Hello from Tatouine!
(how do you spell that? I have no idea) and you thing that's a joke but it only
kind of is, because apparently some of the filming for that area was actually
done here in New Mexico. My first area is in the actual city of Albuquerque, in
the Albuquerque West stake, Taylor Ranch ward. And basically New Mexico is
exactly how you would expect it to be. Almost everyone lives in an adobe house,
even our apartments are adobe, and everything is the color of a Mexican restaurant.
The apartment building we live in is nacho cheese orange and our neighbors is
guacamole green and if something isn't one of those two colors it's some shade
of brown. Even the temple here is brownish. Almost all of our investigators are
Hispanic (we have about 10 right now), almost everyone is Catholic, and there
is no grass anywhere. People have rock yards here. Also, no one has rain
gutters. The one day that it did rain (and it was like a drizzle), everyone was
freaking out, the streets started flooding a little and the next day, people in
their prayers were thanking God for the rain. Ha, that's not something that
goes down regularly at home! Oh and it's averaging about 50 degrees here during
the day, although there is a pretty big temperature range, it does get kind of cold
at night (it's like this place is a desert or something!). Basically it's
exactly like what you'd expect if you saw Breaking Bad. Speaking of which, the
To'hajiilee reservation is like right next to our area. Hmm, I wonder if
digging for drug money is an appropriate p-day activity, ha, ha. There are
actually missionaries that serve out there but only Elders and they're really
only service missions since there are weird proselyting rules on the
reservation and all that jazz.
The Taylor Ranch area
itself is pretty well off. No one is like super rich or anything (at least that
I've met) but there are some pretty big houses here and everyone has a lot of
kids. I've met a lot of doctors, lawyers, business men, and the like. The ward
though is really good, we've been fed every night that I've been here and
people have been super willing to come out with us. We've had a member at
almost every lesson so far and we've had a pretty good number. This past week
we taught 7 lessons to investigators and 7 to less actives. So I'm pretty
excited about the area, I really do feel like the people have done so well here
because they have been blessed.
I've already had lots of
"picturesque" Christmas experiences here, what with the fancy houses.
We've gone caroling to at least one house every night and then shared with them
the Christmas story out of Luke 2. And we've been to a few members’ homes where
people played the piano in front of the fire and everyone sang around it and
all that type of stuff. I've also been to a few Christmas concerts. The last
one I went to on Sunday I talked to a little kid who had just moved
here from Rochester who was telling me all about how cool it is there.
April
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