September 6, 2007
Looking east from a hill
in a neighborhood called Las Fuentes in our area in Xalapa.
When we arrived
in our area, I got my first look at what would be my home for the next several
months. Elder Guerra and I lived on the top floor of a three-story apartment
building in the middle of a neighborhood of identical buildings called Nuevo Xalapa. Ours was
on top of a steep hill covered with trees. We had a three-bedroom apartment that
also had a living room, bathroom, kitchen area, and washroom (sort of). As a
missionary rule, though, we slept in the same room. We just used the other two
rooms for storage. This sounds very nice and all, but let me show you some
pictures before you get too excited.
My storage room.
Elder Guerra’s storage
room. We were allowed to listen to music, but only during few hours of the day, and only certain subdued genres at that.
Our bedroom.
Our living room, with
Elder Guerra studying at his table. Anyone wanna buy a couch?
My study table. I’m not
sure why some previous missionary decided to paint the Addidas logo on the
front of the drawer.
Our kitchen area,
featuring a hot plate, a pot, a mini-stove, two frying pans, a bunch of plastic
dishes, a large fridge (yes, that’s a large
fridge), and even hot water! This was by far the most extensive kitchen I ever
had in Mexico. Also visible on the left is the washroom with a washbasin and
the water heater.
What you can’t
see in this last photo is that the washroom was knee-deep in old, abandoned
missionary junk, including broken fans, rusty coat hangers, outdated church pamphlets,
worn out shirts, shoes with holes in them, and even old underwear. It seems
that years’ worth of missionaries had just left stuff behind when they were
transferred, and no one had bothered to throw it out. Not knowing anything
different, I just left it all alone.
Our bathroom. Nice, huh?
What you can see in this photo is that the water
has slowly eroded the tile around the toilet, uncovering the muck beneath it.
This finally convinced me to adopt the Mexican tradition of always wearing
footwear inside your house. What’s also interesting here is the presence of
both a shower curtain and a toilet seat, neither of which were very common
among missionary houses at the time.
The apartment
wasn’t in great shape, but it didn’t bother me too much. What did bother me,
though, was the fact that we were out of natural gas for the water heater when
I arrived. Xalapa was one of two zones in the mission that even had water
heaters at all, but it was definitely cool enough in the mornings to want it. Instead
of piping the natural gas into the apartment like in the U.S., in Veracruz they
buy big canisters of gas that you connect to your own heater and stove. When it
runs out, you wait for the truck to pass by so that you can stop it and buy a
replacement. The different gas companies all drive trucks around town each
morning playing their own little ice-cream-man jingles so you know they’re
coming. I thought this was the funniest thing ever, though it was less funny
when we kept missing our company’s truck each morning when we needed to buy more
gas.
Until we
managed to flag down the truck, we would just fill our little pot with water,
put it on the hot plate until it boiled, and then mix it with a big bucket of
cold water, which we then splashed on ourselves to bathe. It wasn’t exactly a
nice, relaxing shower to start the day, but it was better than trying to shower
with just cold water, which in Xalapa in late fall was really pretty cold.
My first time
in the apartment, we just quickly dropped off my luggage and left. We’d had an
appointment with a local family on the other side of our area to eat lunch at
2:00, but it had taken longer than expected for me to arrive in Xalapa, so by
the time we got there, I think it was past 4:00. When we arrived, I was surprised
at how nice the family’s house was. Like almost all the houses there, it was
made of concrete and had no carpet, but it was clean and spacious and had art
hung on the walls. The woman there led us into the dining room and served us. I
don’t remember exactly what it was; I remember it was unfamiliar, but I was
starving, so I ate it all anyway. I had assumed the woman who served us was the
owner of the house, but it turned out she was a maid that worked there. The
owners ran their own businesses during the day. I had no idea at the time, but
that was by far the wealthiest family I would ever meet in Mexico.
After our late
lunch, we went out to work. We left the wealthy neighborhood where we ate and walked
back to a neighborhood called El Olmo. I think the first house we went to was one
Elder Guerra and his last companion had visited before, though only briefly. We
asked to share a message with her, and she invited us in. I don’t remember the
visit very much, but it did feel reassuring to know that there were at least
some people willing to listen to us. After leaving, we knocked on a few doors
in the area and contacted people in the street. By now it had gotten dark. No
one else seemed particularly interested.
Elder Guerra
decided we should head over to a different part of town. We crossed a main road
and walked down a long set of stairs to a path through an open field. As we
were walking, Elder Guerra explained that we were going to “la mina” (“the mine,” as in “a goldmine”
of missionary work). We walked into a group of several neighborhoods
collectively referred to as La Reserva. La Reserva was one of the poorest parts
of our area, but that also meant that it was one of the places where people
were most receptive to us. I would end up spending a majority of my time in
Xalapa working with people from this neighborhood.
Unfortunately, I
can’t remember what else we did that night. As 9:00 approached, we walked back
out to the main road to catch the bus to take us back to our apartment.
The first thing
missionaries do when they get home is they plan out what they’ll do the next
day. They try to map out what will be the most effective way to use their time.
Missionaries always carry their planner with them, where they’ll schedule appointments,
write down people’s contact info, and take notes. Planning usually involves
figuring out how long each visit will take, what we’ll teach when we get there,
where we’ll eat lunch, and how to best use the time when we don’t have
appointments to find new people to teach. Missionaries even make backup plans
as to what to do in case an appointment falls through.
My planner for the day
after I arrived in Xalapa.
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