4/25/2010

Things are going great here in Mexico, We have a couple more baptisms planned. to answer a few questions:

 

The most suprising thing here is that the people don´t flush their toilet paper down the toilet, they drop it on the floor and clean it up later or they have a trash next to the toilet but its rare. they also have cults here that use the indian magic to communicate with their ancestory and heal the sick and afflicted blah blah blah. yeah the whole nine yards, like everything there are extremists that go crazy with the rights and what not (haven´t seen that luckily, just heard about it.) and there are the ones that just use crazy herbs and stuff. although the cult in our area is struggling seeing that their Witchdoctor has had a change of heart and got Baptised by the Mormon missionaries ;) haha :) kind of interesting didn´t know about it until now but it seems to be playing out ok.

 

I´ve only had one companion so far, he´s from Utah, and he´s every bit opposite of me, which works out cause it has to make us more understanding of the other, he tells me i´m his favorite Companion :) i feel lucky. All his other companions have been mexicans that hate Gringos... that doesn´t work out to well if your a mexican and have a gringo companion....

The people of Mexico have an outstanding amount of faith, at times i see faith being excersized by an investigator and it makes my faith feel rather small... but thats ok! thats kinda the point... right?

 

Its hot and muggy here still. this week its variated between 90-85 at night it the normal 107-110 during the day.... yeah...

 

We get the Liahona here in English and Spanish although we don´t really have time to read it a whole lot.....

 

Happy Easter everyone! i wish i could have celebrated here but instead they celebrate the cruzification of Christ and parade a man roped up on a cross in the streets, so i couldn´t really join the locals in celebrating. Its been interesting though. Jose Angel was confirmed yesterday, my prayers have been answered :) we had a hard time with him all week cause he is very stuck in his catholic ways seeing as his dad is the minister and all... wierd we baptised the ministers son and the Witchdoctor of the area here.... oh and a couple normal people too lol jk its been fun.´

 

My companion got sick while we were at a members house and we were told to remain inside out of the sun so we did so and we got to watch Charly, its a church related movie about 2 people that get married and then she dies from cancer. very sad. but oh so good.

 

Other than that this week has been fairly interesting. every time the members see us they tell us to carry around an umbrella to avoid gettting tan cause everyone here likes being as light as they can, and every time we tell them we can´t so we just keep getting darker.

 

Love you all, Happy Easter

Elder Allen

 

P.s.- still don´t know whats going down with mothers day stuff, should find out next week. also if you want to put money in my account i need to buy socks and buy a new inhaler. the mission doesn´t pay for that also i´m putting together a couple packages, its about 30.00 to send a package from here. woot. :) Thanks -Paden

oh and Happy B-day to Emmett. :)

4/18/2010

OK so this week was a killer, José Angel disappeared on sunday and we have no idea where he went, so he still hasn´t been confirmed. Also, Daniela, who is the first person that actually acted interested when i knocked on her door, her family decided that she had to be catholic or she couldn´t be part of their family. Its very sad. they locked her out saturday because she was talking to us. But then sunday they let us in for about 5 minutes, only cause we were helping however. We are going to be moving our house soon. Right now we live on a fairly large street but we will be moving to a way nicer house :) I´ll get to enjoy it, however my companion will not. We had 14 lessons with a member present. which is so not normal, the goal for right now is 8. But saturday was our day of Miracles. We didn´t make it to 1/2 the appointments we had set but we did however help Daniela out alot. We hadn´t talked to her in forever because of her family trouble and she is also working through a divorce. but we knocked on her door and she came to the door very animatedly because she had prayed the night before to have us knock on her door and that we wpould be able to ake her to the chapel to show it to her. We had both felt inspired to knock on her door even though it wasn´t the plan. the problem was that they changed to keys to the chapel and they still haven´t gotten us a copy, and we were very far away with not alot of tiime. So we made a few calls and we found a member with a car easy, we had to get ahold of some other elders with the keys however and they had to make a sacrifice in order to open the chapel for us. it was way cool how even though there was no possible way we were going to be able to do that, and it wasn´t anywhere close to being planned, everything came together just right in order for us to have that lesson with her. When she got back she had been locked out and her family said if she wanted to talk with us then she couldn´t live there anymore and that she wasn´t loved anymore. yeah it was bad. she came into the house, where we were having a lesson, crying, and had to leave again to see what her husband wanted, but when she came back she was determined and dead set in taking the path that we were teaching her. it was way cool. they didn´t let her go to church the next day but thats just to try our faith as missionaries and since the last time we taught her which was the 30th of march she had read half of the book of mormon. she didn´t understand most of it but the fact that she is reading is amazing.

