Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 11

Hey que uele?,

Notes for future missionaries and just good advice in general: 1. although at times you might not have any money don´t buy the cheap milk that is past its due date, 2. although it may be tempting to ride in a sweet sports car with a random person, don´t do it you´ll end up in the middle of nowhere, 3. when climbing a mountain that is commonly climbed look for the common path, not just something that looks like a path as you might just end up climbing a water run off trail, 4. the secretaries have time to make some pretty sweet looking shirts! Well anyways this week was pretty solid, we had a bunch of interesting experiences, and found a super awesome investigator!

Well let´s start with the first point of advice, when you have a zone activity and the cheapest missionaries are put in charge of the food, you aren´t going to have a fun life 2-3 hours after the food.  On Monday we had a big zone activity where we all came to the stake center and watched Singles Ward while we cooked pancakes and had chocolate milk. It was pretty fun to mess around with everyone before the changes. However the entire zone learned that something was up when everyone was running to the bathroom after about 2 hours.  We later learned that the missionaries that were in charge of the milk tried to save a buck or two and bought the milk that had expired a week before and the store was just trying to get rid of it for real cheap. I would not recommend that experience for anyone, I drank about half a gallon and paid the price for the next 2-3 days! Hahahaha

Secondly, when a doctor offers you a ride in his Camaro to his house to pick up medicine, don’t take the offer, or at least ask where his house is and if you get a return trip… On Tuesday the president’s wife called us up and asked us to go pick up some medicine for a missionary so we ended up going.  However when we got there the doctor told us that the medicine was in his house and that he would give us a ride in his new Camaro.  Well there was no way we were passing up an opportunity to get to ride in a new sports car so we hopped in, my companion in front, and I in back (the person who invented Camaros was either really short, or just doesn´t like tall people in the back of his cars). It ended up being really sweet, we felt like we were in the bat mobile or something, super cool. Anyways we finally got to his house and he gave us the medicine and said “well it was good see y´all” and hops back in his car and leaves us in the middle of a gated community in the middle of nowhere.  You may remember that I commented that we always use Uber to go to places, but the thing is that Uber can´t enter into gated communities, so that was out of the plan. So we ended up walking for about 2-3 hours looking for the exit to this massive gated community. So yep, don´t trust doctors with sport cars unless they live close, or are going to give you a ride back to the clinic.

Saturday, we went to a hill called Cerro De La Cruz with a member who told us that he climbed the hill about 5 years before and led us the start of the trail (wasn´t actually the correct trail). We started climbing the hill and it ended up being sheer cliffs that we were climbing, about a ¼ of the way up the member gave up and returned home.  About 1/3 of the way up my companion gave up and returned with the member.  The assistants and I continued up the now very steep hill and after about an hour and a half we finally made it (the hike should only last about 30 minutes).  When we finally made it to the tope we all took a nice break and took a bunch of photos and we thought of ourselves as champions. It was about at this time when we looked over and saw a 6 year old and her grandpa up there with us! We were super shocked until we looked over the other side of the hill and saw a road half way up the hill and then a nice little dirt path leading all the way up! We thought it was pretty funny and then we raced each other down the side of the hill (not the brightest idea but luckily no one fell and died!).

In terms of the shirts, well… I´ll just send some photos, they ended up really cool. Maybe I’ll consider a career in fashion for college hahaha, nah, but they did end up cool and now the other zones that did shirts are jealous of ours and shameful of theirs. What a great secretary gift I have to spend hours designing a shirt while my companion is locked up in the offices closing the financial cycle!

A cool moment this week was on Tuesday with one of our investigators. We both arrived at the offices at 8:00 in the night, it was an appointment that we has scheduled.  We didn´t think he would come so we took him on a tour of the church and showed him the sacramental room and he started crying and said that this was the place that he needed to be.  We then showed him a bit more of the church and ended up at the baptism fount and asked him if he would like to be baptized in a month.  He told us quickly that yes he wanted to be baptized. But then he got really worried, and we asked him what happened, and he told us he didn´t know where they sold white clothes hahaha. We told him we provided all that.  He was super excited and then told us the only thing we have to do now is to convince his family to be baptized with him! And to add to the story it was even better that he came to church with us today, and had a great time as well!

And that was our last week of this cycle, guess we´ll see what happens this next cycle!

Con amor,

Elder Bunch

México Chihuahua Misión

Secretario Ejecutivo 

Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 10

Quetal? How goes it?

Well that is crazy that school is finally out and it´s weird to think that I left a bit before school started.  Now the school year is over, that is the fastest school year I’ve had yet hahaha.  It sounds like you are starting to feel the hot temperatures over there as well.  Here we have been averaging about 38 Celsius or about 100 degrees, but apparently it is still pretty cold.  I guess here in Chihuahua we get up to about 48 Celsius (118 degrees) by the start of August.  I´m just glad I’m not still in Ojinaga which gets even hotter than that. Oofele, that would be quite painful, I’m glad that I am in a air conditioned box hahaha.

Well this week was basically dedicated to preparing for the new cycle and finishing off the month.  Basically I spent the week collecting the baptism records from all the zones and then putting each one into the church system, quite the time consuming task, but with my new improved typing speed I have been trained to average about 1 record every 5 minutes (assuming 1-2 errors).  In the end when you are the secretary that has to do this in a mission in Mexico you usually are spending 2 or 3 days doing this all day! By the end of the day one has quite the headache hahaha. But in the end, it has all gone well and even though there was a lot there hasn´t been any mistakes quite yet haha.

