fun

Dear Family,

It was quite a busy week. I've been uplifted so much! Let me tell you all about it.

Monday night, we hopped on a bus to Trujillo (about 2 hours) and stayed the night in the office elders' apartment - I actually got to sleep in a bed this time! Tuesday morning at an unknown hour, somebody woke me up and in my drowsiness I offered to go play soccer with them. It woke me up at least, and after a quick shower, we were all ready to head to the nearby church building to start a long meeting with President Mora, his assistants and all the zone leaders in the mission. We got going at 8am - I got to play the piano: I've been missing that for a while, because our ward here in Chimbote actually has several able (more or less) pianists and a chorister who knows the difference between 3/4 and 4/4 time. We listened and worked until the afternoon, and we all went out to eat "pachamanka." "Pacha" means "earth" and "manka" means "oven", so - you guessed it - it was a meal cooked under a pile of dirt. It included several whole chickens, large cuts of beef (unfortunately, the hole wasn't quite big enough for whole cows), piles of potatoes and yams, and a number of sweet little tamales wrapped in corn husks, glazed with butter, and cooked to perfection. They wrapped most of the meal in large fronds, together with white-hot rocks, put a little burlap blanket over it and covered it in dirt. More exciting than a groundbreaking ceremony is when there's food for 50 hiding under the dirt. It was delicious. We continued our meeting after getting back to the church, and we finished around 7 at night. We finally made it back to Chimbote at 10:30 and got to bed more or less on time.

We took some time Wednesday morning to share with our zone everything we learned in our meeting with President Mora. We had the evening free, so we got to visit some new investigators we have been teaching and take care of a baptismal interview for next week.

Thursday morning, bright and early, President Mora and his assistants came down to Chimbote for our interviews with him. There are three zones here in Chimbote, so it wasn't a quick process. We were there all morning and still didn't get an interview. However, we participated in training (further) all of our zones on the important principles we learned in our previous meetings. That lasted until after lunch time, but we got the afternoon to ourselves again, since President Mora had a few meetings with the local Stake Presidencies.

Friday morning, once again bright and early, we had a training meeting with President Mora and hammered in further the ideas we had been developing the last few days. The meetings were highly spiritual and powerful: everyone was motivated to work even harder to achieve their goals and be obedient to mission rules. In the afternoon, the assistants came with us to an activity in a nearby ward: we went out with members and leaders to visit all the less-active members we could find. We enjoyed borrowing the assistants' cell phones and using them to coordinate appointments and getting the members to help us. We sure could use one of those.

Saturday morning, our perfectly planned morning was cut in by our long-awaited interview with President Mora. We also drove around with Hermana Mora to inspect some of the missionaries' rooms and make sure they're keeping them clean (or to check if the rumors are true and they are as dirty as they're reputed to be). In the afternoon, we took what little time we had to meet with a member who had given us a referral: we invited her to come to the appointment with us later in the evening. She told us she'd meet us there. In the meantime, we threw on our suit coats and took a moto-taxi over to the stake center for the Priesthood Session of Stake Conference. Elder Vladimir J. Campero presided in the conference. He's an Area Seventy from Bolivia, and it was nice to talk with him and hear him speak.

We raced out of the conference and hopped the closest moto-taxi to head to our appointment that started in 3 minutes (the same one we had planned with the member earlier). Unfortunately, the taxi-driver ran a red light and got pulled over. That delayed us a minute, and we pressed on. I think we picked the slowest moto-taxi in all of Peru! We finally made it to an intersection where we needed to turn, but the taxista didn't seem to understand us. He couldn't turn right for some reason, so we just paid him and went running. We ran along the sidewalk until the sidewalk ended. It appeared to start on the other side of some small bushes. Jumping the bushes was NOT an inspired idea. In the dimming twilight, I failed to see some kind of cable coming down from the power line and connecting to the wall about eye level, hovering above the small bushes. I got clotheslined and thrown to the ground. My companion was a little concerned, and I was completely surprised. But we brushed off the dirt and kept on running. We got to our appointment a few minutes late, but it turned out to be one of the best ones in a while.

We got the whole family together and began teaching by explaining the law of chastity. There was no apologizing for the truth. We knew the parents weren't married and we taught them the doctrine and principles of chastity. The father understood, and he even made himself an example: he held up the key to the front door and tried to shove it in the keyhole backwards. He explained that he always knew the principle but never used it correctly. He began to cry, and after a tender moment, we invited them to get married before the end of September. The father proposed to his wife in the middle of the lesson! They hugged and kissed, and after a few "I love yous" (I think their 12-year-old daughter was the most impressed out of all of us), we invited them to be baptized, too. Fantastic. The whole family came to the general session of stake conference the next day, too.

Whew. I suppose that's a lot of detail, but I just wanted to give an idea of all the things we did this week. And it's the emotion I want to convey. Right now, I feel detailed. We've been focusing on getting every detail right. The prayers, the lessons, the words, the scriptures, the studying, the obedience: we've been fighting for the details this week. And it has provided us with results. I love it! I didn't have time to be trunky all week. There's too much to do. I love being busy.

Love,
Elder Withers