Oh how interesting it is to live in a barn/house!

A really great thing about being in a missionary mom group is being friends with your son's companion. With permission from his mom, I will include tidbits of Elder Toolson's email this week in green to help make a complete story of the week with two perspectives.

HI THERE!
Ha! I told you I have gotten super dark up here! And I continue to get darker every day with this crazy sun! It’s like walking around in a tanning bed with a really powerful humidifier!!! Lol.

It's been raining alot and the river has risen so much! Fortunately, Peten is realy flat so its impossible to have an actual mud slide. The river here has risen a lot!! There are parts of our area that are completely flooded so that we can’t go there. It’s crazy! But our house is pretty high up and far enough away from the river. It’s still got at least 600 yards to hit our house, so that most likely won’t happen, plus it’s got to go up the hill of the main road. So we are nice and safe where we are. We have a regular linoleum floor, not dirt. No damages besides the holes that already exist in our house. Ha ha!

It's super crazy about all these natural disasters around the world! We have been talking a lot about all that stuff as a district here and also how an apostle said that the church headquarters won’t be in Utah for too much longer, and that there is cool stuff happening in Missouri. It’s all getting me pretty excited. Who knows, maybe my kids could be called on missions to Jerusalem!!! I guess we shall find out soon enough!!

Oh we killed 4 rats this week! 3 of them by our trap and 1 giant one that escaped the trap and we chased around the house for about an hour. But we finally got it cornered and exterminated it from our house. Hopefully these rats will learn to not come into our house. It’s just so open to the outside, anything can get in! Toolson saw a giant scorpion the other morning crawling up the wall too. Oh how interesting it is to live in a barn/house! Goofy story for the week. We have been having a lot of rat problems these past couple of weeks so we set the trap like every night. In one week we killed 4 rats! Ha ha! One night at like 2 a.m. I heard the trap go off, (the trap never actually gets them, just makes them dizzy or something) so I go in the kitchen and it's just chillin on the floor like it can't even see me. So I get my bat and walk like 3 feet from it and just nail it into the wall as hard as I could! Then it totally ran at me so I screamed like a little girl when it touched my foot! Then I woke everyone up and they all got their brooms and stuff and we just chased this rat around for like 15 min in the middle of the night screaming and yelling! Ha ha! It was so much fun :) Then we finally trapped it in the bathroom and Mcphee smashed it. It was a good one!

Sorry Mom, I had to open all my birthday presents...I couldn’t wait for a whole month and just look at them everyday ha ha! Sorry, please forgive me! Oh I have a Christmas list if that’s ok since who knows when I will receive it. All I want is the D&C Manual, the Book of Mormon Manual and the book called Day of Defense. Hopefully you can find it all. But that is really all I want...nothing else, unless you absolutely want to give me more, I won’t deny it.

I didn’t write the talk that I gave in sacrament last week. I just kinda expounded a tiny bit on what we usually teach in lessons about the atonement (expiacion or expiar is to atone). So sorry that I can't really send that to you.

Your questions:
Eythan is trying to find his graphing calculator. He said he let you borrow it. Any ideas where it might be? It’s not in your backpack.
Eythan must be on crack! Sorry, I haven't seen his graphing calculator. I didn’t really ever need it for my math class. He helped me one time with it but I was never given it. So who knows...or in Guat terms, SABER!

We would love to be able to have family prayer at night at the same time as you are so we can feel more like a complete family. What do you think? What time?
I don’t really have a set time to pray. It’s just random. 10:30 usually but sometimes I go to bed earlier or a little later.

What’s with your MTV backpack you’re always wearing? Kind of cracks me up.
MTV backpacks are all that they sell in the land of Guatemala. So I bought one because the bag I brought… well I really didn’t like carrying it around and the other morrales, or those little shoulder bags, hurt my shoulder after a while. So I bought a lat-pack! Awesome!

Tell me how you have liked and used your gospel picture photo album that I made for you?
I mostly use the pictures about the restoration. It has really been a good tool to use. Thanks so much!!

Ok first off, about the baptisms...The 3 kids of Famila Juarez, the recently baptized family, is happening this next Saturday at 5. It was delayed because we want the dad, Lázaro, to baptize them. But he hadn’t been ordained a priest yet. He got ordained yesterday, on Sunday. He is going to perform the baptisms in the font by our branch building. We can’t do it in the river because there isn’t a beach for people to sit anymore. It’s risen too high. We were going to do the baptisms at his house in the river but then the river grew so much that it just flooded his whole house.

It was a humbling experience to see the Juarez family. We went over there to help them build a new house on stilts. The whole family, along with all their belongings, were just under some tin roof thing just barely big enough to cover every thing. At night they all slept in their little lanchas (little boats). We built them a whole house in like 9 hours. The dad put in the floor before we got there so we put up the walls and the roof. It was pretty much the hardest work I have ever done! I felt like a true Mexican :) It didn't help that it was SO hot and I was sweating so much it was ridiculous! But it felt great to accomplish so much in a day.

The other 3 fechas that we had with other kids is rather disappointing and frustrating. The rule is that they have to go to church 7 times and be interviewed by President. They have gone to church more than 10 times and the last 2 weeks they have been the first people at church! They've gone all by themselves. President is coming up next week for leadership training for the District Leaders and the Zone Leaders so he was going to do the interviews then. But then we received a call last night from our DL saying the President would prefer that their mom commit to baptism too before the interviews happen. So now we have to work with their mom really hard. She doesn’t really even want to listen to us though. She is cool and all but she doesn’t want to even hear our message. If she still doesn’t want to be baptized I am hoping that President will still do the interviews. So that is a HUGE bummer and it makes me sad. We still don’t really know what to say to the 3 kids when we go over there this week. I pray that the Spirit will guide us to say the right things so that we don’t lose them like we did with Familia Molina when the same thing happened.

That is pretty sweet about BYU going Independent. That 8 year deal with ESPN sounds amazing for them! I’m so stoked for that! I’m glad that they found a really good replacement running back. That will help a lot. Who is all on the schedule this year then? Anyone sick? Texas and Oregon are to be played in later years, right? Or are they for this year?

Well nothing else interesting really happened this week! We caught 4 rats, it's hot, I got darker. Ha ha!!! That’s about it!

I hope this was long enough for you, but I really don’t know what else to write!! I love you all so much!!
Stay Strong
Keep the Faith
Love Elder Jordan Smith