My new Comp!

 Here is a picture the senior couple took of me with a sister from Guatemala. She is super short and has been in my district/zone for more than half of my mission. She is small, but very powerful and funny. 

The height difference is just the funniest part. 

A Busy Week

 Well I have had some of the bustiest weeks of my mission these past few weeks. However all this week the President is in the hospital with his wife and the señior couple that worked the offices in the mission are in California so my comp and I are holding down the fort here in the offices today, which means I have a lot of down time right now. 

This week my companion and I did not have very many work days in our area because of some departing Elders we had to take to the airport. We also went with all of the Elders who arrived with me in the mission to a buffet with the president after going to the temple as a little going away party. That was pretty cool. So even though we did not work in our area very much this week we still had a great week with a lot of new investigators and people coming to church too. We had a lot of miracles happen and I am really feeling good about the investigators that we have right now. I hope all is well at home and have a great week.

 Elder Shumway

Ice Cream Peddlars

Right now we are in the heart of the rain season here in Mexico. Every day it is super hot and sunny in the morning, but right around 5:00pm, huge thunder clouds roll over the Eastern Mountains and it rains cats and dogs! Everyday I have to change my pamphlets because they get super wet in my backpack, but I protect my scriptures with a plastic bag. We also accumulate umbrellas every day that the members and investigators insist we take, but it is a little bit harder to remember to return them. We have 2 in the house right now that we need to take back to their owners. 

The church is very worried about mosquito transferred diseases at this time of year here in mexico ( even though I haven't seen a mosquito in a while). Sister missionaries are encouraged to wear pants instead of skirts, and the Elders can use Cowboy hats and sun glasses like the Jehovah witnesses. We also have to apply repellent 5 times a day.

 In our area we are baptizing pretty constantly, almost every week, and our ward was just divided into a  branch and a ward. We have a new bishop now who is on fire and is going to help this ward a ton. He was our ward mission leader two weeks ago so he also focuses on the missionary work more than other Bishops. Y para terminar una pequeña historia chistosa que nos paso ayer. 

Here in Mexico we normally use a public transport system called Combis. Combis are white Shum vans that have a little sign in the windshield which says the town, colony or place that it is going. So you stand on the side of any street and when the Combi you need passes by you stick out your hand and it stops for you. In the back there are no real seats, just 4 benches that go around the edge and that is where we sit...as many passengers that can fit inside the little van. When you want to get off you have to pass money through a little hole in a wall they put between the driver and the passengers. 

So yesterday we jumped into a super full Combi to come back to our area after reporting with the Elders, but it was not a very good Combi. After about 5 minutes of traveling the driver tried to go over a speed bump (here every street looks like oak street in Ashland, with huge speed bumps every half block to keep people from going fast). Our Combi got stuck with the huge Speed bump in between the two tires! We didn't high center, but the back tires just couldn't push the van over the top! Not wanting to lose his 8 pesos for each passenger in his Combi, the driver wouldn't let us get out!  So there we were, 15 Mexicans and one American in a little van bouncing back and forth trying to get over the speed bump while a huge line of traffic and honking drivers lined up behind us. I was dying with laughter! 

Then a garbage truck that was right behind us moved forward until it touched the van and abruptly pushed us over the top with a loud grinding sound. It made me laugh even harder! But then the driver of our Combi told the truck to please push us a little farther so that he could jump start the Combi because it had died! So there we go again being pushed by a huge garbage truck until the driver could pop the clutch! It was a funny experience but also very normal here in the Mexico City Southeast Mission! Elder Shumway

There is a man in our ward who makes ice cream every day, then sells it in the streets.

 One day he asked us to help him in the morning because his workers couldn't make it. 

 So as a service project we went early to make ice cream and sell it. 

We actually found more less actives this way than any other method I have ever tried on my mission!!!

A Few Famous Friends

Albert Einstein

Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso

Bill Gates

Here is a stained glass depiction of Christ's Baptism.....by sprinkling!

(Apparently the artist hasn't read the scripture version!)

Trash Collection

This is the Mexican trash system. First, a guy runs down the street with a  bell to let everyone know that the trash cart is coming, then when the horses pass by you just give your garbage to the guy on it along with some pesos to make him happy. (But he let us take the picture for free!)

Volcanoes & the Rainy Season

We had a great week this week! The rainy season started  with a huge down pour and it has rained every day since! The sun still comes out sometimes but it is mostly cloudy so my sunburnt nose is doing much better.

 Apparently the volcano right next to my area exploded at night but nothing happened here in Ixtapaluca. All of the ash went eastward to Puebla and Veracruz so nobody here even knew it exploded. (It is always exploding so to see a pillar of smoke rising from it is not anything new here.) The night of the explosion, my comp and I were leaving the district meeting of some Elders and Hermanas in our zone, when President Stutz called me. He was super worried about the missionaries. He asked me if Popocatepetl had exploded. Looking right at the mountain, I said, "I don't think so. It is still there." So while volcanoes were exploding right next to us, we had no idea!

We took our recent convert along with another 25 other converts to the temple to do baptisms for the dead. It was a great experience to be with them and a lot of them even brought their own names! I was working at the name table in the baptismal font, registering names but I lost count of how many personal names we did. 

 This weekend was Stake Conference and we had a family of new investigators come to the night time session. It is a family of 6 that is pretty poor and live far away from the stake center on the side of a hill. So to get to the conference they started walking at 6pm to make it by 7:00pm, but the entire way it was raining. When we ran into them a block before the church they were soaking wet and their 3 littlest boys were tired of walking. To see a family make such a big sacrifice to get to a church that they have never been to, helped me to know that the Spirit of God truly works miracles in every one of our investigators. In total we had 11 investigators at the conference, and 10 of those were attending church for the first time.

 It was a great week and to finish it off, this morning we helped the first counselor make ice cream in ice barrels and metal buckets. He sells home made ice cream for a living and we are getting pretty good at doing it too. It might be a good business to start when I get home.

 Gracias y espero que tengan una muy buena semana. Elder Shumway

Mother's Day 2016

We listened to Tanner the old fashioned way, two people sharing each phone to try and hear his stories. He is happy, working hard, and LOVING his mission!