Time flies...are we having fun?

January just flew by.  Having fun, yes.  But we were so tired this past week.  What a busy month!  We are in the thick of things.

Monday was my first piano lesson.  The student is a 10 year old girl named Luz.  She caught on quickly.  My materials from the church hadn't arrived yet so I pulled some songs off the internet using the letter names for the notes and taught her the basics of the keyboard.  I gave her Mary Had a Little Lamb and Itsy Witsy Spider using letter notes and then took Choose the Right from the hymn book and put it into letter notes and taught her how to play that.

Monday we also went to lunch with the new couple, the Johnsons and the Haslers.  We initiated them into the Cusquenita Pikanteria just down the street from the Tullumayo chapel.  We got our first taste of cuy, or guinea pig.  Elder Hasler loves cuy and ordered it.

Elder Hasler shows off his order of guinea pig.  He was kind enough to share a leg with us.

 Can you see the claw?  We both agree, we probably won't order it for ourselves.

Monday evening we went out to eat with a member here that has taken quite a liking to Elder Rhoades.  His name is Miguel Cornejo.  He is the ward mission leader in the Picchu ward and was instrumental in getting us an invite to do the Career Workshop in his ward.  He is a good man, but is in a part member family.  He joined the church many years ago hoping his wife would follow shortly.   What happened was he went inactive for 18 years and just in the last two years has re-activated himself.  He is happy to be back in the church, but his wife isn't too happy about it and it is causing marital problems.  In fact, he is probably, going to end up divorced because he is determined not to go inactive again.  He has a 14 year old daughter.  He is an electrical engineer working with the government

We are in an organizing mood and our Self-Reliance Center is getting an overhaul.  Dave has headed up this project and has made some very practical improvements.  I have longed for hanging file folders ever since we got here.  Dave went out on a fact finding mission and came back successful.  We now have three drawers with hanging files.  One is for our English class handouts and visuals/activities.  Another is for our workshop materials and PEF instructions and the third drawer is for miscellaneous paperwork.

Dave also did an overhaul on our supply cabinet.  We never knew what was in there, let alone find anything.  Now look at what we see when we open the cabinet.

You can see all our English class posters on top.

Last week was our area manager, Carlos Hale's birthday, Jan. 27th.  He turned 52.  We brought a small cake to the office for a round of Happy Birthday Peruvian style.  They actually sing Happy Birthday in English while clapping and then go into a Spanish version - Feliz Cumpleanos a ti, Te deseamos a ti, Feliz Cumpleanos a ti, Te deseamos a ti.  Second verse is Que lo cumples feliz, hasta ano tres mil.

He didn't have time for us to take him out to lunch on his birthday, but Thursday we treated him and his wife to lunch at Papachos, the ritzy burger joint for tourist at the Plaza de Armas, as Carlos loves hamburgers.  It turned out to be a farewell luncheon, as Carlos has accepted the Arequipa area manager position that was vacated and it starts Feb. 3rd.

We were so sad to hear that.  We have loved working with Carlos and getting to know his family.  However, it is a good move for him.  He was working in Arequipa before coming to Cusco a year ago, January 9th.  His 79 year old mother lives down in Arequipa and he really feels she needs his family there as she is in the early stages of dementia.

Our English classes kept us busy.  We are down to two more weeks of teaching the youth/kids during their summer break.  Some days go well, other times it is more difficult.

The Johnson's are joining us for our English classes with the missionaries in the Inti Raymi zone.  It will help them pick up more Spanish and our ulterior motive is to convince them to take over these classes and free us up from this commitment.  Not that we don't enjoy working with the missionaries.  On the contrary, Dave in particular thrives on it, but with our schedule more and more booked, we need to get some things off our plate.

Elder & Sister Johnson from Farmington, Utah

With our missionaries we have discovered that they love to review their vocabulary playing a version of Family Feud. Two of the missionaries go head to head and are given a word in English or Spanish.  The first one to grab a whiteboard eraser that is sitting on the table between them gets to answer.  If they are correct, they get a point for their team.  If incorrect, the other person gets a chance to respond.  It can get pretty intense as their competitive spirits come out.

And the member classes keep going on.  We have a good solid core of members that always come and lately we have been picking up some new members to the classes as well.  Our morning class was down to just two students, but lately we have had 6-8 coming.

Cindy plays the piano while waiting for the students to arrive for a review week lesson.

The center continues to be busy each day with members coming in for help.  We now have Victor, the crippled gentleman we met shortly after arriving, coming in to volunteer.  He has had a couple more surgeries on his legs and is doing much better.  He seems to enjoy contributing.  We are going to have him help us with phone calls.

