August 13, 2012 letter

Dear Family,

 

We heard about the hurricane last week.  Everybody here is up to date on the alerts.  Last Monday they started saying that it wasn´t going to hit.  All that we got here was a lot of water, and the wind was really strong one of the nights.  Now they are saying that another one is going to come, but its nice and sunny here again.  Up until Hurricane Ernesto, there wasn´t any rain since I got here.  It makes things a lot easier.  I got rained on quite a bit in Ticul and Champotón.  

On Tuesday night at 10:30, I got a phonecall from the Zone Leaders.  They had special transfers for us again.  Elder Asencio went to Merida, and an Elder that was in Merida came here.  His name is Elder Martinez.  He´s 21.  He´s going to finish in October.  I knew him when I was in Kanasin.  When we didn´t make it back from district meetings on time, we stayed in his house.  I´m really happy to be with him.  He is from Mexico City.  His uncle served as a bishop, and that´s how his family was introduced to the gospel.  His family was baptized when he was 12.  He started his mission in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, and has spent most of his time in Merida.  He took my place after I left Champoton and baptized 3 of the people that I had been teaching.

Elder Ascencio is from San Luis Potosi, in the north eastern part of Mexico.  He´s 20 and has been out for a year.  He spent the first year in Playa del Carmen and Cancun.  He was with Elder Velasco before he came to Palmas 2. 

I´ve heard of the service rule, but here we just look for opportunities throughout the week.  Every once in a while when we find something, we usually wake up to do it early in the morning.  In Visalia, the missionaries would go to ´Make a difference Day´  There is a missionary here that started his mission in Las Vegas.  He got put in the ´dead area´of the mission.  It´s one of the nicer parts, and there the missionaries aren´t allowed to contact.  They can only teach referals.  There they were encouraged to participate in all the community service projects there were.  They even did p-day things during the week, such as washing their clothes, just so that they would have something to do if there weren´t any teaching appointments.  

Here we get a breeze from time to time, but not as much as in Champoton.  I really like working with the people here.  Some of them know a few words in english, but they aren´t anywhere near fluent.  We went to down town this week to drop off the mission mail.  I saw a few tourists there, including a nice couple from Idaho.  They asked me which bus they should take.

I´ll send some pictures next week.

Love,

Elder Gubler