December 6, 2018

I love you momma, catch ya in a week

December 1, 2018

I learned to love the people from Elder valenzuela, he told us a cool story about the prophet and about elder Holland. The worst thing that happened this week..stupid missionaries being REALLY disobedient, and then president interviewed them and told us they had changed and repented and that they were going to work hard, then 2 days later we showed up at their house at 9:00 and they were asleep. I always expect good things and give them the benefit of the doubt, but i get let down a lot. the new guy should get here tomorrow, he is a powerhouse

November 17, 2018

Hey momma, 

not much is new around here.  On saturday we just cleaned the elders house because it was nasty, and had nothing to do with the flood, just because they are so lazy. I was irritated. We went on a road trip with the secretaries and Pres, there were 11 missionaries there helping them clean their stupid house because they don't know how to solve their own problems. Then when we got there the missionaries just sat and watched everyone else work. In the next four weeks my goal is just not to kill anyone because these missionaries are getting dumber. We are still living in the office because our house is not very nice and we are busy doing office stuff at night usually. I lost my camera i think yesterday, which is lame, but the good thing is it didnt have that many pictures, but still a bummer.

November 10, 2018

Hey momma, Things are still busy around here, we had more special transfers this week for disobedient missionaries, and today we are going to tecuala where the hurricane hit with president, were going 3 weeks later, but were going...I dont think things will mellow out before i leave because the area president is coming in a couple weeks. My new companion is pretty cool, i still dont know him super well but hes cool. I feel like an old man because theres lots of things where i can tell he has a lot less time on the mission than me. he is from mexico city. miracle this week was we went to a place where there were 50 houses and you have to touch the doorbell and the person opens the gate for you from inside their house, and i felt like we should go visit this lady, but i didnt know where she lived, i just remembered she lived by the bank, so we get to this gated thing and i ring the first doorbell i thought of, doorbell 11, and she answered and let us in, so that was kinda neat. I contacted 150 people this week probably, and we started knocking doors in the apartment buildings because we dont have investigators, but everyone just rejects us so hard. we met an indian guy, the conversation went like this,

"buenas tardes hermano disculpe"

"I know about your church"

"wow you speak english, how do you know english" 

"i am from india" 

"woooow thats so cool, could we come back some time to talk"

"i think maybe not because i dont really need your love and your religious stuff"

i dont know why but i thought it was funny, the kid i was with got super excited that he spoke english and he just shut us down. 

November 5, 2018

 this week wasnt super great so i dont have much to say, sorry. i will have pday again saturday, so saturday i will write you a better email. i promise. Sending off elder velazquez was crazy because the church bought all 17 flights  without luggagee so we had to pay a lot of cash that i didnt have on me, and there were problems with  visas so they didnt want to let people leave the country. so our goodbye was pretty rushed. my new comp is sweet, but i havent gotten to know him at all because of all the craziness going on. I love you momma, hope you have a good week. 

the missionaries were native and american, it wasnt that much their fault, they told the sisters not to go to the church, and they went for them twice in a car before the flooding started, and one time once the flooding started and the sisters refused to leave the church, I probly wouldve thrown them over my shoulder and carried them out. Stinking sisters.

