We have family home evening every week with people rotating being hosts. The Monday before Christmas we had FHE at Elder Johnson's apartment. He has served as a mission president and general authority seventy until he turned 70, and is now serving as executive secretary at the CCM here. We sang a lot of fun Christmas songs with the accompaniment of a tinny sounding electronic organ, then Elder Johnson gave a short talk about visualizing what our lives would have been like if the Savior had never been born.
During the week before Christmas, we went to our office every day to try and organize the information we have. It's been kind of like doing an archeological dig. There is some stuff from the immediate past AMA that needs to be sorted and culled, and some from previous AMAs that is no longer relevant. For lunch one day we went to Wendy's with Curtises and some other office people. We also went to the Guatemalan Costco called PriceSmart. Same routine - buy a membership [to get it we had to show our passports], get a tiny photo taken, then be able to buy things in quantities that would likely last our whole mission. They have some tuna cans that look like they hold about a gallon. If we get a call to cook at the CCM cafeteria, we'll use them for sure. We have a TV in the apartment we are presently in but are not sure what will be in our next one, so we might end up buying a new TV at Price Smart. [Eat your hearts out young elders and sisters].
Patsy is learning Spanish. She bravely ordered at a restaurant the other day, but the waitress wanted to practice her English at the same time. I am preparing a list of common phrases in Spanish with the English translation to help her. It's definitely a shock for her to come to a place where most of the people don't know much English and expect her to speak Spanish. When I was here 50 years ago, if we were out tracting, the little kids would practice their English on us. They all knew how to say "Goodbye my love", although sometimes the pronunciations was a little off and it came out sounding like "goodbye my lung". We advised them never to smoke.
Being responsible for over 1500 missionaries, we get calls most mornings and evenings. One elder with known epilepsy entered the CCM and had 3 gran mal seizures in his first three days. So we planned to send him back home to Honduras to get stabilized and come back when he's been seizure free for six months. The president of the CCM asked if he should be accompanied on the flight home. I said yes thinking that if he had a seizure on the plane and was alone, they would land, call the paramedics, and he'd be taken to a hospital and no one would know a thing about him. I said "he needs an escort, and I'd be glad to take him." I went to get my passport and the fellow in the office that handles all the immigration issues said that they'd sent it to the government immigration office to get our semi-permanent residency status issued. Mark & Lafaunda Curtis were touristing 9 hours drive from here, so I told the CCM president to keep looking for an escort.
The CCM president's last name is Morris, one of the other mission president's first name is Matthew, and the mental health nurse's last name is George. So as George Morris Matthews, I feel really at home here.
As we haven't been assigned to a home branch yet, we went to the ward by the temple on the morning of the 24th. It is the Buena Vista [beautiful view] Ward. The area president talked and we met the three mission presidents based in Guatemala City and the temple president. There are six missions in Guatemala, the three around the capital all have some territory in the city and extend out. The three away from the capital are three or more hours drive away.
On Christmas Eve, we were going to cut down our own tree, but the neighbor caught us and told us to get out of his yard, so we decorated the artificial plant in our apartment (just like Patsy's mom grandma Gwen used to do with her artificial rubber tree plant). We strung popcorn and draped it around like a garland, made stars out of colored paper and snowflakes out of napkins, so they looked really soft and pretty.
At 10 pm on Christmas Eve, we went up to the roof of our building and had appetizers and visited with the other missionary couples. People started setting off fireworks, and by midnight they were going off in every direction and sometimes hitting the sides of tall apartment buildings. They were like the ones you would see at the park on the fourth of July, and they were going up all around us and off into the distance. It was quite impressive. It sounded like a war zone! The ringing in my ears only lasted a couple of days.
Christmas day we were invited to a brunch at the temple president's house. Everyone brought their favorite side dishes, and it was really good. There were four different varieties of funeral potatoes, and I wondered if someone had died and we hadn't heard about it. We met some of the temple missionaries. We are currently in an apartment building with about 8 other couples, and Curtises are in another building close by with three other couples, so we are in the social center of the mission. When we move to our new apartment in a week or so, there will only be two single sisters there. Patsy said she would probably have to take over the party planning for the two sisters in our building and also the temple missionaries who live in temple housing close by.
Patsy baked her famous Snicker's candy bar cookies to give to the missionaries on Christmas Day in the CCM Our oven is really interesting. It''s 18" by 14" inside. A regular cookie sheet is too large to fit. I found one at Walmart in the toy section that fits. The oven rack was way up at the top, so she moved it into the center and baked a trial batch. The bottoms scorched, so she moved the rack back up where it had been. She could only get 8 or 10 cookies on the sheet and they'd asked for 3 dozen, so she spent pretty much a whole afternoon baking. I got to eat the ones that were scorched a little on the bottom, and I thought they were great.
Patsy made a nice Christmas dinner. I couldn't find ham, so we had smoked pork chops, rice, and carrots. The carrots here are about as big as my forearm, but very sweet. Then we watched "It's a Wonderful Life" with Jimmy Stewart. I hadn't watched it for a long time. It was good but two hours long, and we started falling asleep and had to finish it the next day.
The Tuesday after Christmas some couples were going to a flower market and an archealogical site a couple of hours drive away. I have a little cold and am in the tired and tender muscle stage, so we didn't go. We did go in to the office in the morning, but no one else was there. Finally one fellow came in with his family and we said hi to them. They had the cutest 3 year old daughter. The rest of the week we spent in the office translating things and following up on sick missionaries.
Friday afternoon we went to Star Wars The Last Jedi. Since it's about the eternal fight between good and evil, we figured it was ok to go.
Sunday Dec. 31 we went to church at the CCM. They tell each missionary to prepare two talks to give while they are there, then they randomly call on six of them to talk in the sacrament meeting. A member of the temple presidency gives a message to end the meeting. Most of the talks are pretty good. Most of the missionaries here are from Central America and serve here, but generally not in their home country. There are some from the US and Canada, but most are from close by.
After lunch we watched Curtises give the preventative health talk to the missionaries at the CCM. We will be giving it in the future, so I paid close attention.
We stayed up until midnight to welcome in the new year and watched the fireworks from our 4th floor window. On New Year's Day we are invited to dinner and game night with the other couples in our apartment building. Happy New Year to all of you!
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