But we lost Zoila, our volunteer who had a baby last July.  She has been coming in more frequently as she knew our volunteer staff was down, but her baby, Natan, at six months is becoming more active and needs more attention.  Zoila was such a great help.  She was great at showing enthusiasm and giving pep talks and teaching correct principles to the members that came in for help.

Wednesday afternoon we attended a four zone conference.  The president established some goals for the missionaries for 2015.  Apparently in 2014 there were only a little more than 2 baptisms per missionary for the year, as there are about 240 missionaries and we had just shy of 600 baptisms mission wide.  They do have to work a lot on reactivation since that is a big problem here so that keeps them from working full-time on converting new members.  But President Harbertson has asked them to work towards doubling that number and as a mission he has set the goal for 1200 baptisms, double what they had last year.  That comes to 1 baptism per companionship each transfer period, which is every six weeks.

 The missionaries take a break during the conference before hearing the challenge for 2015.

We now have two groups in full swing with the business workshop.  Those are both on Saturdays.  We go from the afternoon one in Tullumayo chapel directly over to the evening one in the Inti Raymi chapel.  Luckily, our Inti Raymi specialist handles most of the class there.  We do a small part of the class but we are mostly there for support.

Some of the Inti Raymi business workshop participants.  These are all stake high councilmen.  Willlie Farfan gives the thumbs up.  He is a tour guide who would like to start his own business.  He speaks decent English.

We also have a group of three attending the new Education for Better Employment.  We have had three lessons now and we can see a difference in the amount of participation and how much they are learning.  These new workshops are great!

We continue to be trained for institute teaching come March.  Those are early Saturday morning for a couple of hours each.  I think next week is our last session.  We are learning a lot.  We get to attend a satellite broadcast fireside next week, where Jeffrey R Holland will speak.  That should be good.

We continue to work with the Ponce family but have hit a plateau.  Cindy meet with the wife privately and she opened up and dumped a lot of past history.  Their marriage has struggled in the past and is currently struggling now and the economic challenges they are having is a major cause of the problems.  The husband serves as the stake YM president and currently does no work as he is overseeing the summer vacation activities for the youth in the stake center each day.  His wife is beside herself as she worries about how they are going to pay their bills and feed the family.  When we talked to him about it, he seems to believe that the Lord will work everything out as he is fulfilling his calling and serving in the church and it is only for a 5 week period.  We were, of course, concerned that he doesn't seem to understand the spiritual principle of individual responsibility as it applies to self-reliance.

We talked to his bishop on Sunday to get his counsel and to report to him where we stand with them.  He is aware that Brother Ponce is not very focused on working to support his family and that has been a problem for many years, hence why they are where they are.  He will speak with him but also asked us to have a frank conversation with him, as he speaks very highly of Elder Rhoades.  So guess who gets this assignment?  Should be interesting but nothing that Dave can't handle with the help of the spirit.

We held our second district My Path to Self-Reliance workshop last Sunday on Feb. 1.  We did it without Carlos as he was in the midst of packing and dealing with movers, etc.  Javier Caseros went with us.  It was in Urubamba, a city in the Sacred Valley where the district chapel is.  It is only an hour drive from Cusco so we were able to go out and come back the same day.  It is at a lower altitude so we enjoyed a few hours of warmer weather.

We had about 20-25  people in attendance.  This time the presentation went much smoother and we stayed within the 2 hour time frame.  We handled it rather than the local leaders.  I was given the first part that introduces the principle of self-reliance and then has them evaluate their budget, income and expenses and asked them to answer some basic questions regarding their self-reliance.  If they are honest it will give them a good indication how self-reliant they really are and in what areas they need to improve, both temporally and spiritually.

Dave handled the second section and he did it quite well.  He recruited some of the members to read certain sections so he didn't have to do it all, but I think that was actually quite effective.

Javier handled the last part of the presentation and wrapped things up.  He presented 3 videos, two more than he intended to do but we still were able to finish on time.

We left at 4 pm, took a small side trip to see an old abandoned Catholic church along the way and still got there 20 minutes before it was supposed to start which gave us time to get the computer and projector set up and ready to go.  Here are some photos of the Catholic church.

The fireside went from 6 to 8 pm and we were home shortly after 9 pm.  We went in a private taxi so that helped us travel quicker and more comfortably.  It was so green!  You could tell we are in the middle of the rainy season.  See for yourself.

 A crop of potatoes in the photo above.

Look what we found this week?  Imagine down here in Cusco, Peru.  Go Wolverines!

Spiritual Thought for the Week:  Elder James J Hamula of the Seventy in October 2014 General Conference talked on the sacrament and the atonement.  He said:

By the power of the Resurrection, all of us will be restored to the presence of God.  That reality presents to us the fundamental question of our lives.  The fundamental question facing all of us is NOT WHETHER we will live but WITH WHOM we will live after we die.  While every one of us will return to the presence of God, not every one of us will remain with Him.