October 25, 2018

Listen up kids, Elder Koenig has got a yarn to spin. So sunday night there was a hurricane warning for a hurricane named willa that was sposed to hit on tuesday. And President Reyes is gone because he has a training in Mexico, so my and Elder Velazquez are alone in this one. Tuesday we decided to evacuate the missionaries from tecuala and acaponeta because that is where the hurricane was supposed to hit hardest, but right after we took them out president called and told us to leave them there to work, but we moved them to the zone leaders house anyways so that they could all be together. But the Elders from acaponeta left their area way late because the elder is the branch president and he was preparing everything for his branch, they left around 3, which was rigth when the hurricane hit land. The instructions we gave everyone was that everyone tuesday made a bag for 7 days, with all their cash, identification and that they went to buy food for a week and they should all get together. Tuesday afternoon the hurricane passed, bringing lots and lots and lots of rain, meaning that the river is going to flood, so we asked to evacuate teh elders and president said no. The elders have a 2 story house so we told them to take everything upstairs, and that they would go to help put sand bags on the river. We told them to take the sister missionaries to the Sister Preciados house, because we know Tuxpan and we know who has a safe house. So then the missionaries called us at 1:30 to let us know that the river was starting to leave, and that the sisters were in the church (right next to the river) because they made the church a refuge for the week and old(worst idea ever, it is not on high ground), but nobody thought it would be a good idea to send healthy people to the church to help. So we told the zone leaders to get the sisters out of the church, but they didnt want to go because the water was up to their calves. so instead of getting the sisters to a two story house, all 6 of the Elders went back to the 2 story house of a member. So the sister missionaries are in the church with their ward mission leader who is young, and 3 people 75 years and up. The water started rising so the sister missionaries stacked tables on tables. The zone leaders called us to let us know that the water was 9 feet deep and that they had left their bags we told them to make in their house, and that the food for a week that we told them to buy, they ate it all the night before because they got hungry. The water kept rising, and the elders were on the roof of a 2 story house totally fine, But the sisters were in the church and the water was rising fast, so they somehow got all 3 of these old men up a ladder and into the crawl space of the church and were sitting there watching the water rise and praying it didnt rise up into the crawl space with no way out. at 10pm on wednesday night we lost contact with the sister missionaries, and me, elder velazquez and elder mendez each had the phone number of one of the people in the church, I called the sisters, elder velazquez was calling carlitos, and elder mendez called alexis. Meanwhile i was talking to a sister that me and velazquez knew in tuxpan who has some political ties and she was helping us to get some military boats to go pick them up from the church. So at like 2:30am the military boat finally gets to teh church, but the sisters are inside the church, up in teh crawl space, so they cant leave to get in the boat, and the soldiers dont hear or see them, so after 6 hours trying to get a boat to go for the sisters, the boat came and left and the sisters are still inside. The whole time we were still calling the 3 numbers that we had non stop. At 4:30 the hermano carlitos finally answered his phone and we could talk to the sisters and know they were still alive. At this point the sisters had climbed down and were in the sacrament room on a table on top of the pulpit and the water was still up to their knees, soaking wet and freezing cold, but the old people were still up in the crawl space because they couldnt get down. So at 4 we put a plan to call every hour to make sure everything was alright. by 6 the water had gone down to mid shin again, so we called the elders at 7 and told them to go for the sisters. at 9 we hadnt heard anything and we had been trying to call the elders for an hour and they finally turned there phone back on to tell us that they still hadnt gone for the sister missionaries because they didnt want to get their feet wet. At 10:30 we finally talked some elders into going for the sisters, so we call carlitos to talk to the sisters, and he tells us the sisters got tired of waiting for the stupid elders and went walking through the water by themselves to go get help for the old people. At like 12 the sisters got to the house where all the elders were, they walked their on their own. At 1 the elders called us to let us know that tehir houses were completely wrecked. All their study materials and photos and just about all their things were destroyed because they never got around to taking their stuff upstairs, so the water thrashed it and carried it to all other parts of tuxpan. The elders in tecuala also live in a two stories house, but carrying everything upstairs sounded like a lot of work, so instead of taking their things upstairs they just left it downstairs and stacked everything on top of their bed. But they havent been able to go back to their house to check, but i imagine things are destroyed. The miracle was that God thought the sister missionaries had suffered enough, so their things were all fine, because even though their house only has 1 story, they stacked the fridge on top of the table and put their things on top of the fridge like we told them to, and all of their things were fine, their beds and some other stuff of the mission got destroyed, but all their things were fine. At like 1:00 the guy from church security got to tuxpan with a couple elders from tepic to help, and they took the sisters to tepic. So then at 2 elder koenig and elder velazquez fell asleep for the first time in about 40 hours, and then when we woke up we ate a fat ton because in all teh chaos we forgot that we were hungry. So the moral of the story, is get ready for the flood. I am still livid with the elders for not helping the sisters at all, and because they are idiots. They thought it was vacation and didnt prepare for anything like we told them to. I guess thats kinda how life is sometimes, we all know the second coming is around the corner, and we know we have to prepare, but when the prophets tell us to do things we sometimes think its a joke or something, or we dont take it as seriously as we should and we dont prepare, and then when the water comes things get real bad real quick. And that is the story of how elder koenig, elder velazquez, and elder mendez became mission presidents and saved the mission. things didnt go too smooth, but at least nobody died. Things definitely wouldve gone smoother if they did what they were told. Also, dont share this with people because it makes the elders look bad, but the sisters were warriors.  

October 24, 2018

Theres usually more missionaries getting here around this time of year, last year we had 26 people get here at once in november. in the mission we have like 135 missionaries. I wrote the letter about the hurricane, but i was translating from spanish so im not sure how good it sounded, there were some things that i wasnt sure if they were right or not, my english is rough. We evacuated the coastal area, i think i already said that, this week we ate some tortas ahogadas, which translated is...drowned sandwhich? do you know what a torta is? so they get special bread thats hard, because if not you will have nasty soggy bread. so you get the bread (birote) and you fill it with meat and onions and avocado and stuff, then you grab the sandwhich with tongs and dunk it in suuuper spicy salsa, then you put more salsa on top so that the bread is wet and not too tough, and then you eat it, with horchata rosada, which is water they make with rice and strawberries, it is gooood. The miracle is that the hurricane didnt destroy anybody too bad. The wheat and the tares isnt going to be one big event, it is going to be a series of small events, like the changes in the church, and the wheat are the people who are willing to follow the changes with faith. I will try to teach president some stuff, he is kinda weird with prayers, they brought breakfast and passed it out and everyone was kinda waiting for the prayer but him and his wife were eating, and we asked if we could say a prayer and he told us that they blessed it before they left their house. weird. Ill send pictures in a bit momma. have a good wednesday