Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 3

Hey sorry about now writing, on Saturday all the church servers were down in the afternoon, and then yesterday I had to deal with all the paperwork that happens when a Missionary gets sent home early. It´s been a pretty fun week though.  I started out the week with pretty solid thinking that I had this whole secretary thing down and that it was all good that my trainer wasn´t there.  Then an entire district did something and got them all kicked out of the area, which sent my world for a loop with the president asking me things I had no idea how to do, and programming interviews, and in the end buying emergency plane tickets from a newly hired thick accented airport worker (that was a long painful talk that ended up lasting about and hour and a half). But all in all this new calling is super busy but super fun, even when we have to wake up at 4 to get to the airport 2 days in a row hahaha. It´s been pretty fun trying to change the approach that previous secretaries were assigned, specfically the secretaries weren´t normal proselyting missionaries.  They only worked in the offices, but now the president wants the secretaries to work in the field as well. So Elder Mendoza and I have been planning ways to work in our area and start reviving this area. At times it is hard because our area is basically a bunch of gated colonies, where we can´t contact or knock on doors, so we can only really work on references.  It is a harder approach at times because we are completely reliant on the work of other missionaries to start it off, or member referrals.

             

  Anyways this week was pretty good, me and my companion were made official co- district leaders of a district of 11 missionaries.  This has been pretty funny because our district is larger than 3 of the zones here in the mission, but for these next 2 weeks we have about 8 baptisms planned, not counting the ones from these first 3 weeks of this month. It´s going to be some pretty cool weeks coming up. This week we taught a 12 year old the word of wisdom, and it went pretty well, the entire time he was chewing on a water balloon and in the end the balloon blew up and soaked everyone and the pamphlet.  Luckily we had just finished the lesson so it was alright, and in the end because he didn´t have any problems with it, and all we have left is the law of chastity before his baptism this Saturday.  It is going to be the first time the secretaries have baptized in about a year! Everyone is really excited about.  Hopefully it all goes through well.

A large part of this week was spent with very little sleep, on Thursday one sister missionary finished her year and a half and so we woke up at 4 in the morning and took her to the airport, that night an entire district came and had interviews in the offices until about 12:00 (due to being the presidents secretary i´m obligated to stay until the president leaves haha), that next day the president had me buy plane tickets for early the next morning for one of the missionaries in this group, making us wake up again at about 3:30.  It was pretty cool though because the president took us rather than an uber like service which is how we usually do it.  Then on the way home we got to see a motorcycle accident, luckily the driver wasn´t hurt, so it was just an interesting experience to wake us all up for

a early morning haha.

And that was our week here in the offices, see ya next week!

p.s those are the sister missionaries in my district, they are pretty cool (foto)

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Elder Bunch

México Chihuahua Misión

Secretario Ejecutivo 

Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 2

Sounds like your area of México is quite different from my México, but the food looks about the same, lots of mangos and seafood, and especially here in Chihuahua a ton of meat. I will look forward to those future experiences in México with all of y´all.  It´ll be fun and to have the opportunity to understand when dad is trying to make fun of everyone in spanish ha ha ha. But glad to know that everyone had a fun time, this place is super cool!

This week was a solid week of learning how to do my job solo, up until now I have had a trainer named Elder Ochsenhirt (who happens to be my 4th cousin through the Warner side), and he´s been training me on how to do all the tasks and this week he basically has had me do everything solo and if I have questions he answered them.  The biggest thing that happened was that I had to help send a missionary home, it was a bit weird because he was the Assistant in the mission when I arrived. He hurt his spine really bad in one of the mountain areas and had to go home for surgery, so I spent a good portion of this week talking with global services and buying tickets so that this missionary could go home and say his goodbyes to all of his friends. When I wasn´t doing that we were moving into our new house and cleaning the old house. The new house is pretty cool but not quite as big.  The new one is a more American looking house, rather than the old one. We spent a lot of our time moving all the beds between the houses, due to the fact that we stay in the house of the mission where all the missionaries stay when they need to stay over night in Chihuahua, because of this we have about 15 bunk beds that we had to take apart and build them all again. But now all the houses look pretty good and I´m almost all the way unpacked ha ha ha.

