Hey everyone! One month down in Oaxaca! I can hardly believe it’s true. This has been a wild ride thus far and it is only going to get better, I know it. As for this week and a half, things were a little crazy and pretty exciting! Travel This week we did a lot of traveling to the mission offices in Oaxaca (about an hour trip) for a bunch of things like fixing our phone, getting my migration papers and green card done, and getting to go to the Oaxaca Temple (today). So it has been a busy week. The first trip was for our phone, and for some reason the phone we had was so bad, they gave us a temporary replacement. Funny enough, it (I think) is a brand new Samsung Galaxy which only mission assistants and secretaries get to use. But it has been awesome, and all the other missionaries want to use it just for the amazing camera, haha The exciting travel day was definitely the migration papers. It starts with us waking up super early because we had to ride our bikes to the house of a member who was going to drive us to the city. We rode our bikes in the pitch dark on sketchy roads for nearly 30 minutes. Fun. When we got to the mission offices, the secretary elder, another elder, and I, headed to the migration offices in central Oaxaca and it was beautiful! This is where all the tourism happens in Oaxaca and I can see why. The market, the chapels, the architecture, it was all so incredible. We then got our migration stuff finished and headed home. Kind of a cool day. Finally, the temple trip. On Tuesday night Elder Sifuentes and I traveled to the zone leaders’ area and stayed the night with them because they live closer to the temple. We woke up the next morning (today) super early and took a bus to the temple and met up with the Mission President and other missionaries. It was super cool! Not only was it a different temple, but with everything in Spanish it was super interesting. I didn’t understand everything, but I felt the spirit and had an awesome time.
Friday the 13th If anyone didn’t know, last Friday was Friday the 13th and for us, it really felt like it. When we woke up, Elder Sifuentes was feeling super sick so the morning went by pretty slow. I gave my first blessing in Spanish, which was super awesome! But that morning I was also super stressed about an upcoming lesson so it was just a hard morning in general. I thought it would be better once we left to get lunch, but it only got worse. We rode to one of the furthest away houses for lunch and picked it up. Not even 5 minutes after leaving we realize my front tire has a flat. So we pull off and try to repair it, and find 3 more holes. We patch them, and the tire still won’t inflate. At this time, we also realize that the tuperware with our food has also spilled all over the bag we were carrying it in. So we try to clean it up, find a bike repair shop close by, and it turns out there were 4 more holes! 7 in total! No idea how this happened, but it was a mess. We then made it home hours later and were just really drained from the day. But I sure believe the myths now!
The Work This week has been really great with missionary work. We seem to be setting up appointments and teaching more regularly, and I am doing a lot more too. At this point, I can pretty much teach all the lessons in Spanish; understanding over the phone is hard, but it is getting better. We have a few people super close to Baptism, but also one that fell through sadly. And we are doing a lot of meetings with members to practice my Spanish and to get to know the area. It is really helpful and super fun.
Spiritual Thought I was doing a lot of studying about the Preexistence and the War in Heaven, and happened to come upon a 2017 talk called “The War Goes On”. It is a super awesome talk and I totally recommend you all to read it. But one cool thing I got from it is that Satan only knows of our words and our actions, not our thoughts like Heavenly Father does. This is why commandments like do not murmur exist. Satan has less influence over us if he doesn’t have anything to work with! An awesome scripture to go along with this is James 4:7 “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” This is a super powerful verse that will help you with temptations in life. I know it is true!
Pictures! 1. Me at the Oaxaca Temple! 2. The Church from Nacho Libre (yeah, seriously! Nacho Libre was filmed in Oaxaca and the church is in Valle de Etla!) 3. Us patching the flat tire 4. A snake that caused a ruckus on our porch, I think the whole street was at our house, and some guy killed it for us
