Wesley's Letter 2-4-13

Hey got news, I forgot to bring my camera cable so I won’t be sending any pictures this week. But the good news is that this week we baptized 2 people, one named Santos and the other Leonardo, both are recovering alcoholics and both are legit converts. Leonardo told my comp in the baptismal font, after getting baptized, that he had “forgotten everything” with tears in his eyes.

Santos was one of the first people we met here. He’s actually the ward mission leader’s brother. His daughter was listening to the missionaries and her father Santos was against it. After about 2 months of not letting his daughter progress or go to church she lost her enthusiasm and stopped trying. Later when we arrived, he’s the one that was basically begging us to baptize him. Haha we`re also working with her but now she lives in some other small pueblo that’s kind of far and its hard to get a hold of her.

So these last few weeks I’ve had some seriously hilarious experiences. Yesterday the bishop permitted us to take some of the chairs from the church to put them in our house because these last 4 weeks all we’ve had were our hammocks and the floor. So we brought the chairs in another trici-taxi. That was pretty funny, us both and 4 giant chairs in a tiny trici.

So one dumb thing about Motul, basically there are no stores or shops with any fixed prices. Everything here is family owned, and the reason its bad is because none of the prices anywhere are labeled, so when the people see me enter the shop they figure that I’m just an oblivious rich tourist that has way too much money. So whenever I ask for the price of something they always kind of look at me for like 10 seconds configuring how much they could sack out of this dumb Gringo. But what they never seem to get is that I’ve been living here for more than a year and I get the ropes of how much things should cost and how the market works. The really sad part is that when they say the ridiculously high new price and I know they raised it just because I’m American. I ask if there is any way to lower the price to about the normal price where it should be, and they keep playing the "Oh I’m sorry there’s just no way, I can’t go any lower than where it is now", but I know they’re lying. So in the end I end up not buying it and they end up not getting any sale out of it. Now I’ve just gotten to the point where if any one tries to raise their prices on me I decide to never go back and buy from them again. And another sad thing is that it happens in basically EVERY STORE UGGGGGGRRR.

Anyway I’m all outta time PEACE
SMIT