San Carlos Week 3-Talk, talk, talk

We attended senior missionary FHE in Mesa Monday night.  Lots of good food and the couple in charge showed a movie called Lehi in Arabia that she said could be found on Netflix and is a researcher's study in finding the place where Bountiful (where Lehi and his family lived while Nephi built the ship) was located.  He has 12 criteria that must be met for it to be the place described in the Book of Mormon and apparently this place fits the bill. Very interesting.  

Had ARP and then RS on Tuesday night.  We held seminary at the church Wednesday, which has advantages and disadvantages.  The same 10 kids showed up and during the lesson we showed the BofM video about Lehi’s dream and they were actually quiet and listening.  Thursday it was back to the Detention Center but this time we taught the juveniles first. That was brutal! They were deadpan, uncommunicative, and refused to participate.  It was like Quinn and I were just talking to each other. If they don’t warm up to us soon, we will not be putting ourselves through that much longer. They did like the ginger snaps I brought though.  Teaching the men this time was totally different. We only had 11 this time (lost 4-gained 1). They asked questions, shared comments, and asked for BofMs when they left. At one point, I thought Quinn had asked me to look up a scripture in Hebrews 16 and when I got there, I saw that it only goes to chapter 13.  As I was trying to get his attention to ask him what the reference was, one man said, “Hebrews doesn’t have a chapter 16.” WHAT?! How impressive that he knew that! We just had a good discussion that night and we enjoyed it. They also loved the cookies. 

We drove to Globe Friday to meet with President and Sister Andrews for interviews.  We had a good talk with them. Of course, whenever we are asked how we are doing, the answer is always, “Fine”, but I did feel like I had to be honest and tell them this is a depressing place.  There is so much poverty, ugliness, filthiness, idleness, and decay that it can feel discouraging. I am trying and praying to overlook the negative and focus on the positive, but it is hard. The Andrews were understanding and tried to be uplifting--especially Sister Andrews (she is a fireball) as she became so animated and was saying, “But you are their bright star!  They are looking to you and they need you!” She made me feel better, though sometimes I feel like we don’t make any difference here.

We had to talk in Sacrament meeting today, so any spare time I had this week I was working on it.  Just felt like we were doing a lot of preparing to talk this week. Glad it is in the past.  

RS today was awesome!  The native sisters starting talking about family history, Apache history, local stories, census record mistakes, etc.  It would be SO SO hard to follow your Apache line. When the government rounded them up, they assigned them English names and sometimes the names aren’t even names, they are Apache responses that the whites wrote down as names because they didn’t know any better.  For instance, one sister said as she was going back and looking at census records, she came across the name, “###” (can’t pronounce the word) which is actually a phrase in Apache meaning, “What’s it to you?” So when asked by the census taker, “What’s your name?”, they said, “###” and it was written down phonetically as their name.  I find their history fascinating.  

Have started giving rides, delivered 3 loaves of bread, bought the neighbor cat food for his TWELVE cats, have been hung up on twice (am starting to think this is a native thing--will write more about it if it continues), and picked up our first hitchhiker (that is how MANY people travel here) and turns out she had been to Idaho many times to fight forest fires. 

 Our first experience with the local wildlife.  I found this on the side of our bedspread--flicked it off onto the floor and as it was crawling away, realized it was a scorpion.  In sharing this experience with the other missionaries, Sister Andrews shared one of her encounters with the creature in a clothes basket, and asked if we had a blacklight flashlight.  She said she regularly goes around at night checking with the flashlight because it makes them glow green!  We now have one en route from Amazon.  Good news: they are more prevalent in the "valley" - what everyone here calls Mesa.  Bad news: the little ones are more dangerous.   Audrey's response upon hearing about our visitor, "Burn it down!"  Hopefully, it won't come to that.

 On Saturday we drove to the Tucson Temple--just over 2 hours away, but a beautiful drive.  Our session had 6 women and 4 men, so things moved right along.  Met a couple there who had also married in the Idaho Falls Temple.

After the temple, we drove to University of Arizona so Quinn could purchase the obligatory logo trunks.  I took this picture to show the interesting rock walls that are all around the campus.

 I was just fascinated by the trunk of this tree.

 A mural we saw near downtown Tucson.

 Not a great shot.  I was so busy enjoying the scenery, I forgot to take a picture until we were almost out of the cactus/rock formation area.  These hills are covered with saguaro cactus, but you would have to zoom in to see them.

 Once we see Bucket Mountain, we know we are close to home.

We have officially arrived in our showcase.