Traveling the World

Welcome to more last-minute exchanges with Comitan! 

But first going to Tuxtla!

And two zone conferences in between all that.

Leadership council was beautiful. They ended up dividing it for the first time so we were only half the people we usually were, we went up the same day instead of staying the night and then came home afterward. We learned a lot and I liked it. It was interesting to be there with Hermana Coronado and Hickman, my two ex-companions who have also been companions with each other, forming this funny triangle relationship. It was awesome.

We went home and had a great zone conference. We'd planned a lot of new activities and it went pretty well. That afternoon the girls from Comitan call and one had fainted and the other was a little beside herself, and something just told us we should probably get down there. So we called our zone leaders, "We're suddenly going to Comitan, we might come back on Saturday!" And they said "Cool! If people suddenly explode up here too let us know and we'll be you!" We appreciated that. They're awesome.

We went down and it went really well, we were able to help them and have fun and work up there, and the great thing about it was we got to help with their zone conference too which we weren't originally going to do. And it turned out. FANTASTIC. It was by far the best conference I've participated in, and we'd only had an hour to plan with the zone leaders the day before. But we got a flood of ideas and they really outdid themselves with the preparations. I'm going to run through it a litle bit just to give you an idea:

We started out with music and all the seats in a circle and some announcements. Elder Garcia then said that they had one more announcement but it was too hard to say so they were going to have Hermana Wilson give it. I'm like, "Right now?" "Yeah; I think so hermana." So I get up and solemnly tell everyone that the number of missionaries has gone down drastically in the mission (true), that President has to make some hard decisions (true) and that he's decided to close this zone at the end of the transfer (total lie). Everyone's all shocked, and we said we wanted to have the best transfer ever because of that. So we started singing, talked about what manner of missionary we want to be, time management, and then headed to a different room where there were four cakes set up representing four missionaries. A huge, beautiful one, a large, almost beautiful one, and then two pathetic bread rolls, one of which had a bite taken out. We talked about what our "offering" to the Lord is, and how each act of disobedience is taking a bit out of that offering. It sounded better there.

Afterward we went to a different room with a video and an activity with an alter to leave old behaviors. Then a different room where I had three paper swords and had them fight against Satan, then against God AND Satan (with disobedience, mind at home, etc) and then united with God AGAINST Satan. Because really, it doesn't work when we're fighting against both.

And we did a couple more, but the point is we felt so inspired and had so much help in that conference and it answered a lot of questions we had of how to improve the zone. We then set an impossible goal for each week of the transfer and sent them off with the challenge.

Oh! And Elder Merrill is in the zone so that was awesome. He was my Satan ;)

Meanwhile we're having a ton of fun with the comp. 

She's just like Erika and says random things and makes weird faces. And she's the sweetest human ever.

(For comparison, we’ve got Erika here on the right…)

(The Comitan zone; I'd awkwardlky understood that this was the crazy picture and...it wasn’t.)

So we're loving it in San Cris! I love you all, and I'll try to be more spiritual next week! Because holy tired. THIS IS THE BEST!

P.S. [Dad: "So did you ever tell them you were full of frijoles?"] Yeah forgot to tell that part! It was awesome, at the end I said I had one more announcement.... we're not closing the zone... but if we WERE.... what would you want to leave these people with? And everyone was like "HEEEYYYY" and some hermanas almost cried in relief but then we talked about how they'd felt and it turned out to be a really awesome thing. That's when we started putting impossible goals for each week, one in each category to really go for it and we ended singing the Army of Helaman with me at the piano. It was superb.