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