Visit from Salt Lake

We started this week off with special visitors from Salt Lake.  Sister Bonnie Oscarson, YW General President, and Sister Jean Stevens, First Counselor General Primary Presidency, were in town to do focus groups with the presidents of these two organizations and provide some training.  My name had been submitted as a possible translator and I had interviewed and tested with the Lima representative in charge of making these arrangements.  In the end they found some local sisters with strong enough English skills to handle the task.  But they were holding these focus groups in the rooms directly across from our Self-Reliance Center during the afternoon hours when we are not busy working with members, so I sneaked into the meeting with Sister Oscarson and so did Sister Hasler, the other full-time senior missionary serving here in Cusco.  Here is the group photo taken afterwards.  Sister Oscarson is in front in orange and Sister Waddell (the wife of Elder Waddell of the area seventy) in green with Stefany Ahuaro, the translator in between the two.  What a thrill of a lifetime that must have been for her.  I know she was pretty nervous, but did a great job.

The Primary group came out just as we were finishing up taking our photos so I snapped a photo of that group as well.  Sister Stevens is in the back row second from the left.  Sister Harbertson, the mission president's wife is in the front on the far right in bright blue.  Not sure who was used as the translator in this group but Javier's wife attended because she is the Primary president in her ward. She is in the middle of the front row wearing the bright purple sweater and third from the left in the front in red is Nidia Ponce.  We are working with her family trying to help them become more self-sufficient.

We had another meeting with Sister Cuadros and showed her how to keep better daily records of her sales.  We challenged her to start using this system on November 1.  I knew this would be a bit challenging since she is in the flower, vase and candle business and November 2 is a big holiday in the Spanish speaking world called Dia de los Muertos.  It is a bit like our Memorial Day as everyone takes flowers and memorabilia to the graves of their loved ones and it is one of the busiest days for her business.  We'll see how she does.  It would be nice if she didn't work that day as it falls on a Sunday this year, but right now they are inactive and it is not likely they will keep the Sabbath day holy.  Every time we meet with them we are encouraging them to either pay their tithing or keep the Sabbath day holy as those are two key commandments for success with self-reliance.

Sister Sanchez and Camacho are coming regularly to the center to help.  They seem to enjoy it and are making all kinds of calls.  It has taken a burden off my shoulders.  We do have to spend more time at the center as they come in the afternoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2 pm and have been staying until 8 pm.  They seem happy to serve.  Apparently, they had gotten quite discouraged sitting home in their apartment all the time.  Sister Camacho has 9 months out and her knee was injured while she was in the MTC and she has had two surgeries on it and still hasn't recovered so it has been quite the trial for her.  She is fluent in both English and Spanish as she is from Sinoloa, Mexico and lived for a time in Mesa, Arizona.

It was a good thing they were helping last week, as we had a computer glitch that caused me to lose my entire translation of the Family Finance workshop we were scheduled to start on Sunday.  I was in a panic since this happened on Thursday and it had taken me days to get as much translated as I had.  I mentioned this to the sisters and they jumped all over it and said they would come in extra hours to do it for me.  I was so grateful!  It didn't leave me much time to study and learn the material but I did the best I could.  After reading their translation, I decided it was a blessing in disguise to have lost my translation because their translation sounded much more natural than mine.

We had about 20 people attend the Finance Workshop and I got positive feedback from the participants afterwards.  There are 5 classes total so we'll see how many stick it out through all five lessons.  It was a holiday that day so we may have a number of new participants next Sunday.

Our apartment fell through that we talked about in our last post.  We were to the point of getting bids from painters and had two bids in hand when the landlady told us the rent was going to be more.  We told her no thank you and promptly went out looking for something else.  We got lucky and found another one only two blocks from the church where we have our center within a few days.  This one is owned by church members and we are hoping to move by November 15th.  With two other apartments not working out so far, I'm a bit skeptical.  We'll keep our fingers crossed as the rainy season is fast approaching.  Dave is determined to not let this one slip away.

One of our  volunteers in the center had her birthday on Wednesday, October 29th.  She is a very dedicated volunteer and is a big help to us.  We found out last  minute so we weren´t able to do a lot.  But we found out birthday cards are very rare here.  We looked and looked and couldn´t find a single store that sold birthday cards.  We got another volunteer to make one and brought in a cake to the center.

The birthday girl, Gladys Machado with her homemade birthday card.  This cake (below) is their version of an ice cream cake, I think,, but they use jello instead.  Inside is a cake that has been surrounded by two different layers of whipped gelatin and then on top they do regular jello.  It was really quite tasty.  You just can´t put too many candles on top or have them burn for very long or you have melted jello.

I like this photo as it shows almost the  whole Self-Reliance Center office staff.  We are just missing one volunteer.  Back row from left to right  is Hermana Rhoades, Javier Caseres, Carlos Hale (area manager), Julio Condori, Nathan (Zoila´s baby), Elder Rhoades, Zoila and in front the birthday girl, Gladys Machado.

We got a copy of the report the Clarks made to the area presidency regarding our returning missionaries training meeting we did on October 20th when they visited.  We hold those every 6 weeks as the departing missionaries return home.  It was a very thorough and detailled report.  We were blown area by how glowing and complimentary  it was.  We are now famous as the Clarks are holding us up as the exemplar for the other areas and even recommending that "the Cusco approach" be adopted area-wide (Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru & Bolivia).  It made us laugh as some of the things we did and they called "best practices" were decided on last minute or even during the training in the moment. The credit has to go to the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.  We are just grateful  to be receiving inspiration since so much of what is needed down here can be overwhelming.  It´s a good thing this is the work of the Lord and we are pleased to see His hand involved in what we are doing.

Spiritual Thought for the Week:  "Self-reliance is ...an essential element in our spiritual as well as our temporal well-being...Salvation can be obtained on no other principle."  Thomas S Monson,  Ensign Sept 1986.