A pretty fun part of this week though was that all the zones in the city of Chihuahua had their zone conferences with the president about how we can all improve in certain aspects, and we had the opportunity to help the president and his wife prepare the zones for the zone conference, which basically involved buying about 300 dollars of food (that´s a ton in Mexico ha ha).  It was really fun to travel to all the zones and see a bunch of my buddies from old zones and from my generation from the ccm. Another pretty cool part of the week was that we got to do a lot of baptism interviews, because Elder Ochsenhirt is still training me.  He is still the district leader so I still didn´t get to do much, but I learned that we often do the interviews for the zone leaders due to the fact that our schedule is a little more open than other missionaries. And on Thursday we had to do 2 interviews the same day, both unexpected. Pretty cool experience. And pretty soon we should have a baptism for ourselves.  There is a youth here named Carlos who wants to baptized, but only needs to be taught all the lessons, so right now we are teaching him with the goal to be baptized this next week, and at the latest the week after, It´s going to be awesome!

And that was my week here in the offices! See ya next week,

Elder Bunch

México Chihuahua Misión

Secretario Ejecutivo 

Secretario Ejecutivo, Week 1

Hey! This week has been super crazy and today as well so I´m going to try to write super fast again, because at this moment we are moving houses (quite the exciting life here as a secretary). Anyways this week has basically been a whole bunch of learning how to do everything from putting in baptism records to going to immigration.  Apparently most missions have 4-6 secretaries, but our mission only has 2, the executive and the financial (we´re companions).  The financial secretary is busy enough, so I do the job of all those other secretaries that other missions have, and it sure does keep me on my toes ha ha. Although it is super chaotic at times, it is super cool because I get to talk to every one of the missionaries and the missionaries that I´m now closest to are the assistants to the president and the zone leaders of all the zones.  It´s really cool to hang out with all the leaders of the mission and learn from them, and to realize that they aren´t at all different than any other missionary ha ha ha. 

This week we have the leader conference where all the zone leaders come down to Chihuahua and they listen to the assistants and the president talk.  Then they go give the message to all of the missionaries in their areas. It was our job to help prepare and serve the food, and due to having a lot of free time during those 6 hours, I was able to sit in on the conference and here the messages from the sources rather than having it relayed through the zone leaders.  Even though the zone conferences are cool they are nothing compared to listening to the actual source and all the actual details that are put in place. After the leader conference almost all of the leaders stayed in our house, and everyone of them asked me how I ended up as secretary because of many reasons such as; no one had ever heard of Elder Bunch (thanks to being in Ojinaga for 5 months),  I was the least talked about of the 3 candidates to be secretary and the other 2 are zone leaders, and finally I only have 8 months in the mission, and that has never happened before either apparently. It ended up being really fun learning about all the reasons why I shouldn´t be secretary, but well here I am ha ha ha. And although it is very hard and I have to speak spanish with the authorities of Chihuahua it has been one of the best weeks of my mission ha ha ha.

And even though I´m a bit sad that I left Ojinaga after all this time, these next few cycles as secretary should be some super fun times, even if my schedule is super wacked at times.

Sorry don´t have much times again, hopefully better luck next week!

Elder Bunch

Secretario Ejecutivo

Office Week 1

Well changes came in and dang they were quite the shock.  The president called me up last night and I was thinking that I was going to train again or something like that (when the president calls it is because you´re going to train or have leadership).  Anyways to make a long call short, I´ve been promoted to district leader, but not just any district leader, I have been made the executive secretary. It was quite the surprise to be put in a situation like this to say the least, but I´m excited to have an experience that most missiornaries never have the chance to have.  The wierdest part is after today my new p-day is going to be Saturday, usually, or if it is hectic, Monday (so don´t be calling unless I haven´t written till tuesday ha ha ha).  It´s going to be way cool being a secretary here and I´ll get to know every one of the areas in the mission and every missionary.  My new house is super cool and super big, it should be a pretty fun couple cycles here!

