Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 16

Hola!

Canada sounds pretty cool, and the weather sounds a lot like it has been here recently in terms of the temperature, because we´ve been caught up in massive rainstorms all week and next week! It has been great! Lot of flash floods though, but better to have rain than deadly heat! And hey Amazon delivers hear as well only that it first goes through the Branch president in Texas hahaha, not quite as fast, but it kind of works haha. And I guess Chihuahua actually get´s more visited than I originally thought due to how much tourism we have to deal with when we go the airport (all the Americans trying to speak Spanish with the airport attendants), it is more like a big national park, kinda like the Grand Canyon only without the swimming part as often. It is more of a bring your jeep and journey the mountain and the waterfalls, it´s pretty cool, and then you go to a steak buffet for the best steaks in México! I´ll probably visit when I get back when all the wars start settling down in a year or two, it´ll be sweet! And cool to hear I’ve got another cousin! I’ve lost count…How many do I have now? Hahahaha, and cool to have another red head, I always thought that trait was on dad´s side, maybe not… hahaha. And darn i´m going to miss a lake Powell trip, that´s a bummer, maybe next year I guess, I could go for a striper bass feast one of these days haha. And I shall be looking forward to all the packages, right now the president of Ojinaga is in the states visiting his kid so he won´t be back for a week or two, but soon I shall receive all the packages!

Well this week was awesome! It rained all week keeping the weather cool to the point where we had to use blankets again to sleep! We got a baptism we were pretty sure wasn´t going to happen, and I got to eat some more Menudo even though it is usually only served in the winter! Awesome week!

Well let´s start with the rain, on Wednesday is when it all began, at about 4 the rain started and by 5 there was a river in the street about a foot deep! We went with our chofer to do a few tasks and it felt like we were surfing with how much water was coming over the car, there were parts where it was so deep that it moved our car with the tide, when we finally got to our destination me and my companion had to get out of the car and we were outside for about 30 seconds and we were already soaked, on the return back to the car my companion fell into a big hole that looked like the sidewalk and well he got soaked and was not happy about it, to say the least hahaha. But I thought it was super cool due to not seeing sufficient rain in a year haha. I´ll send a pic when it was starting and we were in the middle of the city!

Onto the unpredicted baptism, well a little while ago I put a goal for the district to baptize every week, and well we´ve been pulling it off! We were a little worried that we wouldn´t keep our goal because this week the Hnas. Had a date for an inv. And everything was going well until Friday when I went to do another baptism interview and my companion went to do the interview with this inv. Of the hnas. Well my interview went well but the inv. Of the Hnas. Wasn´t in his house so they couldn´t do the baptism interview, so we postponed it until tomorrow, only problem was that on Saturday we had to go take a missionary to the airport for certain reasons… Anyways we called the zone leaders up and they went to do the interview, only problem was that the inv. Called and told us he was in the hospital with his niece who had an accident and couldn´t come, and so that go rid of that option. So our last resort was today(Sunday) during the second hour during gospel principals he asked us for a blessing to help him for his travel (oh and he is leaving the area for 2 months, because of this it was a bit rushed to get him baptized), after the blessing we asked him if he would like to be baptized, and he said yes, but only if we did it then because he was leaving the next day. So we talked with our mission leader and he organized it all, and boom I got to baptize him! It was awesome! And well that was our week here in México!

con amor,

-- 

Elder Bunch

México Chihuahua Misión

Secretario Ejecutivo 

Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 15

Hola ¡que rollo!

