Week #12 Settling in

It has been a relatively quiet week. A highlight was our being given a number of tasks to work on. Sister Schlachter is tracking down information from vendors that is needed to close the remaining 2023 projects. 
She is doing a great job and all in Spanish. I put together a simple Excel template for a directory of vendors and a presentation to help guide implementing organizations to submit projects proposals aligned with our objectives and priorities - both are for team discussion this coming week. Our 2024 humanitarian aid project budget is about 60% larger than it was for 2023 and we understand that we may be joined by two additional missionary couples early this coming year to help us confirm and implement projects. 

We worked from home this week as office space for us isn't ready yet. Our internet connection is reminiscent of dial-up, painfully slow or non-existent which added to our challenge this week. On Friday a tech fellow worked most of the day to install a high-speed connection in the suite we are living in - it worked like a charm at 6PM when he left. The bandwidth test will be Tuesday morning when everyone is back to work here. Today was a national holiday celebrating the start of the 1910 Mexican Revolution that ended Porfirio Diaz's 35 year dictatorship - ironically, it looks like Mexico may be heading in this direction again. We watched the festivities in the Zocalo on TV.  Apparently, so did everyone else as there were no crowds to be seen anywhere during the broadcast.  

Our stake conference (Chapultepec Stake) was this past weekend. We slipped into last night's adult session during Elder Cervante's presentation to stake leaders. We were both surprised to see each other and what a delight it was! As an area authority, he was asked to preside during the conference. I served as a counsellor in the bishopric of our ward in Cholula with his dad when we lived there. We learned a lot from him and his family. It was a delight to be so lovingly and richly instructed by one of his sons. 

Key themes of our stake conference were the peace, comfort and happiness that result from learning about and living the Gospel of Jesus Christ. At Elder Cervantes' direction, members in our stake of all ages shared their experiences and encouraged us to make and keep sacred covenants. Not long after I joined our church a family member expressed genuine surprise that I would associate myself with an organized religion. I have thought about this quite a bit over the decades. The structure-organization isn't our religion, our religion is the Doctrine of Jesus Christ, namely, faith unto repentance, baptism unto the remission of sins, receipt the Gift of the Holy Ghost, essentially, keeping the commandments and making and keeping covenants throughout our lives to change our very natures-who we become. The organization part helps prepare us as a global congregation to receive the promised blessings of keeping these covenants and provides opportunities to love, share and invite others to come unto Jesus Christ. 

Elder Cervantes shared a personal experience of his family being blessed by keeping covenants that occurred just prior to our moving to Mexico. His parents were in a car accident and were hospitalized. They couldn't receive treatment until at least partial payment was received up front - Elder Cervantes' dad called him by telephone and asked him to bring his check book to him at the hospital. His older brother was serving a full-time mission. Elder Cervantes was a teenager and said that up to that point he had not been privy to his family's financial circumstances. The economic situation in Mexico was very difficult. He was shocked at the very small amount of money recorded as the balance in his dad's check book ledger. When he got to the hospital with the check book, the room his parents were in was being guarded by a police officer as the local authorities had mistakenly charged his dad with being the cause of the car accident. Note that the involvement of police in anything here is good cause for fear. Elder Cervantes said he started crying when he saw his dad. His dad took him by the shoulders and asked him why he was crying. Elder Cervantes responded, "Dad, have you looked at your face?" It had been badly bruised and cut up in the accident. His dad's response was, "son, we pay our tithing, it's all going to work out". Elder Cervantes left them at the hospital and said that when he got home, there was a large amount of fresh fruit and vegetables and other necessities on their kitchen table that had not been there before. His younger brothers and sisters said that their ward's Relief Society President had brought them. Things worked out for his family. Some reading this might conclude they were just very lucky - we see it differently and we are very grateful. 

Our family has also been blessed by keeping this covenant. Tithing is giving one tenth of your "increase" annually (i.e., income) to the Church for the Lord's purposes including building and maintaining temples, chapels, and other Church buildings and supporting the activities and operations of local Church congregations. In 1994 we sold our home and pretty much everything else we owned for me to go to University in Mexico. It was a five year degree. We had gathered up enough money to make it through only half of the program but felt impressed that we should go anyways. The banking system them was not what it is now. We took a cashier's check with us with just enough money for the first year's expenses and deposited it in a Mexican bank converted into pesos. We arrived on December 6, 1994, on December 20, 1994, the Mexican government devalued the peso meaning our money was now worth only half as much just weeks prior. We growing family ate a lot of vegetables, fruit and tortillas that first year. I remember wearing the same three shirts that I had brought with me for an entire year but we somehow made ends meet. Our miracle came in the following years as the peso continued to be devalued making our Canadian dollars worth even that much more. Coupled with the "increase" of our investments, my taking seven classes per semester and five classes during the summer sessions, I was able to graduate in just three and a half years with honours. When we returned home to Canada in the Spring of 1998 we still had the same amount of money in the bank as when we left. As was pointed out in the conference and in Malachi 3:10, the blessings of tithing poured out upon us through the windows of Heaven are not limited to temporal things. Through our obedience, I have experienced spiritual growth that has helped sustain and shape me in positive ways all these years. Yes, I have a long way to go in striving to be more like Jesus Christ - let God prevail and think Celestial are the watch words. 

I went to the MD Self-Defense Academy for the first time this week. It's a Renzo Gracie affiliated BJJ gym in Polanco - a very affluent neighbourhood. It was a good experience. It's a 45 minute walk to the gym and the class starts at 6PM. I considered taking an Uber back to our suite but the traffic was such that walking was considerably faster even though I took a wrong turn and walked an extra 3km. 

By the time I saw that I had taken a wrong turn, I had already passed through a number of groups of people waiting for combi's who looked me over pretty closely, I resolved to keep going ahead until I could walk back on the other side of street rather that walking through the same groups of people again, as if I were lost... I was walking beside a bumper-to-bumper freeway so there was nowhere to cross for quite a while. My usual resting heart rate is under 60 beats per minute (bpm) - my average heart rate for the BJJ class that night was 129 bpm. The hyper-alert fight or flight stress during the return trip made it a pretty good workout at 163 bpm...hopefully this won't be a mistake I repeat often.

We have taken only one bus here so far.  It was from a Saturday tianguis and it wasn't as packed as the one in the photo below with folks content to just get one foot in the bus. We generally walk most places. For groceries we walk to the store (1.5km to Fresko-Walmart or 3.5km to Costco-Chedraui one way) and then we take a taxi back with our groceries. We are slowly building up a supply of non-perishable food and we also have extra water on hand as we live in a food desert and the food distribution system here is of the just in time variety. No earth quakes yet but that too could also disrupt things depending upon the magnitude. 

In the spirit of "waste not want not" tonight for dessert I had a bowl of sweetened breakfast cereal with ultra pasteurized milk that we got in our welcome package last week. Like Canada, Mexico has adopted front-of-pack consumer labelling (excess salt, sugar, fat and calories). One of the Elders we work with here quipped that anything with less that three black stop lights on the label isn't worth buying because its going to taste awful. I generally agree but the habanero sauce only has one black stoplight and it's pretty tasty (excess spice?). I like habanero sauce but didn't add it to my cereal.