Well this last week was super fun in Ojinaga.  Basically everyone new that I was going to have changes so I spent my days saying my goodbyes and being invited to a whole bunch of parties, it was awesome! One of the parties they made me a soup of a mix of different types of seafood.  It was awesome with a ton of octopus, clams, shrimp. Then another party was with the future baptisms of Ojinaga.  We went over after being invited to a massive BBQ, they invited all 4 of us in Ojinaga and we ate a ton of grilled chicken and steak. It was awesome! The husband is a really good meat cook after working in a restaurant and we all ate until we were full and sick.  We all slept really well that night ha ha ha. It made me a little sad to leave Ojinaga because when I arrived the area didn´t have investigators and was in mission terms "dead", but now that I spent time in both of the areas in Ojinaga I got a chance to help revive it.  Now this next cycle Ojinaga has the potencial to baptize 10 people this month! Unfortunately I won´t be able to attend but it will be cool none the less to play a small part.

Well I´ve got to keep it short this time, so that´s more or less how the week went.  I´ll probably email on Saturday ha ha ha,

See ya in a bit,

Elder Bunch

Ejecutivo Secretario 

Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Week 18

Basically if I don´t email within a week then you can start worrying because especially while I´m here in Ojinaga, at times we don´t if we are going to be anywhere near a server or if we are in Chihuahua.  We always get a chance by Tuesday or Wednesday, if not on Monday,  This may happen again next week because I will probably have changes (transfers) and if I have these who knows if I´ll have time.  Especially if i get called to a far off area. At least for now the Mission President and his wife know who Elder Bunch is now more than before ha ha ha. 

Anyway the family search activity went well and now the members have a firmer grasp on it.  Unfortunately we didn´t get any random people showing up, but we answered a ton of questions that the members had about their family trees.  We got them all started on genealogy and because of that we gained a good amount of trust from the members.  Now they have asked us to come to their houses to help them out with their families, kinda like my old calling in the church, ha ha.  The members really liked the banner that we made for the activity and asked to keep it so that they can use it in the future with events like this or they can use the blank side and make their own event. 

Anyway this week was pretty normal we basically left all of our none progressing investigators and now are focusing on our best and more prepared investigators and contacting a ton. This turned out to be a really good decision for us because one of the investigators we chose to stay with was having marriage problems and so we taught him basic marriage relations and now the the husband has decided he doesn´t want a divorce and the wife is going to stay in mexico with the husband.  This increased the family we were teaching from 3 members to now 6 with the wife and the two kids that stay with her!  Two of those kids came with us to the church Sunday which made the entire ward happy because usually they only have a primary of 2 kids that are a little older, so we doubled the primary with our investigators!!  The primary president was very thankful to us ha ha ha. 

The other big thing that happened was that my companion erased all of my photos. Lately we have been messing with my camera because over that past 2 weeks we have found about 100 new functions that it has that I had never bothered to try out. Anyways my camera is in English so he was messing around and accidently hit the delete all button and deleted 1300 photos from my camera and about 100 videos. Neither one of us was very happy that night.  Luckily there is a photo shop near us so we quickly ran over there and he said he could recover all the photos, so we left it there for about 2 days due to the amount of photos deleted.  Luckily I got most of them back, but I did lose all of my videos.  Wierd thing is I never really cared through the entire process.  I think my companion was more distraught than I was hahaha.  In the end I´m glad I didn´t lose 8 months of the first third of my mission hahaha. 

Well that basically is how my week went here in Ojinaga, getting very tan with the weather, but having a blast with all the free water and car rides ha ha ha

See y´all next week!

Elder Bunch

Ojinaga, Chihuahua