This week we also had to help out getting the letters for the missionaries who had more than 4 baptisms this month. Our President really likes a ball and stick game (where you have the ball with a hole attached by string and you have to fling it and try to impale it with the stick) and so for all the missionaries that get more than 4 baptisms they get one of these items (valeros) with their name engraved and their accomplishments of the month. So we spent the week trying to find all these Valeros because there were 12 companionships that achieved this goal this month!  Then on Thursday we had a big feast with all of them where the President gave each of them their Valeros. It was pretty fun and we got to see a lot of the future leaders of the mission who are working hard.

On Saturday we woke up at 5 and went with a member to the top of the biggest hill in chihuahua (that doesn´t involve hiking), just a car hahaha)  On top we watched the sunrise over the city, pretty cool stuff hahaha. Afterwords we went the damn here in Chihuahua and relaxed some more and messed with the ducks that you can pick up due to them being extremely domesticated (they were the pet ducks the school classes have to train children to be kind to animals).  Afterwards we went back to the house and cleaned and rested a bit, before going to lunch and then working in the area a bit.

All in all not a super eventful week, but still not to shabby either, this next week is going to be the end of the cycle so that means a ton of work to do! But i´ve got most of it done and it´ll be cool to see who the new recruits are going to be in the zone!

Well that was the week here in Chihuahua México,

Con amor,

Elder Bunch

México Chihuahua Misión

Secretario Ejecutivo 

Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 9

Hola!

Well I’m still pretty solid on clothes and shoes, they are starting to get pretty worn especially my shoes, but I like the look of worn clothes for a Missionary rather than new stuff haha. I´ve repaired my shoes several times now, but they are still pretty solid! And in terms of my return date it will be August 7, or August 14, also if I needed to, I can return 3 weeks earlier (as if I went to the CCM for 6 weeks). So in terms of school, it won´t be a problem haha.  Here in Chihuahua we have 4 time markers that we do, at 6 months you burn a tie(super common), at 12 months you burn a shirt(common), at 18 suit pants(rare), and at a year a suit jacket(rarer). There are some missionaries who just cut their clothes up, but they are usually the lame missionaries who are afraid their neighbors will beat them with a stick if they start to burn something haha. And that´s cool that Maren and Josie will get to see Keaton in Italy, his president must be a little more used to that kind of thing due to it being more of a vacation spot. My president wouldn´t be so open to the idea if that happened here to say the least hahahaha. In terms of if I need anything, right now I´m pretty content.  I´ve been informed that it is very likely I´ve have another 11 weeks here in the offices,  That will be cool!  It turns out the mission hasn´t voted us out quite yet, like they have with the others hahaha.

Well this week was a pretty good week of work.  On Tuesday we did 24 hour divisions with the elders in our district.  I stayed in my area with E. Johnson, and we worked all day long, it was great! My current companion is one of the best secretaries, but because of his focus on his office work, we often don´t get the chance to work in the field. Well I´m the opposite, I´m a solid secretary but I´m a much better field missionary hahaha. So anyways these splits were super fun, Johnson and I contacted all of the references I received from these last 2 weeks. At about 5 it started to rain a bit, which we found it very refreshing, but it rapidly turned into a full on lightning storm, which involved heavy raining, and hail the size of marbles. We were booking it to our next appointment when luckily a stranger gave us a ride, it was great! Anyways we went with a reference that rejected us the last time we tried to go.  The guy that gave us a ride dropped us off and while we knocked he sped off. At this point in time just staying in the rain for 10 seconds soaked you, so we were banging on the door and E. Johnson was yelling.  Finally we heard someone from inside yell back at us “Get inside,” without hesitance we ran in hahaha. We ended up having a super sweet lesson with this family where we covered a bit of every point in the gospel, from the restoration to the law of chastity. It was great!

This week I was given the responsibility to make the shirt for the zone Chimex, so I spent about 3 hours Tuesday collecting ideas that every missionary in the zone wanted and then did a vote to see how the shirt should look.  Afterwards I spent the week designing the shirt.  It was no easy task to digitally draw every design that the missionaries wanted on their shirt, but in the end I was able to accomplish it, with the help of a bit of digital design and a lot of google images hahaha.  I learned all about deleting, how to print off a picture, how to erase water marks, and how to remove parts on a picture. Pretty useful tools hahaha. Oh and how to make a big picture out of parts of small pictures, really quite the useful experience hahaha.

These next few weeks should be really cool, mainly because we are going to have a lot of baptisms! Saturday we had one and it was amazing.  O

n the 17^th we have 7 planned, where at least 3 are definite and the other 4 just need to come to church! It should be super sweet! I am super excited.  Right now my district is in competition with another district in my zone, this last month we both tied and our zones ended up getting more baptisms than any other zone! So this month we are trying to accomplish this feat again, and we have the resources and desire to pull it off! Especially my zone where we have 10 strong baptism dates and several possibilities, this next month should be sweet!

Well that was our week here!

Con amor,

Elder Bunch

México Chihuahua Misión

Secretario Ejecutivo