Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Wesley's Letter 1-14-2013

Sorry guys,

The computer I’m on doesn’t have an SD card reader so no pictures this week, which is a bummer because I had a lot of funny good pictures. So don’t worry your baby is fine.

Well just to let you know, Motul is about as rural as it gets haha. The branch told the Mission President that they’d have a house prepared for us, but their interpretation of having a house ready meant that they looked at about 2 diffent houses that are being rented so one thing lead to another and none of them worked out. We actually got to the point of shaking the rent ladies hand on a deal on one of the houses, but she ended up backing out at the last second. So this entire week we’ve been going back and forth from Merida to Motul in buses or in combis every day, and we’re currently staying in the house of some of the other missionaries.

Funny thing, Motul is one of the more impoverished areas in the mission but the missionaries in my district are actually in the 2 wealthiest wards in the entire mission, so that’s a funny contrast.

Actually Motul has been closed for so long that I guess the area book got lost, so all week I’ve just been going around meeting people and looking for who were the last few people the missionaries were teaching. We’ve been going all around the area to all of the smaller pueblos around it, Kaxatha, Dzununcan and other places named in Maya. Actually this is one of the last few places on earth where the majority of the population can speak Maya, which is sad because when I come back here some day with my kids and stuff there will be a lot less Maya. The new generation of kids hardly learn any Maya from their parents, so this language is on the verge of dying.

This week we had several cool experiences, one just kind of cool was when we needed to go to Kaxatha but by feet it would have been too far, about 40 minutes, so a member that accompanied us took us out on his tricycle. 2 of us sat on the front while the other one pedaled and we did that switching off. Upon arriving to the house we found a nonmember family whose son is on a mission in Paraguay. We talked to his brother Rogelio and put a baptismal date for the 2nd of Feb.

One other thing that helped my testimony of our church is that here in Motul they have a brand new church that was dedicated in December and honestly its bigger and nicer than most I’ve seen in the United States. In any other religion or church the beauty of a church is determined by how economically well off the local members are. I see here in any other church all of their meeting houses are cinderblock tin roofed houses, which proves that there is no international organization of those churches or if there is they simply respect more the people who pay more towards the church. However in our church it exemplifies the phrase that God is no respecter of persons, or that He doesn’t make exceptions of what a worthy member deserves based on what they can give. I know that if it was based on what the members here could give there would be no way they could pay for a church like this. But the church doesn’t care about how much the physical amount of tithing you pay just that you pay the 10 percent and with that you get all of the same benefits any other worthy member would get.

Love ya bye,
Elder Smith

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