Sounds like Canada went pretty well, if it is anything like how Alaska was then it must´ve been pretty sweet! Right now I´m trying to convince the assistants and president to send me to Madera.  It is an area In our mission in the mountain range and also happens to be the coldest area in all of México.  I´ve been coming up with some pretty good arguments but we´ll have to see how it goes.  It has already started to cool down over there, and during the winter it averages about 15 degrees Fahrenheit in the day! But apparently it is a super cool place with a lot of pine trees and Yellowstone type animals! It would be fun to go there though because Ojinaga is the hottest place in the mission (in the spring/summer) and Madera is the coldest (in the winter) and to have the two of them on my list of areas would be sweet hahaha

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This week was another week dealing with lots of river flooding and just flooding in general, it was sweet! Apparently it is super common during this time in the year and that the waterfalls in the mountain range are amazing (another reason I hope I go to the mountain range haha). Luckily nothing to bad has happened yet due to the flooding at least that I know of haha. This week we also continued with our baptism per week goal. This week was pretty cool because the other elders baptized an inv. That I met during her first lesson with the missionaries.  The only thing was back then I would´ve never thought she would get baptized.  She was super serious said she was a faithful Catholic and wouldn´t open the door but one of her daughters opened it. It´s a miracle that she got baptized! And she is so different now.  She is super cool and makes us some awesome food! This next week the sister missionaries have another baptism of a widow they found a while ago and she has 4 daughters that range from 9 years old to a 1 year old.  She´s super cool and has a strong desire to be baptized as well as her 9 year old daughter! It looks like we are on track to win the balero (ball and stick thingy) again for the zone! Assuming that everything goes well!

Another great week in Chihuahua,

Con amor,

Elder Bunch

México Chihuahua Misión

Secretario Ejecutivo 

Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 14

Quetal! ¿Como estas?

That was pretty unexpected to hear about the business, but cool as well! I don´t really understand half of what his inventions do (you can find the patents under his name online pretty easily) but it looks fairly interesting hahaha.  Hopefully they are better than the dog food launcher, although that was the coolest science project at the fair that year, a lot better than all the vinegar and baking soda volcanoes hahaha.  It sounds like the 4^th of July went alright hahaha, next year I´ll miss it by a month, but who knows my end date is really wacky so maybe I´ll be back before/on the 24^th, that´d be cool! Hopefully there is a better air/fountain fireworks ratio going on though, maybe a few of those lady bugs haha.  It sounds like another fun goat adventure, and good to hear you didn´t bring the lice goat home, otherwise you would be shaving all the dogs and any other furred animals, that´d be a fun experience haha.  The Hyrum lake experience sounds awesome! Keaton is trying to get another lake Powell adventure when we all get back, it´ll be sweet to have an opportunity to swim after 2 years, that´s one of the weirdest parts of the mission, but now I´m getting used to it….took long enough haha.

Well we didn´t really do anything for the 4^th here.  We woke up at 3:30 in the morning to take someone to the airport, so I guess that was kind of like a celebration hahaha.  Our big party was on Monday, Elder Vargas (my trainer) and Elder White had their last day in the mission.   We all went to a chicken wing buffet in a massive restaurant mall thingy, it was awesome! We probably spent about 3 hours eating there and talking about all the areas they were in! We were there so long because they would bring us a new plate of wings about every 20 minutes, and well after 20 minutes, we were always hungry again.  We ended up eating all of their fried mushrooms and in the end we only left because of the mission curfew, it was great! The only problem is that the assistants and my companion decided to go and do their own party and neither one of them had internet… so no one could send me an Uber… we ended up waiting about a hour before they remembered to send us one!  Needless to say when we finally got to our house, it was super late… I probably got like 2-3 hours of sleep, it was amazing! I´m not even sure how I survived Tuesday on that much sleep, but I pulled it off! Hahaha.

