First I asked him last week where Alamos 2 (his district) was
because we are trying to find him on the map and he replied:
“Actually they changed it to Alamos 1 right before Transfers. It is in the city
of Puebla and it is near the border between the north mission and the south
mission. Maybe if you search for the Colonia Alamos you will be able to find
it.”
I did and this is what I found:
[link won't post right now--I'll have my computer geek work on it]
I put in “puebla mexico Alamos” in google maps search. It also gave me a few other options, so I still don’t know where Jason is except in the hands of the Lord, doing his work and all is well.
Jason's email:
“3 months down 21 to go (not that I’m counting)”
[He actually titled his email this time!]
I am actually not counting down I'm just counting how long I have been out by the number of transfers that I have (or would have) been though. One transfer is 6 weeks so counting the MTC I have been through 2 and am just starting my third and there are 17.3 transfers in a mission counting the MTC so there are about 16 in the field and you go home at the end of the 16th I think. It is really easy to count transfers because you use one planer per transfer so all I have to do is keep them all and whenever I want to know how many transfers I have been out for I just count my planners so I have one transfer in the Field and so I have one old planner.
Well Elder Swenson is now district leader and almost certainly will be for this transfer and the next. This is because training is 2 transfers so neither of us are getting transferred next transfer unless for some reason they want me to train with 6 weeks in the mission (or him).
This week was both awesome and terrible at the same time. I'll go with the bad news first so that you can be lifted up by the good after.
We weren't very productive this week and our numbers show it. We barely had 5 lessons all week :( the work with investigators is very slow here. We don't do finding activities. We don't knock doors. We don't do much street contacting. All of our work basically has to come through the members and that can be very hard when they don't give you many referrals. Also I wish that I didn't have to learn a language to help these people and they all just spoke English. But enough of my complaining now I'm going to move on to why this week has been AWESOME!!
We have been meeting with part of this family named Es* and a friend of theirs who lives with them and this week the 15 year old daughter basically asked to be baptized!!! So we set a date and are working to see if we can get the rest to have the same date so they can all be baptized together. It will be so cool if we are able to do it!! The only problem is that she works on Sunday and even worse is that she works during Church (Church is from 12-3 and she works from 10-3 on Sunday) so we don't know how hard it will be to get her to church and this week was even harder because they had a family emergency Saturday night when we had an appointment with them and so we were unable to invite them to church this week so we will have to move the baptism date because they need to come to church 3 times before they can be baptized ;( The other good news is actually in the numbers I said were bad earlier. Here we track something called "MARS" which stands for "Menos Activos Reunión Sacramental" which means Less-Actives in Sacrament Meeting. The good news is that we had 10!! this week (that's a lot). The chapel was the fullest I have ever seen it. It actually looked like enough people to be a ward (it is one there are just a lot of less actives here).
Well I thought that I would send this picture to show off Mexican architecture and ingenuity... Yes that is what you think it is. They didn't like where the door was so they put a wall behind it.
-Elder Blanding
"The way not to go"