A Great Week!

Hola Mom!
 This week has been one of the best of my mission, with new shirts, socks and shoes it is a LOT easier to work! We baptized this week, and had a lot of investigators at church. I am actually very satisfied right now with my mission and my life. You really don't have to send me anything. The shoes were enough. I have everything I could need.
 Tomorrow are the transfers and I will be leaving my area. I only had one cycle here and it is agreat ward, but I am excited for another change in my mission. I will let you know where I am next week.

 Gracias y te amo. Elder Shumway

Hot Water Anyone?

Hola Mama! General Conference this week was pretty awesome wasn’t it! Ponderize in Spanish is meditizar. (I was also wondering what it was in English.) Meditizar is the combination of Meditate, Meditar and Memorize, Memorizar. Right now I am about to teach in the zone meeting about studying and this Meditizar thing.

I received both packages yesterday with the new shoes and shirts. Thank you very much. I love you! Today is the first time in 6 months that I have not walked in shoes that are too small for me, or with my feet touching the rocks through the holes in my shoes! I put the shoes on last night and they fit perfectly.

Also mom, I just want to say thank you for everything you do. After the talk by Jeffery R Holland, “Behold Thy Mother,”  I felt homesick for the first time in my mission. Well not homesick, but I felt like I should tell you thanks for being my Mom. I love you and appreciate everything you do for me!

This week some old Catholic guy on the street asked me if I was one of the sons of Jose Smith. I thought it was pretty funny! The old guy just wanted to tell us that our church is false and the Book of Mormon would be a good Walt Disney movie. But hey the bible has also produced some good movies of Noah and Moses!

Last week someone broke into the church and stole the TV from the sec office and the stove from the kitchen! We had a baptism on Sunday, and in order to heat up the water we use a gas powered boiler. The stove also uses gas and the robbers broke the gas pipe when they stole it so we couldn't heat up the water! The baptism was for a little girl and I did not want to baptize her in cold water, so I ran home during church with my comps and we brought 2 extension cords and 3 clothes irons to heat up the water. Sadly the irons over powered the cords and they started to melt so we just put one of the irons in the water, but it didn’t heat up the water fast enough. So we baptized in cold water!

Pues gracias for everything! Tell Jojo thanks for the letters and that I will start writing her back.

Elder Shumway

A Giant

A little while ago I had to go to the Southern part of the city to renew my green card and visa in order to stay here in Mexico. While we were in the metro on our way back home, we ran into the famous piano stairs of Mexico. They are stairs painted like a piano, and when you step on each stair it actually makes the sound of that note! It was awesome and fun to play on for a minute. (Listen to them on YouTube!)

 Sometimes I feel like I am in a movie because there are always riot police in the metro in the mornings that form lines for crowd control. It looks pretty scary. Sometimes with so many people trying to get on the Metro, it looks like a cow herding factory. 

There is this funny little girl who lives in an apartment building that we teach at. Every time we walk in, she is playing at the door. When she sees me she always says, "Grandote!" Which means giant. Then she looks at my comp and says in a cute voice, "Chiquito" or little one. So my comp and I are now known as the giant and the little guy.

 Sadly, I had my camera stolen this week. Tell Danielle thanks for buying it for me, but I won't worry about buying a new one. There isn't very much to take pictures of here in the City. Other than that, every thing is great. Tell the family I say hi. 

Love Elder Shumway

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