We went to the center of monterrey this morning to find some special shoes for my companion. it was a waste of time but at least we got to see the infamous statues. i was excited to take a picture of the statue of life cause everyone always talks about it but i realized when  saw it that its only because its a giant fountain with lots of naked statues, greek style. which its confusing why they have posiedon in the middle of monterrey but thats ok...

Thats about it but talk to you all next week!

Love,

Elder Allen

P.S. Mom, did you all ever find that missing disks from the movies levi lent to me while i was there? if not i still have to replace those.

4/10/2011

Hey Everyone! So this week my companion was put out of commission by an infected ingrown toenail, and we did nothing for a day and a half... woot! I goofed off with my camera and made phone calls to everyone in the ward trying to find 2 men from the elders quarom to help us. We managed to get 3 hours of work done on thursday, friday we were stuck however. :( i attatched the camera goof off evidence however.

Other than that this week went fairly well. We got most of our goals and we had 6 investigators at church. Things are starting to heat up if you can believe it. i´m glad i took pictures of the mountain before because it is almost always covered with the humidity.

Last week there was a man shouting at us and holding out a very badly tied tie my companion ignored him, however i heard he was asking us how to tie it, so i tied his tie in the middle of the street, it was good and we got a reference for some other elders out of it. and i´ve seen more drunk men wanting to change their lives this week than i thought possible... anyway.. What does Emmett want for his B-day? Boring week this week but that happens at times. anyway talk to you all next week!

Mom could you send me an electronic copy of my patriarchal blessing and my bank accout balance? i took out 1,000 pesos so about 80 bucks.

 Why have i heard nothing from dillon?

Love, Elder Allen

P.s. sorry its super short this week

 

I asked him how he was doing: wonderfully! :) thing are still pretty normal except i am more brown than normal

 

4/4/2011

OK this week was awesome we had 2 more baptisms and we watched conference; Conference was awesome. it made me feel bad and i´m not even bad eligible to be married yet... cant imagine how a single RM feels... haha the people we baptised were blanca and josé both 24 they are not married but live seperately, we found her in a door contact my first week in the mission field, he as well cause he is her boyfriend, he has lots of family opposition as his dad is the catholic minister.....anyway this week went by really fast! we did lots of walking this week our area is about 20 blocks wide and about 1.5 miles (ish) long. its kind of rediculous. We have investigators on both ends and all the members live in the middle and don´t have cars but it keeps up in shape. We found 3 new investigators that are really golden here this week, they of course live as far away from eachother as possible but they are all single men as well, which means more priesthood, in which our ward has a serious lack.

Last p-day we went to the mountains as a zone before a few of our members were shipped away to different areas the picture of me sliding in in the middle of the woods...... I also bought a pair of cowboy boots that i really liked, i included a picture of them as well, :) i´ll send them over the border with hno. Casas who goes to the the untited states to sell produce there, he said he can send them there which would be better than trusting them to the mexican mail system.

Things in mexico are pretty... normal... for mexican normal. i live in a city that is conjoined with Monterrey, like draper through salt lake area and to give you an image of what its like here, there are more people here than in the entire state of Utah... yeah... My mission president is great! and he speaks fluent english which is really convinient cause i have a hard time understanding his argentinian accent. I also included a picture of ´the seat in the mountain´it looks like a saddle and thats why it has its name... there is also a small portion the city at the bottom as well.

 Anyway, thats the run down this week.

-Elder Allen