We attended church at the Picchu ward with Dave's siblings and they were able to meet Nilda and Miguel a few of our good friends there.
Nilda with all her children at church.
We were only able to visit a few minutes with Nilda. We left her the Isogenix products Jim had brought down. She said she is doing better but we need to have a longer visit with her and find out where things are at with her treatment. Jim was not at church with us, as he came down sick the last few days of his visit. We feel bad about that, especially when we heard that upon his return to the states, he was in the hospital diagnosed with pneumonia!!
We had time to attend church and have some lunch before sending the three musketeers (Jim, Merlyn & Carol) off on their return trip to the states. It didn't sound like a fun trip - long layovers in both Lima and Mexico City. We were really grateful that they were able to take two big duffle bags of our souvenirs and gifts back with them, along with some of the things of another missionary couple, the Johnsons.
We finally got another business workshop going here in Cusco. The last group we had finished up months ago. We have a good size group, about 7 and we have one of the participants willing to be the facilitator. For the first class, Sister Rhoades, facilitated since we hadn't trained the member, but she, Katia, is going to handle things in the next class, the week after General Conference.
Monday was a real P-day. We pretty much took the whole day to do a thorough cleaning of our apartment and rearranged our office space as we cleaned out all our personal things from the self-reliance office and they are now stored in our apartment.
English Daily Dose posters
We brought back some shelving Dave made for the self-reliance center. I wasn't sure where we would fit it in but it now sits in our apartment living area and it fits in quite nicely.
We settled back into our typical weekly routine with plenty of English classes, piano lessons, Book of Mormon classes in English and the Pathway gathering group on Thursday night.
We are really enjoying the Pathway group experience. The students are grateful and excited to be part of this program. They are pretty dedicated and prompt. There have been a few that have dropped out after the first couple of weeks due to realizing they were in over their heads, but we are sitting at about 35-37 students. Which is good, as the drop out rate after the first semester is about one-third of the group, so that will still leaves us a good size group to work with.
Friday was moving day for Javier Caseres, a self-reliance service missionary here in Cusco, our travel planner, and friend. He bought a house (apartment) through a process called anticrisis, which allows you to take advantage of someone else's financial troubles. You pay a lump sum up front which gives you the rights to live in the dwelling for a set number of years. At the end of that time, they either pay you back your money (so it is like giving out a personal loan to someone) and you move out, or the dwelling legally becomes yours if they can't pay you back the lump sum (so I type of lease to own program). Anyways, you can't lose if you are the purchaser. You've either rented for free because you get your money back, or you own a house, usually at a much lower purchase rate than the normal selling price.
We decided we needed to be of service and help him move. What we didn't know was he was moving from an apartment on the fifth floor of the building where he currently lived to an apartment on the fifth floor just up the road from where he was at. That was a lot of stair climbing at high altitude!
Elder Rhoades got worked over pretty good. Javier didn't have a lot of other helpers there so Elder Rhoades did most of the heavy lifting and moving. He hasn't done that much physical labor since we've been on the mission so he came back hurting pretty badly. He had a miserable night's rest.
I only stayed for about an hour because we had a new Education workshop starting up Friday that I had to supervise and actually facilitate, something we are trying to get away from and have the members take on that responsibility but this group we had not been successful at finding a member to act as facilitator.
It was a good thing the next day, Saturday, was General Conference. Dave needed a day to recoup and rest his muscles. We are so grateful for the internet that lets us view conference live and in English. We were excited to hear who the new apostles would be. I had secretly hoped that maybe one of the new apostles would be latino but just proves that I am not running the show, God and Jesus Christ are. And thank goodness. They do a much better job than I would!
We loved the messages and the spirit we felt as we listened to our prophet and apostles. It seemed they spoke a lot on trusting God and keeping the Sabbath Day holy. Because of the emphasis on keeping the sabbath day holy, we have postponed our travel home in December. Originally we had planned to fly out Saturday night, Dec. 19th and arrive Sunday afternoon, but in order to not miss attending church, we are going to be flying out o-dark-30 Monday, Dec. 21st and will arrive sometime that afternoon. Definite time of arrival is pending.
Spiritual Thought for the Week: Article of Faith #9 - We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.
No comments:
Post a Comment