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Anyway, I hope the week wasn't too stressful for you. A short observation is that taking a little time to read the scriptures every day will help you maintain your sanity and balance the rest of your time better. Also: the employers here in Mexico are so much worse than the employers in the U.S. for work/home balance. The average Mexican works ten hours a day, seven days a week with an occasional rotating day off (which is never Sunday which is especially frustrating for us as missionaries). And they work that schedule not because they're desperately poor but because that's what the employers demand. 

 

As far as the mission schedule goes, it's not as simple as you paint it. Sometimes there are meetings and things in the morning when we ought to be studying. And sometimes our companions aren't interested in studying. And sometimes we have church at eight in the morning. Sometimes we get back to the house late and we have to decide if we're going to plan or go to bed on time. Sometimes lots of things happen. But if we decide that studying is important to us, we get it done. 

To stay warm I've been going out to work with my fleece on and my raincoat on top (the cold comes with rain and high winds). And today it's in the high eighties and really sunny. The locals say that another storm is supposed to come in tomorrow, but the weather report that we get from the mission says it'll stay sunny and hot all week. We'll see. 

 

 

Today we went to the escolleras (breakwater) in my area and saw some pretty cool stuff. I took pictures that someday I will send to you. I saw a frigate bird and a puffer fish (there were people fishing and they'd just caught it) and terns and gulls and oil tankers and giant concrete tetrahedrons that had to have served some kind of purpose but were pretty incomprehensible and a skin diver spear fishing. I also got kind of sunburned, but It was a good trip.

 

This week we were looking for this one inactive member who we didn't know in this one part of the city where we'd never been, and, after looking for her for an hour, crossing the colony from one side to another, we gave up and headed back; right then we saw a couple women struggling with corrugated metal roofings, and stopped to help them put them on top of their house. So we're up on the roof and the neighbour comes out of her house to ask us to put a pause on the roofwork because she was going to shower (her bathroom doesn't have a roof and we were up high to see inside). And it turned out that she was the person we were looking for! And then after some more talking, we found out that the woman we were helping was the ex-wife of one of our members whose daughters we were also looking for. So it was interesting how that happened.

Amor,

Bryan