Week #15 Mexico shook this week

On Monday the mission office Elders accompanied us to the Mexican Migration Institute to get an appointment to apply for temporary resident status to allow us to stay for another 11 months. At that point we had only five days left on our visa before we were at risk of being deported. After an hour and a half of waiting in line we got an appointment for the next day at 9:30am. The office elders also gave us an overview of the process to expect including what could possibly go wrong and how to handle it. 

Things went more or less the way the office Elder described except that we didn't have any of the problems they said might arise. We met a woman from the US who had been there five times and like us, she only had a few days left to complete the process or be deported. Each time she returned there was something new wrong with her paperwork. She was in tears as she waited at the counter while they reviewed her application for the sixth time. Thankfully she made it through this time and so did we.  

The office elders told us that once we got into the building we would be asked to take a seat in a waiting area where we would play "musical chairs" for a while and if successful, we would be asked to go to the second floor where they would take our pictures and finger prints and then we would receive our temporary resident cards. Sister Schlachter and I sat down in the first waiting area as instructed. Just as we were getting settled, suddenly the whole group of people stood up and moved one seat to the left and sat down again - the person at the end of the row being invited to submit their paperwork to an official at the counter. This was repeated each time there was an opening at the officials' counter. It was hard not to laugh as I thought about the elders' "musical chairs" description - there was a nervous playfulness among those waiting in line with us. We happened to sit down at the right place to join the game - it took others a while to figure out what was happening and how to join the musical chairs game already in progress. A couple of young Haitian men were in the line in front of us in a second round of musical chairs on this same floor.  One of them offered me their seat (yes, I am that old - Sister Schlachter had taken the only seat available in this second round of musical chairs). I had a chance to practice my French. They were students at a Mexican army medical school here in CDMX and like us, were applying for a temporary residence card. If we thought the photos on our entry visas were bad - the ones on our temporary residence cards are orders of magnitude worse. Considering they took front and side shots as well as digital copies of our finger prints, if we were ever charged with anything here, it would be hard to believe we weren't guilty.

We got our temporary resident cards in time to take an Uber to Mexico City's Temple Square to participate in a devotional - I sang in the choir and after we did not family sealings in the temple, acting as live proxies to give our kindred dead the opportunity to be sealed as families for eternity. These were Sister Schlachter's Basque relatives. The brother officiating had no trouble pronouncing their names.

On Thursday afternoon during the introductions portion of an on-line meeting with some colleagues in the United States we heard an alarm sound and saw our supervisors' faces freeze and then they quickly told us they had to go because there was an earthquake - a that point our apartment began to move too.  We made our way out of the building and into the street with everyone else in the neighbourhood. It was a 5.8 magnitude quake with its epicentre in the state of Puebla which is just to the east of us. We are still working from home on the first floor above ground level. Talking to others, the higher up you were in a building the more movement there was. Our supervisors were on the 9th floor of the Church office buildings which explained their reaction versus ours. There were no reports of serious damage.

Saturday is preparation day. We went shopping at Chedraui. The fruit and veggies are very, very good here - as pretty as the picture is, what it doesn't show is how much work is involved in making things safe to eat. Typhoid, salmonellosis, cholera and e coli are risks with open sewers (air borne contaminants) and human night soil still commonly used as fertilizer. When we get home, we scrub everything with soap and water, rinse it in tap water, soak it in either a bleach or iodine solution (weighting it down so it is fully immersed) and then let it air dry. If it's not going to be peeled or cooked, it also gets rinsed with bottled water to get rid of the bleach - iodine doesn't have a taste but there's only so much you can consume. The bleach bottle even has instructions on how to do this. When we lived here before we relied on other people's advice on how much bleach to use for disinfecting and for purifying our drinking water. 25 years later, we are still disinfecting our fruits and veggies but we are now trusting the bottled water. 

Pretty, tasty and a lot of work. The exception is certain things destined for export like spinach in a bag bought from Costco. The Costco spinach was already going bad today so it was cooked. On cooking vegetables here - it takes a lot longer because water boils at 92C instead of 100C as we are about 2,400m or 8000ft above sea level. 

Being viewed as active people were invited by a new friend we made here to accompany him to his sports club in CDMX, Club Mundet. It is a virtual oasis surround by the City with top notch sports facilities and instruction of nearly every kind and of course a high level of security - I didn't see a hockey rink or a football field but it had pretty much everything else including Shotokan karate but no BJJ. I went to a yoga class with our friend on Saturday morning - it was a great class but well beyond our means. For a family of five it costs over $1900 Canadian to become a member and then $1075 monthly just to access the facilities. For a single person it's just over $450 for the membership and then just under that each month to access the facilities. The monthly fee only includes certain things. Users pay additional fees for most of the classes. 

On Friday night we went to a shawarma place a few blocks from where we lived, however, it was closed as it is Hanukkah so we went to a taco place instead. The tacos al pastor were $3.75 each and while o.k., were nothing like what I was expecting, specifically to be cut off of a rotating spit. Halfway to our table the waiter remembered that there needed to be a bit of pineapple on the tacos, so back they went.  I also ordered tortilla soup and Sister Schlachter ordered a vegetarian "alambre" (pan-fried veggies) - both high priced and also average in every way. We went somewhere else in the neighbourhood to complete our meal with a whole rotisserie chicken that came with two fresh fluffy bolillos for less than the price of two of the three tacos I ate. All this to say, there is a lot of money in our neighbourhood.  

On Saturday we went to the English ward's Christmas party. There is only one English ward in Mexico City - many of its members work at the US Embassy here. The most calm part of the evening was the children's reenactment of the nativity after the feeding frenzy that featured Costco spiral hams. The bundle on the chair was their depiction of the Christ child in the manger.

I am sure our four boys were as wild when they were tweens but oh my, I haven't been in a place that was that rowdy for a very long time and when the mariachi's arrived the energy and noise level went up quite a few more notches. We didn't stay for the piñatas. I wonder how adding sugar to the mix turned out. The children were all back to being their normal selves at church the next day.  

An update on my friend Nathan in Salt Lake, the fellow on the corner by the Church History Library. He wrote me back and we have continued our conversation by email. He's an engineer by training and started his street corner mission about two years ago. He has me thinking a lot as, while our approaches are very different, our objective is the same, to invite all to come unto Jesus Christ.