New Area

Well my new area is small (I'm back in the crowded city)... but the ward is great. The Elders quorum is made up of pure solid returned missionaries and the classes are actually super interesting and full of stories from their missions. Like all wards, there are problems, but this is the strongest ward I have served in so far. It is also the first ward that has someone who can play the piano for sacrament meeting!

I am the district leader of a companionship of Elders and of two companionships of Sisters, which is different but fun. The two senior sisters are also the sister training leaders for the mission and right now they are training two new sisters from the states who are still learning Spanish.

In my house I have been showering with cold water for the past two weeks because my comp said that his trainer told him the boiler doesn’t work. But I hate taking showers in cold water so I bought a little wrench and fixed the boiler and also bought gas...but now I don’t have money. However I can now shower with hot water!

We have also have a big problem of bed bugs in our house. The members say that the Elders have had bed bugs for almost a year now, even though they have gotten new mattresses and changed apartments, they haven’t been able to get rid of them. I am going to keep trying to kill them because they are eating me alive!!!!!

Right now we are teaching a lot of little kids that are from a member family, but we have also had quite a bit of luck in contacting people at home or on the street. We are teaching a few mas o menos investigadores right now. But the work is progressing and we are having a pretty good time still.

My first day in this new area we went to go visit a recent convert in his home. Two of the little boys that live in their house when they saw me they said, "WOW are you for real?" they just kept staring at saw me and looking at my white skin and touching my arms. It was pretty funny!

The food here is also a lot better than the food in texcoco. Here they eat more enchiladas and chilaquiles and all of the best mexican food! However, the other day someone made me eat a salsa of larva,.... it wasn’t that bad but it wasn’t good either.

Yesterday we rededicated the temple in Mexico City with Elders Eyring and Holland. It was a very spiritual experience. The cultural event on Saturday was pretty cool and to top it off we are reading the Book of Mormon as a mission! I have actually seen a lot of changes in the Elders and in the lessons as a result.

Elder Shumway

Tightwad!

In Spanish,"codo" means elbow but it also means tightwad or cheapskate, (someone who doesn't want to spend money on anything.) Well it looks like I'm so codo that you can actually see my codo!

(Tanner should be receiving a box with new shirts in about 3 weeks.)

Object Lesson

We taught the young men about missionary work and then we read D&C 4 about “the field is white and ready to harvest.”  Afterwards, we took them out behind the church where there is a little white field and shared our testimonies. They liked it.

Water Issues

This week was very interesting here in Mexico. On Sunday, the people voted for new political leaders. (The last 3 months have been pretty contentions while the political parties hash it out. In Mexico they don’t just have two political parties; there are more than 14! There are also a lot of people who  are against voting so on Saturday in almost 6 states, they burned the voting offices so nobody could vote. Saturday afternoon Pres Stutz got a call from the general authority who said that all the missionaries had to go home and that they could only leave their apartments for the church service on Sunday. So we spent the afternoon and most of Sunday in our house catching up on sleep.

We had a baptism here, and this is what the water looked like when we filled the font: Que asco!

But after buying a magic toilet brown water pill it looked like this! The baptism smelled like a bathroom with the toilet pill we put in there but hey, it looks great and didn’t stain the white clothes!

It rained super hard during our baptismal service and the church began to flood. (They don’t build anything very secure here so the water from the street just started pouring in under the door and under the sides of the building.) We spent 30 minutes fighting back the water that poured in. This was kinda funny because the baptism was originally planned for the weekend before, but when we showed up at the church last Sunday there wasn’t ANY water in the building! So we postponed the baptism a week and then we had an abundance of water!

Well everything is good here and I hope with you too. I love you and will send more pictures next week.

Elder Shumway

June 1, 2015

Tell Madi Feliz cumpleaños! When is she going to take her permit test?  Well tell her happy birthday and to be careful driving because everyone drives like they want to kill you! (Or maybe that’s just here in Mexico.) I’ve got some more funny stories for you.

The other day we were walking through a parking lot of some apartment buildings and we saw a police car pull in and drive around slowly in the lot. Then they stopped. One of them got out of his car and stole a hub cap off of one of the nicer cars in the lot because they were missing one! Then they drove off, very content to have a good looking car again. At first I was shocked that the cops would do that,... but then I just laughed because 

...I’m in Mexico!

