Hacendoso

May 31, 2011

Hello Family.

Well... Not much to report once again. Ummm.... There's got to be something to say, some sort of funny story... Hmmm... I'm looking through my planner, looking at what we even did this week... We had a leadership training meeting and a zone meeting. Both were very long and very boring. We did a lot of service on Saturday. Hurricane season is coming around so in church they have these emergency preparedness classes and things and the elder's quorum has being going around and helping people cut down trees in their yards. Better to cut it down now than to have it fall onto your house during a hurricane. So we went and helped because of course only 4 of the men from the elder's quorum actually showed up. So the four of us missionaries made up half of the work force. But it was fun, I learned how to sharpen a chainsaw, change the chain on the chainsaw, how to fix a chainsaw, everything about chainsaws except for actually using a chainsaw. The hermanos had brought like 8 chainsaws and all of them would not function and one time or another so we spent a lot of the time simply taking them apart and fixing them. We did that and most of the manual labour. None of them wanted to do the menial tasks of dragging all of the fallen foliage out to the street or hauling the logs away, they like doing all of the important things like cutting the trees down. Which was just fine with us since we never complain about anything and we didn't really want to be up in those trees with a not-quite-fully functioning chainsaw cutting off the larger sections which would dangerously swing about threatening to knock you off the tree. That nearly happened to one hermano, two more were nearly flattened when pulling down a rather large tree with a rope. They barely dove out of the way. So we were just fine watching and dragging the branches around.

We had a ward FHE, which we were in charge of. It was really funny actually, we taught about the Book of Mormon and the activity we had was a Jeopardy type trivia game. When we made the game up we knew that we would be dealing with hispanic members so we tried to dumb the questions down a bit. But nevertheless it proved to be a bit too difficult for them. We also felt kind of bad for the investigators that showed up, they didn't have a clue what was going on but we had a good time. One my favorite questions was: "Who was the only person in the book of Mormon who did a push-up with out his head?" They were pretty dumbfounded by that one. One hermana actually got it right by sheer guessing. We gave them a hint that it was in the book of Ether and she randomly guessed Shiz, and she was right. Even simple scripture mastery was just barely beyond their grasp. The thing is that mexicans don't really like to read, at all. Someone showed us a poll once, worldwide countries and on average how many books each person read on a yearly basis or something like that and Mexico was almost at the very bottom. The top was like Finland or something but the U.S. was close to the top as well. Even for the active members who study the scriptures on a somewhat regular basis it's a serious chore for them. It's just not something they do, so they learned quite a bit.

Well that's all the interesting things that happened this week. I hope you all have a good week. PEace out!

-- Elder Rice