the mom i think is around like 60 ish or more. the mom we havent met nor seen, we were looking in the lists of members we dont know and we went to the house talked to the daughter who i think gave us a fake name the first time we went by and we made an appt. for last night we went were received by two people and they said that like 5 or more years ago the elders used to come to visit and teach but suddenly stopped coming. pretty exciting finding new inv. hahaha

and like this cousin to a member i was thinking like some teenage cousin before i met her, she´s like a señora with three kids whose husband doesnt really like the idea of the church but she´s all in. we went talked about the book of Mormon the importance it can be in here life and stuff and how she´ll get a testimony that what we teach is true if she reads and prays, she accepted and we kind of put a baptismal date with her.... kind of as in she chose a day to be baptized but it was too soon she wont have the required sundays so we either have to explain that and postpone the date or get permission and baptize her with only 3 sundays instead of 5 hahaha....... who knows what´ll happen.

there is also a family in my area where the dad is a nonmember not cause he doesnt want to but that his ´´wife´´ is his half-sister, they have like at least 3 kids. they/the elders before us, wrote to salt lake asking permission for the marriage salt lake gave permission, but the government here wont legally marry them. So that's a dilemma. something about how we´re going to try and get a different kind of permission from salt lake so they can get baptized but we´ll see.
anyways we went to their hosue to teach the other day and i really liked the lesson it was nothing special it was the lesson we had planned and were sharing with the majority of the people and at the end of the lesson the Hna kind of was crying and she thanked us for sharing the message and said the elders always come here to share a message according to what they needed in that moment that we are the angels that god sends,  i really liked that experience cause sometimes we do go and share messages and never really know if thats what they needed to hear or like if it impacted the people at all and so it was nice to here hear that we helped in that moment.



SO thats about it.

Elder Blotter

P.S: here are  some pics i took:

Week 60

SOOO

yesterday they closed my area and now im in the offices learning how to be the executive secretary.

i told you we got robbed but like during the day at like 5 oclockish that happened on friday. so we get back to the apartment and walk in and i looked and was like thats kinda weird why are those books not neat... haha and then i notice like a bunch of trash on my desk and i was like i didnt put that theree.... and then my comp was like hey did you go through my stuffffff and then we were like we got robbed..... so we go upstairs to tell the hno so he could like see the apartment. we then walked into teh bedroom and all the dresser drawers were like thrown on the ground and the suit cases were like empited on the ground. so you thats a pretty terrible feeling.

but the thief only robbed my nikes and a crappy watch from me, but he robbed my comps stereo alarm clock and his dads watch which was like the most valuable thing that was stolen. he also stole the portable dvd player thing from the mission. YA. lame huh. my camera was like visible on my desk and like i had like a buynch of money and my credit card in like a little container that he didnt open. so that was a blessing.

BUT, because of the insecurity in that area they closed it. so thats super sad. i knew i had changes  coming but my comp was going to stay and teach and baptise the people we had, but he had changes too and we like packed all the house up. sad feeling to have inv and tehn they cant progress anymore cause there arent missionaries.

 AND so ya. im a secretary. what else. it was super sad saying by to my conversos, and the people. and now im here in a different zone and its like super nice. i went from the most dangerous area to living outside the area in like a house with like 5 bathrooms. also we dropped off the missionaries at the airport today and there were a bunch of problems and it was super hectic hahaha and i got to hang out with pres that was cool.

idk..........

love you guys have a great week.

Pictures:

These pics were like taken about a year ago.. haha like a minute after the picture was taken the carrito flipped and the people on it got hurt i luckily hopped off before they went down the hill.

Week 58

so literally tomorrow i think was my first day here in mexico a full year ago. which is crazy.....

so this week passed like super fast. but really really fast.

polo was a guy in the ward that the elders in front of me baptised and he never got confirmed. id like visited him pretty much every thursday in the 7ish months i have here in the ward. we finally came to the conclusion that he needed to be taught again and then rebaptised more than just be reconfirmed. anyways he didnt progress at all and we were thinking of dropping him, when last thursday he like opens up to us and tells us why he didnt come to church and that he isnt interested in going to church nor be baptised, but its like this 70 year old dude who knows we´re probs not going to visit him anymore and he starts crying and that was super sad. sad that he cried and sad that he rejected progression.

who else we found daniel an inv that we have and we like have a hard time finding him home to teach him so he doesnt progress he´s like a 20 year old that wants to learn and honestly he´s super chosen golden he just needs like a little more of a push before he like gets baptised and i really see him  going on a mission.

who else. diana the girl in the baptism clothes in these fotos is super cool, and we are now teaching her sister and friend. which is why converts are so great they are like on fire and want to share the gospel with everyone. her sisters name is nayeli she is beginning to progress i see that she gets baptised but we need to teach her a bunch about the importance of it all and that she needs to make it a priority more than just a sidelined curiosity. she looked up on the internet a bunch about mormons instead of reading the pamphlets we´d given or the book of mormon. the strangest thing wasnt that she was appalled at polygamy, she was like you guys have more than one wife and lovers and stuff...... hahahhahaha NO. she didnt come to church cause she went to her grandmas house so like that might be a little hard ot bring her to church for the first time but with faith and the spirit all is possible.

Antonio is a new inv that we found this week taught the restauratino and tehn he like nayeli hopped on the internet and so when we went to teach the book of mormon he was wanted it to be like a history book and that we could prove all the facts and stuff and stuff. so instead of putting a baptismal date with him we had to take a couple steps back and get him to try his faith so he´d read the book of mormon. he came to church so he progressed and felt the spirit at church so thats great.

oh on sunday we´re on the bus going to the stake center to report, and the buses here get full and then starts the standing room which makes a double file line int eh isle between the seats. so as wefile back as people get off the bus, cause we get on like halfway through the route and the second half is where everyone gets off, by the time we get off we´re normally two of like 6 people on the bus, but anyways as we get further into the bus some lady makes eye contact with me and smiles, i smile and wave and say to my comp i think this is a member talk to her, cause i was sitting down on the window side and he´s in the isle seat. so she is a membe of two years visiting her sick nonmember  brother that lives by where we get off the bus so we go with them and give him a blessing and leave. it was a cool experience. cause we wont ever know the outcome of what happens there if he ever gets interested or the missionaries ever teach him. interesting to think about.

i dont think there is anymore. hahaha these are pics of the people that got baptised on valentines day and when they got married.

love you!

Elder Blotter