Wesley's Letter 3-26-12

Sup brews?

This weeks been pretty chill. Not too much has happened but I keep on hearing a bunch of news about every one. Tell Calli and Matt I’m super syked for them. Tell John Gove congrats and I want to meet his wife when I get home.

Probably the biggest news is that yesterday we found a kid that had been attending church for a long time, but we had no idea, we asked him if he wanted to get baptized and he said yes, so he’s getting baptized this week. But I’ll tell you this kid is amazing! He has been coming to church all by himself for the last few years, all this in spite of no one in his family being a member and he already has goals to do vicarious work, because his dad had passed away a few years ago.

His names Jorge and he’s super chill. It’ll be the fastest I’ve found someone and then have them get baptized. Less than a week!

Not a lot more news except that cat keeps on finding ways to get into our house, but it’s ok because it eats all of the pests in the house. It’s already caught and eaten about 12 lizards and I don’t know how many cockroaches, ick. The difference between the cockroaches here and the ones in the US is that here if a cockroach bites you it’ll give you a disgusting infection and it’ll swell up and ooze puss. Its like worse than a scorpion sting. Yep

Oh ya Dad, the funny part about all of the pictures you sent me is that things like that happen here on a daily basis, the culture here’s so funny, the people here really are like the rednecks of Mexico and I love it!

Anyway I wanna get more letters from you guys and hear who’s getting married and all that kind of stuff.

LATER...day saints,
Elder Smith

Wesley's Letter 3-19-12

Sups FAM?

Hey, tell Matt Passmore that I got his package and that I love his face and I’m going to send him a letter, but when I got his package it didn’t have a return address, so I might end up sending it first to our house as a letter within a letter then you guys can give it to him later. Idk things will be a lot easier when I can just Facebook people and guess what, that’s gonna be in only 15 more months yippppppyidido. All you other friends can learn from Matt’s example and send me a letter I promise I’ll cherish it and write you back...

Also mom and dad, I want a list of all the kids in the stake that are either serving or going to serve a mission and I would love to know where.

Okay, so news here:
So the other night my comp Elder Suarez, a young member Sergio and I were walking home and we had only just turned onto an obscure unpaved street when my comp and I at the same time got a feeling to walk around it. Right as we turned around we found out there was a creepy hobo following us and as we passed him he asked Sergio if he had any money but we felt we should just kept on walking...There were two guys following us and I know if we had kept walking down that street they would have prison shanked us with a sharpened toothbrush then finish us off with a nice curbstomping, but thanks to a prompting from the Holy Ghost that didn’t happen.

So, I’ll explain some of these pictures, some are of a barbeque we had today and we played basketball. That was pretty chill.

The picture of me in a taco shop is of me and Luis, who I’ve told you guys about. Actually we had to wait quite some time to take that picture because there’s always a big line in front.

Alight I still haven’t explained to you whose my comp is...
My comp is Elder Suarez from Torreon, Cauilla. Del Norte del País and makes sure every one knows. Super norteño. He loves futball and is a diehard Santos fan. He’s awesome! He is probably the most mature of all the missionaries I’ve seen here. He is a convert to the church and was baptized not even 3 years ago and is by far the best missionary I’ve seen here. I’ve never seen him stumble even a little bit in any lesson so far and he knows the scriptures about twice as well as I do. He’s the only member in his family so he had to work and pay for his own mission. He’s awesome.

Okay so that’s about that for today and I really do want to get more letters especially from the people who haven’t written me yet. You know who you are! I just want to know if you’re still alive, because I really have no idea.

Whelp that’s all for today peace out,
Smitty



























Elder Smith and Elder Suarez's beds.

Wesley's Letter 3-11-12

Hey sup?

So this week’s been a pretty big awesome success story! We found about 4 families that all say they want to devote themselves more to God and want to change religions, so we’ll see how that goes. We should see a baptism this week that I wasn’t expecting at all. There’s a girl we’ve been teaching that went for her third time to church this week and she kind of had an attitude that she just saw us as another church. But this week we asked her about baptism and she actually said she wants to be, but she’ll think about it.

Actually I have a really awesome story this week. So the guy we’ve been teaching that’s been having all these dreams, well this week we committed him to a baptismal date but unfortunately he’s leaving for Guatemala for 2 weeks, then in about a month he’s going to the United States. But not for coincidence he has a sister that lives in Encinitas, where he would also be staying for about a year as he works. So, I might have a referral for dad and the missionaries in the Spanish branch. How would you guys like to see a baptism of one of the people I taught in my mission? Well this might be your chance, his name is Artemio and I’ll send you his directions in Encinitas when he goes there. I’ll be praying that if dad does divisions with the missionaries he’ll be chosen to do the baptismal ordinance. But it all depends if he gets baptized here or not, we’ll see.

Alright, so I’ll explain some of these pictures, the scorpion we found in an investigators house and we killed it with a lighter and hair spray .

Last night we kind of fried out and I spent an hour learning how to weave palm fronds and I’m pretty excited because I learned how to do it all on my own! Some of those pictures are of me cutting up palm fronds with a machete and making cool, useful stuff like that shield, club, and I also learned how to make rope, ya I’m pretty cool.

I don’t know if I ever told you but we now pretty much have a pet cat. One day it just kind of wandered in the house from the street and now it won’t leave. There’s a picture of it, we named her Pepita. Last night she climbed through a broken window while I was sleeping and jumped in my hammock with me, it scared the crud out of me!

Also, wasps keep on flying in our house to make a nest in one of our light fixtures, but it’s ok because they keep on flying into the swirling blades of our ceiling fan and we swat them with our sandals when they get too close. It’s kind of fun.

I’m out of time,
Smith out

Wesley's Letter 3-4-12

¿Ba'ax ka'ua li'k sookum'o? ¿mi'ix ba? I bought myself a little Spanish to Maya dictionary the other day for my birthday and man is Maya a weird language, but way cool. There’s a guy in my ward here that always teaches me Maya. For some reason Maya is more easily learned by English speakers than Spanish, so I actually speak more Maya than my companion who was just in a little pueblo for the first 5 months of his mission.

Believe it or not there are actually a few Mayan branches of the church here, where the services are 100% in Maya. It’s a pretty awesome idioma. I want to learn it just to show off to every one when I get home, because you will never hear it in any place that’s not the back woods of the Yucatan!

Any way this week I don’t really have any stories, I mean I have some but I can’t tell them because it has to do with missionary confidentiality and most are pretty depressing, the stories of the people I teach here.

Let me just say something, don’t throw away your lives on drugs or alcohol kids, because here it’s at least a 9 times out of ten, some accident happens and your entire life gets turned to a big mess.

Also on the law of chastity, I can literally tell you after speaking to well over a few thousand people that not living it can destroy your life, just as much as drugs, and you’ll be taking other people down with you. Almost every person here in the peninsula is someone else’s illegitimate child and almost no one really knows who their own father is. Almost every man here over 40 years old has had about at least 3 other families with kids before he settles down. They treat having a family as more of a trial and error thing, if they mess-up or things get too hard, it’s okay because they can just run way to another state and start over. That really is the mentality.
And I’m going to tell you right now I could keep writing about this stuff for about 2 more hours but I’m out of time. I’ll end with this; having sex out side of the bonds of a committed marriage is an act of pure selfishness and I’m saying this because of what I’ve seen and the people I’ve met here. (Not just for what the church’s stance is on the subject.)

That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

Elder smith

I got your package...awesome. I never got the card from the Brummers or the package from Matt soo...

Well, tell Matt he’s the man for getting ready for the mission and I’ll be praying that he gets sent to the Mexico-Merida Mission.