The River is Dropping

12/9/09
Hola Familia!
Great to hear from you all this week. I hope you are enjoying the cold, because its certainly the opposite here. It’s quite toasty.
Anyway, good news from the river front. Its dropped below 15 meters and continues to drop. Some members are getting back into their houses, but now the clean up starts. It’s gonna take quite a while to get everything cleaned up. The river brought a lot of mud and bugs and snakes and things, so there will be lots to do in the coming weeks. I talked to a red cross guy the other day and said that they were planning on housing people in the schools for another four months, but I think that was like a worst case scenario thing. I think everyone has pretty well repented and remembered God in their time of need. Despite all the forecast of rain, there hasn’t been a drop all week. Last night we walked by a catholic church, and being the day of the virgin, there were about a thousand people outside, and I think I heard them praying for the river to go down or something like that.
I guess you could say that Christmas season is in full swing here. It’s not got too much to do with how we celebrate back there, but it’s cool in its own way. It’s a lot more similar to the fourth of July, with fireworks and parties and certain drinks that would be unwise to partake of. This year will be different for us though. Last year we got to go and spend the night with members, until one in the morning, but this year we have a normal schedule. But once 12:00 hits there will be more noise than on a battlefield due to the fireworks, so we will more than likely just keep the lights off and watch the fireworks from our tenth story window. I am very excited about that. There are no regulations on fireworks here, so its basically anything goes. It's gonna be sweet.
To clarify things that I must not have explained correctly, my comp is from Utah and is also a zone leader. When you move up to zone leader you get “trained” again, so I guess I am training him. We went to mission council last week and were instructed on the vision of the mission by the assistants and of course, the man behind it all, Presidente Villalba. He taught us why we have the priesthood and how we can be agents unto ourselves and be anxiously engaged in a good cause. Lots of doctrine instead of the “application” or list of things to do.
The investigators are doing great. One family is receiving an abundance of trials and blessings. They are going to receive a ton of bricks and materials from the government to finish their house, and they won like 700 pesos in the lottery, but the mom is hospitalized with an aneurysm (coagulated blood in her brain) and the dad is also having some medical problems. It’s great to see how the lord keeps them afloat. This is the same family that the dad got up in district conference about two months ago and gave his testimony. They have so much faith.
We have zone conference coming up this week, so I will get to go back and see my first area. Half of the mission will be there, so I will see quite a few friends. I hope to have a few minutes to drop by some people out there. There are now Hermanas in the area.
I think that’s it from me this week. I am learning a lot about things that are going to help me later in life, like working efficiently under pressure and stuff like that. It’s not easy to be a zone leader. It would be nice to move into the emeritus ZL status, but I guess I have something to learn here. I will go and do I guess…
Anyway, I love you all a whole bunch and look forward to talking to mom and dad in a few weeks. The church is true, of that I’m sure.
Elder Rau

p.s. i can't send fotos due to the lameness of the computer, so maybe next week...sorry...