Otherwise we didn´t really do much this week.  I had to put all the baptism records in the system this week so that kept me pretty busy.  Right now we are working hard with one of our golden investigators, his name is Alfredo, and we had a pretty fun experience with him this week. On Wednesday we went to visit him at work.  Afterwards he gave us a ride and asked us if we could help him bring some furniture to the house of one of his buddies.  Of course we said yes.  So after driving about 30 minutes we learned that we were headed to a whole different city that is close to Chihuahua.  Once we learned that we were going to be in the car for awhile we started teaching him about the book of Mormon.  He promptly asked me to tell him a brief summary of the book of Mormon.  I started to explain things to him and it went really well, but when I got to the middle of Alma, the truck slowly came to a halt and we learned that we were in the middle of nowhere without gas. I was thinking “dang this is going to be some sweet homecoming talk material” then right when I thought that it started pouring rain and then I thought “even better!” It was awesome! We were stranded for about 1 hour and a half! Then finally someone helped us and we got on our way.  We then dropped off the furniture and returned home at about 11:30, it was sweet! We were able to help out Alfredo a lot and we taught him every one of the lessons right down to the word of wisdom and law of chastity, super cool!

Well that was our week,

Con amor,

-- 

Elder Bunch

México Chihuahua Misión

Secretario Ejecutivo 

Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 13

Hey que tal?! 

     Sounds like quite a cool experience that you all had on Pioneer trek.  I´ve learned that trekking is good practice for when one comes on a mission to a dessert/Chihuahua and you need to walk all day. It even is about the same dress style hahaha. But it is good to hear it was a solid experience!

     Well this week was another busy week, from cooking for the missionaries in the conferences to going to the airport to take more missionaries home, we did a bit of it all this week! On Monday we spent the morning playing basketball with a couple other missionaries like we do just about every Monday, it was here that we realized the President and Hermana Montoya were going to complete 1 year in the mission on Tuesday. Ever since the shirt incident I´ve been established as the official tech guy in the mission (kinda like in the ward haha), so I got put to work on making a video with all the memorable pictures of the previous year. It ended up pretty sweet (which we found out the next day), then in the rest of my freetime I started working on new shirt designs (ever since the Chimex shirt came out everyone wants me to make shirts for their zone, or for their families, which I will do it if they pay for my shirt haha). On Tuesday we had the first conferences for the cycle, which always starts in Chimex (my zone) and Chuviscar. This time however president told us we couldn´t help Hermana Montoya and had to watch the conference.  So this was my first time seeing the Conference in 4 months! It was Sweet! During lunch break we had President and Hermana Montoya come into the dining hall and played the Video I made, it was great and Hermana started to cry! Win! And then they both asked me to send them the video so they could keep it! It was a great conference! On Wednesday we had to take a missionary to the airport nice and early like usual.  The president is working on “purifying” the mission again (he did it last year and sent like 15 missionaries to their home) so anyway I’ve been kept pretty busy and I´m going to the airport again on Tuesday at 3:00 in the morning! Great... It´s alright though, we´ve been seeing a lot of success here recently because of it.  We (the mission) are now baptizing people every week without fail, and not just 1 or 2, like 10 or more, it´s great! On Thursday we had conference in Tech, another zone here in Chihuahua, we spent the entire time cooking a feast and taking pictures, it was pretty normal in terms of that point.

     On Friday we had a missionary activity in the ward where we invited to the ex-missionaries to share some experiences from their missions and then to set up a display.  We planned it about 2 weeks ago and had about 15 ex-missionaries sign up.  We were super excited and prepared everything for all these members for their presentations, then when the day finally came around every single one of them cancelled except for one.  So we played the part of the ex-missionaries and made our own presentations and the other ex-missionary did all the things that we couldn´t do, and prepared some food from her area! Then the members started arriving, about 2 families came, 1 family left because we started 15 minutes late (due to the other family arriving 15 minute late) and then about 10 young single adults showed up to support the awesome missionaries hahaha. In the end, the activity ended up pretty well and then we ironed the ward a bit for not showing up when they keep telling us to do activities.  So the bishop´s counselor gave his testimony on what a great activity it was and the “amazing” assistance of the ward… It was pretty sweat! The ward wants us to do the activity again but with the assistance of the ward this time hahaha.

And well that was our week here!

Con amor,

-- 

Elder Bunch

México Chihuahua Misión

Secretario Ejecutivo