Monday, May 29, 2017

Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 7

Hola del desierto de Chihuahua!

I´m super excited about the package! I wish I was still in Ojinaga so I could get my package sooner haha.  The socks to give my companions will be awesome as well! My companion is pretty excited but a little worried after seeing some of the socks I have hahaha. Hopefully my package comes soon, but who knows because right now Ojinaga is going on strike a bit because the zone leaders have been getting angry with them for not working.  So the last time they came down they didn´t bring any packages as part of their strike, so hopefully they work things out and they bring the packages haha.

Well this week was quite the busy week.  We spent this week helping out with 3 different zone conferences where we had to help prepare the food for the missionaries that had their conferences. Then at the end of the week we had to help with the mass baptism that our zone leaders planned, so all in all it was a pretty busy week on our end.  We only had one day to actually do some work, and we only had from 7:00-9:00 in the night to actually work in our area, because all these wacky times we have been working a lot with the ward. During the conferences we received new instruction that we as missionaries shouldn´t do all the mission work alone, and in fact that we should leave a large part of it to the members of the church and that we should just be helpers along the way or to be a more thorough teacher for an investigator. So we´ve been trying to work hard in this regard in helping the members realize their responsibility so talk to their neighbors that aren´t members and to set up appointments with us to teach them together. The new focus has been put in place because they lowered the required assistances in the church to be baptized, and because of this they have fear that when people are baptized they won´t be fully converted to the church, but by involving the members the new converts will have friends in the church and have a better attachment to the church helping them become stronger converts. I´m pretty excited about the new focus in our work, right now it´s a bit rough because a lot of the members are a bit afraid to contact their friends, and are trying to keep the responsibility to contact people with the missionaries. But the stake presidents now have been trained and they are now training the bishops, and the bishops to the ward leaders, and the ward leaders to the ward, etc. It should be sweet if everything goes well!

Anyways this week Hermana Montoya was out of town at the wedding of her son, and she is the one that usually prepares and cooks the food.  We as secretaries just serve the food and help her lift all the food in the kitchen (it´s a ton of food!).  With her not being here this week we had the responsibility to prepare and cook and serve the food, it was crazy, but fun. On Tuesday we had the conference of Chuviscar and Chimex (my conference), we ended up serving chicken bakes from Costco, and a sister from the ward literally brought 100 pounds of macaroni salad (we probably ate about 30 pounds (40 missionaries)). We still have about 50 pounds of macaroni salad in the freezer after giving 20 pounds to homeless guys on the street hahaha. The best part was finding where all the missionaries hid their macaroni salad.  We tried serving about a pound of salad per missionary, but in the end the missionaries found an assortment of places to hide their salad.  I wouldn´t be surprised if we haven´t found all of it yet hahaha. And that is how the first conference went. In the second conference we went to the 2 stakes of Technologico.  In this conference we made bacon wrapped hotdogs with homemade hot dog buns.  It was pretty darn good.  Everyone kept coming until we were left with 4 hotdogs out of 104 for a conference that only had like 30 missionaries.  So the second meal was a hit and very little food was left behind, except for a bit of salad we tried to trick the missionaries into eating that was left over from the first conference…It didn´t work haha. And that is how the second conference went, the third conference was unexpected in the regard that we weren´t initially invited.  It was the zone of Parral which is about 3 hours from Chihuahua City, and we as secretaries almost always only help with the zones that are within the city. So Thursday night we got a call from the president of the mission more or less saying that he nor the assistants had a desire to serve the food, and if we could help serve the food while they teach the conference. We were both pretty excited because that never happens so we got the chance to wake up at 4:00 the next day and go in the president´s minivan on a 3 hour trek to Parral. In Parral a group of sisters up there prepared all the food and all we had to do was divide it and serve it. So it was pretty easy and we spent a lot of our time listening to the conference for a change haha. It was pretty cool and I got to talk to a few of my friends that I’ve made through the months!

Then on Saturday we had our “massive” baptism.  It was originally planned to have like 12 baptisms but in the end we only had 6, 2 in my district, and 4 in another district. So although it wasn´t super big, it did end up being a success and it gave a lot of missionaries a firm date to put down for their investigators. Which helped our zone a lot in terms of helping the missionaries put baptism dates.

And that was our week here in the offices!
Miracles-3678
Tortillas-1273
Con mucho amor,

Elder Bunch
México Chihuahua Misión



Secretario Ejecutivo 

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