Week 35 from Mexico

25 April 2010

¡Hola!  ¿Cómo esta?  ¿Qué hay de nuevo?  (How are you? What's new?)

The weather has become quite warm. We had a spell of rainy weather and the temperatures have been in the 70's;   very nice, but this week it is been in the 90's.  As we get into spring the trees and plants at the temple are showing much improvement from the damage from the frost in January, though some are still looking pretty sad.  I've posted some pictures of before and after in my Picasa Web albums. I'll send a link to the pictures.

The last couple of weeks I've been spending part of my mornings with Cynthia Escalera. She missed coming a couple of days because she was sick but we met on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday of last week and Tuesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.  We don't meet on Wednesdays because that's when we go to do a session at the temple, or at least I do.  Lynn usually ends up helping because they are short on workers.

It's been fun to get to know Cynthia. We go through her workbooks from her English classes and discuss stories and pictures, grammer, etc. with me struggling to come up with the Spanish. She definitely knows a lot more English then I do Spanish.  Let me tell you a little about her. She is twenty-one years old, almost twenty-two, born in May of 1988, and graduated from the UANL (Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo León) in December and is looking for a job.  She needs to practice English to improve her chances for getting a job.  She has one brother, who is living with his girlfriend and they have one son, who is Cynthia's only nephew.  She attended a private catholic school for nine years, from age six to fifteen, after which she attended the Prep for UANL for two years before spending four years at the UANL.  She explained to me how the school system works.  For those attending the public schools the primary school is for six years, then the secondary is for three years. Because she attended a private school those nine years were all spent there. These public schools are subsidies partly by the government but the families are supposed to pay for what is not covered unless they are too poor to do so.  After secondary school you can either stop and try to get a job without much training or go on to get more training or a degree for better paying jobs.  In order to attend the universities or colleges you need to go through what's called the Prep or Preparatorio for that university or college, which is for two years.  Then on to earn a degree at the university.

One day we were looking at and discussing some pictures of places around the world and one was of the Empire State Building in New York City.  She said that her father was working in New York City at the time that the Twin Towers were destroyed. He didn't see it actually happen but saw all the smoke and the fear of the people and felt scared.

Friday, Cynthia & I were doing a time line of our lives and talking about them.  She said that when she was fifteen they had a big party with musical groups, dancing, lots of food and lots of people invited. This is a common custom of the Mexican people. It's a sort of coming of age thing for young women.

Wednesday, when we went to the temple, Lynn met the new missionary couple, the Riggs, who had just arrived here in Mexico on Tuesday.  They had come to help with the missionary session at 7am.  I was in the 9am session and so didn't get a chance to meet them, but we will tomorrow night at FHE. I look forward to getting to know them.

Friday, we were going to have an English session at 7pm. They had decided to make that a monthly thing, on the 4th Friday of the month.  We started out the shift with only me as the only worker. Sis. Zavala, the obreras coordinator, had a real problem to deal with. She needed to have someone to run the 5:30pm session but she also needed to make sure to have someone for the 7pm, the English session. So, she decided to have me do the 5:30pm session unless someone came before it started and just be available to help with the last of the 7pm session.  Fortunately, Sis. Garcia, came about ten minutes before the 5:30pm session was to start so she was able to take it.  As it turned out we only had three English speaking patrons, two sisters and one brother, for the 7pm session so we ended up doing it in Spanish and giving them the headphones, just it would have normally been done.  It's taking a while for the idea to catch on. I think they need to get the word out a little more.   Lynn & I left right after this session so we could get to bed early to be at the temple by 5am, as is our schedule now.  I felt bad leaving that early because they were so short-handed but knew I would be exhausted if we tried to stay any later.

Saturday, was a very long day but also very rewarding for me.  We were there from 5am to about 6pm.  Though it wasn't quite as busy a day as we usually have we had a lot of first time endowment patrons.  I was able to help several of the sisters through the last part of the session and had some very special experiences with it that reconfirmed my testimony of the beauty and blessing of the promises we receive in the temple.

Today, at church, I was surprised to see Sister Berenice Montalvo, the young sister who was going to be serving a mission in California I helped when she went through the temple for the first time.  She was visiting someone in the ward and came over to me to say “Hi!” I told her I was surprised to see her and she said that she had some visa problems and was still waiting to go. Hopefully, she will be leaving before too long.  She said it was really frustrating but she was dealing with it.