Monday night we were up near the mountains walking home around 9:00 and over one of the mountains that is called Hill of the Promise we saw a bunch of lights flashing in a huge storm of clouds. It looked like a war was happening on the mountain, then I thought it was the volcano Popocatepetl exploding because it has been actively smoking for a few weeks. Finally I realized it was an electric storm. It was a normal storm but with 100X more lightning!  There was never a moment without lightning!

The following day we got stuck in a similar storm and lightning was hitting the ground everywhere! Because the city of Mexico is built in a lake bed, there is nowhere for the water to go! So all of the streets become rivers that are unpassable, and when the cars speed by they soak you!  

One day we went to a food appointment, but the sister didn’t have gas to cook the food, so my boy scout skills came in handy! We made a fire on the roof in the rain to cook our food. It was quite a delicious meal... but the meat was not completely cooked so my comp and I bought a Coca Cola afterwards to kill whatever was in our stomach. We haven’t gotten sick yet so I guess it works!

Everything here is great now because we just received some money on our cards, so don’t worry about me starving anymore. I also have money saved up to buy gas tomorrow so we can shower with hot water instead of bathing with buckets of water heated up with the iron. So life is going to be good again!

Te Amo,

Elder Shumway

Pictures

We were asked to cut someone's lawn using these tools!

Mexican Celebration

Ancient Ruins

The Lord's Cheeps!

I just got your package. Thank you very much for the pens and everything. My comp didn’t like the dried pears but he did love the huge chocolate bar! It was a good taste of home. Thanks.

I paid for the wedding of one of our investigators.

They didn’t have any money and the ward didn’t want to pay for it. My comp and I pooled our money to pay for the wedding. (I also pulled some money out of my US account because we have been without money for a week and I was just dying of hunger! We need money to be able to work this week.)

I am learning a lot from my time in this area.

1. I actually know how it feels to not have a single peso and to be so hungry that you can hardly sleep

2. I know that god answers prayers fast!. One morning this week we were walking in a colony called San Miguel Tlaixpan up in the mountains. I was super hungry and without energy. I only had enough money to take a combi back down to the valley after we were done there, but I didn’t even have the energy to keep working. In my heart I told the lord that I needed to eat something. I was explaining that I was going to buy something in a little store and hope that he would provide a way for us to get home. Right as I was thinking about this a huge truck,of Sabritos, or in english I think its lays like the chip brand, pulled up in front of us and the driver was  the husband of a recent convert that I did the baptismal interview for. I worked with he and his family when I was on divisions. After chatting, he gave us each a free little bag of Doritos! It wasn’t very much to eat but enough to break my 24 hour fast and keep on working. They literally were “the Lord’s chips.” (A quote from Nacho Libre) God answers my prayers with Nacho Libre Humor!

Later we visited some members that gave us breakfast. Pretty awesome.

    I also want to explain to you some of the food we eat here regularly because it is pretty funny. One of the most common dishes here that all of the gringo missionaries hate is called chicharon en salsa verde.

It is slices of pig hide in spicy green salsa with little squares of cactus. The salsa and cactus are pretty good but the pig hide is one of the grossest things ever!  The only way to eat it is with a lot of tortilla.

Some other foods that are interesting but that I don’t like are chicken foot soup, cow intestine tacos and cow brain quesadillas (nasty but durable.)

Danielle would hate it here because they eat crema with everything. Crema here is like sour cream but not sour, just cream and they put it on everything! We eat it on tacos, enchiladas, soup….. and then after the meal they take everything away and just leave the cream to put it on your dessert of jello, fruit or whatever else they bring out. The cream with fruit is actually pretty good, but the first time I saw them put the same taco cream on fruit it scared me because I thought it was sour cream.

They also have this awesome fruit that I have never seen in my life but it is called a lichi. Mango used to be my favorite fruit until i tried this one and now it is this.

The lichi is a little ball that had a red shell with little spikes on the outside but when you open it up it is super white and glowing. On the outside it looks like the fruit from the tree of good and evil but inside it is like the tree of life! And its taste is unlike anything else!