Elder Zach Snyder Obregon Mexico Mission: Week 50: Life in a Pueblo

Welcome to 4 Milpas!!

Hola!

Well I dont have too much time to write because we arrived a little late to our cyber, but I will try to answer your questions and explain what happened this week the best that I can. So 4 milpas is the name of the branch extension where I live. There are no paved roads and there are no stores. It is kind of crazy because if we need something, we have to wait until monday til we can go to los Mochis to get it and los Mochis is like an hour away by bus! So we have to plan our pdays very effectively. haha. :)

Our area is very big. We have to cover 5 small little towns and some of the towns are like 40 minutes away riding my bike. So lets talk about my bike...

Well, I have to say that having a bike has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages that you can all imagine is that it is much easier to travel. Also your sweat actually starts to dry with all the wind. haha! And the disadvantages is that my bike is a piece of crap! It does not have shocks and all of the roads have a ton of loose rocks and my first day I popped the tire returning home. But luckily someone gave us a ride back to 4 milpas so that was very nice. But to start, my bike seat was absolutely terrible. It was super hard and with my lack of booty, my bum was hurting by the end of the day. So the next day we went to the bike shop and I bought a new bike seat. I bought the one that is for fat people. It is super big and wide and is very soft. And it has shocks so now all the bouncing isnt too much of a problem. But the other problem is that the pedel was kind of broken. But it still worked, so I didnt worry too much about it. We took it to someone in the morning to check it. And they said that I had to get a new one but that it would probably last for the week. Well that day we had to go to one of the farthest towns in our area. So we had like 2 km left to get to our comida (dinner appointment) and my companion asked, "is your bike still at 100" and I responded, "I think so." Then directly one minute after this short conversation, I said to my companion, "My bike is no longer at 100." My pedel arm had fallen off my bike and we were still like 2 km from the comida. So we had to walk the rest with my broken bike. Then we fixed it and got back home. Today when we were riding our bikes some screw broke in one of my gears so I had to buy a whole new set of gears. It is getting fixed right now.

There is some guy who lives kind of close to our house that fixes our bikes. His name is Scooby. Like Scooby Doo. I think they call him that because he is always smoking weed. But he always fixes our bikes for us.

I want to say more, but unfortunately I don't have much time. But I do want to talk about what happened this past sunday. So the church building is a "casa de oración" or house of prayer. It is a little building where we meet for church. We had an attendance of 25 people this sunday, which is a new record I think. But there is not that many people with the priesthood here. But this sunday was the first sunday that the missionaries did not have to bless and pass the sacrament. We had a new convert bless the sacrament for the first time and he did a great job. He is 16 years old. And we had another member who is 13 years old pass the sacrament to everyone. And at the end, we were short one cup of water. So we had to bless the water one more time, so that everyone could partake of the sacrament. But this taught me a big lesson of the importance of taking the sacrament. It is so important that everyone takes it each week, that we will bless it again if necessary so that everyone can partake of it. And it is such a blessing that we can take the sacrament each week so that we can be cleansed of our sins.

Well we need to go, but I just want to tell everyone that I love you all so much.

Love

Elder Snyder

P.S. Also we dont have a working AC so one of these pictures is our invented AC. We are trying to find someone to fix our AC but it is really difficult to find someone in these pueblos that know how to fix AC. And it has been really difficult to sleep these last couple days because it is starting to get really hot here.