Enough Already!!

For all of you who think we are having too much fun on our mission, this past week was for you.  We spent the whole week sick between Dave and I which I can guarantee you was NOT very fun.  Therefore, there is not much to report this week, as we really did minimal work.  We just managed to keep the ball in the air but didn't make much progress with it.

Dave was sick from Sunday through Thursday with a major cold.  He felt bad enough that he spent the whole day in bed on Wednesday.  The stomach bug stayed with me until Wednesday and caused me to drop a bit more weight.  Then Dave was kind enough to share his cold with me and Thursday night  I started to feel a sore throat come on and by Friday I had congestion, a lack of energy and felt achy all over.  On top of that I had two large cold sores break out, one in the center of my upper lip and the other in the right corner on the bottom.  Sorry, no photo will be included of that.  I spent another Saturday laid up in bed.  Dave was a busy beaver and did a lot of household errands and chores.  I think he was so glad to be feeling back to normal he was anxious to be busy again.

He made a shopping trip alone to Plaza Vea, a major supermarket here and came back with many American food items, among them

1- a large box of Kellog's Corn Flakes
2- Hunts ketchup
3- Kraft mayonnaise
4- Pringles

And the biggest prize of all - bacon!!!  He probably paid a minor fortune for all that.

Our week of review with our Cusco stake English classes went well.  It was good for them to see how much they have progressed in just one month and how much they can say.  The English classes in the Inti Raymi stake are in the second week and are slow to pick up momentum.  The 7 pm class is doing well, the 8 pm class is just about dead.  The Wednesday night class, I had to teach on my own due to Dave being sick and the Friday night class Dave taught on his own because by then I was feeling pretty crappy.

Our center is getting more volunteers but they come with problems.  One of our volunteers quit coming because she was intimidated by the computers.  She doesn't have much experience with them.  If we hadn't been so sick, we would have gone to visit her to assure her we are there to help her and help her see what a good skill it will be for her to learn.  Another volunteer was supposed to start this week, but never showed up.  Again, if we hadn't been so sick, we would have given him a call to help push him into action.  The one dependable and gun-ho volunteer we had, has had to stop coming.  We hope to work things out with her, if possible, but not sure where that will go.

We are starting to get some success with  our phone calling.  We were able to complete a few (6) graduation surveys.  I know it doesn't seem like much but to just get any done still takes a lot of work as it often requires multiple calls (we have alternative contact persons we try to call and if that doesn't work, we look up their bishop or stake president and call them to ask for the recipient's phone number and then we can finally call and speak to the person we originally wanted to call) just to locate our PEF recipient.  One of our volunteers is very willing to do the calls, but is computer challenged as well, so I helped her enter the data and she did the calling.  Hopefully, the ice is broken and we will be able to pick up speed on this.

Since we are the model Self-Reliance center for the mission we are responsible to call PEF recipients from all over the mission.  Here is a map that shows the mission boundaries.  I thought I had posted it before, but it looks like I may have missed doing it.

Not the best photo, but you can see it covers quite a bit of area and very diverse as well.  The darker green section is jungle, the lighter green section is mountains and the browner area is the altiplano, then you can see the blue on the far right which is Lake Titicaca.

This weekend was Cusco's stake conference with another area seventy visiting.  Dave had to attend the Saturday night session by himself as I needed to work on getting better for a presentation we were scheduled to do on Sunday, something I just wasn't going to be able to hand over to Dave to fill in.  The visiting area seventy, Winsor Baldarrama, from Cochabamba, Bolivia apparently was fairly young (we looked him up and he is only 37 years old) and as part of his talk he asked all the full-time missionaries to stand up and started to count them.  He got to 19 and was confused as to why it was an odd number.  Dave went like this

and he figured things out.  Dave said he had so many members come up to him afterwards and give him medical advice to help me get better.

One of the wards here in Cusco invited us to present a self-reliance lesson to their ward members this Sunday.  Even though I don't have a lot of experience with preparing Power Point presentations, I am proud to say I put together a very basic, but thorough self-reliance presentation.  We needed this to help us remember what to say and how to say it in Spanish.  Here are a few samples of our slides.
This was our introductory slide.

Then this is the slide teaching the four basic spiritual principles of self-reliance.

In case you can´t read Spanish or deduce what we are talking about the basic principles are 1-Faith,
 2-Obedience, 3'Individual Responsibility and 4-Unity & Service.

We found some very good quotes to use in our presentation but they were only in English.  I had to work at translating them and some of them weren´t easy.  One claimed to have it translated in Spanish on their website which got me excited, but when I looked closely at what the translation was saying it wasn´t anywhere close to a accurate, so I had to tweak it quite a bit.

Dave gave his short talk about self-reliance and the pre-existence again and this time was much iimproved in his pronunciation and wasn´t nearly as scared.  We used our story from 2 Kings about the widow, her debt, the cruse of oil and the instructions from the prophet Elisha as an example of the four self-reliance principles in action and they seemed to catch the vision.

The ward members were very grateful for our presentation and at the end were invited to attend the Career Workshop that will be given at their building the following four Saturdays.  The priesthood leaders did a good job selling this opportunity talking about how this type of instruction would cost hundreds of dollars through any other organization but this is free because it is through the church.  They also told them to take their commitment seriously and plan on attending all four sessions if they signed up.  After the closing prayer, there was a long line to sign up and at the end we left with 31 members signed up for the workshop! 

It made me think of the early missionaries who went out to preach the gospel and found whole congregations ready and prepared to accept the message of the restored gospel.  It seems this ward is like the field that is white and ready for harvest.

Then an even bigger miracle occurred later that day.  Our native instructor, who has been on no show, no contact, disappear off the face of the earth status, called us! He apologized and claimed he had an emergency that caused him to leave town and he didn´t have the opportunity to call us to let us know.  He also claimed that where he was at did not have any access to internet or cell phone and he just got back and heard my messages and got my email.  Whether it is true or just an excuse, we don´t know but we were able to tell him about this ward and asked if he was available to teach.  He said he would come in and coordinate but believes he can help.  I sure hope so.  We´ll keep our fingers crossed and prayers and faith working.

Sunday evening we had invited Javier Caseros, a service missionary at the Self-Reliance, and his family (wife and 3 year old daughter) to dinner.  Dave also invited a young returned missionary to dinner as well.  Since I´ve been under the weather, Dave was the cook and chose to prepare pancakes, hash browns, fried eggs and the precious bacon.  It was a hit with everyone except the 3 year old.  I should have taken a photo of the feast but forgot.

After dinner we taught them how to play Yahtzee.  They enjoyed it very much, especially the young man.  Just for the record, I had 3 Yahtzees in one game.  That never happens to me and I had 4 witnesses of this accomplishment.  So of course,  I won the game.  No one came even close to my score of 486.

Spiritual Thought for the Week:  The Lord has placed currents of divine influence in your life that will lead you along the individual path He would have you fulfill here on earth.  Seek through the Spirit to identify it and carefully follow that direction that the Lord has put in your life.  Align yourself with it.  Choose willingly, to exercise your agency to follow it.  - Richard G Scott  August 2014 Ensign  "Act Upon This Land as for Years".