Sunday, March 14, 2010

March 14, 2010

Hi again, It has finally stopped raining everyday and it is beginning to feel like spring or even summer when the sun is out. I wanted to show you some of the tiles that they use in building. This is a house we passed by with tiles on the outside walls. They use tiles everywhere. When we walk to church and see some of the individual houses and if you are able to look into their gates and see into their garages, they are all tiled. Can you imagine having a tile floor for your garage, plus tile for your yard. They don't plant much grass around their houses or apartments very much. But they do have nice tiles. Our apartment is all tiles on the floor, plus the bathrooms and kitchen are tiled up the walls.
We finally got a picture of the rooster that used to wake us up in the early morning when we first got here. Now we can sleep through it just fine. This is just below our apartment.
We had a very nice week this week. The mission is having zone conferences this week. There are 6 zones in our mission right now and usually they have 3 or 4 zone conferences each transfer. I say 3 or 4, because they usually combine two zones together to have a conference, except for the Canary Islands and they only have a joint one about once or twice a year, because of the expenses of air travel, so only the mission President and his wife go to these zone conferences and sometimes do two, one right after the other. It's cheaper to fly them than to fly all of the 14 missionaires to one of the islands.
A typical week for us start with a staff meeting with the mission president and his wife, the assistants to the president and also the office elders and then Roy and I. We go over the next week or two and discuss any problems that they might have, talk about zone conferences, etc. We only go to one of the zone conferences. When they have a zone conference on Monday, we don't have a staff meeting until later in the week.
We usually meet with the branch mission leader once a week, and the elder also meet with the Spanish ward mission leader once a week to coordinate plans for teach new investigators, etc. On Wednesday we will take the train into Malaga for Zone Conference, we don't drive there, because the parking is a problem and it's almost easier to take the train, even though it takes twice as long to get there. The church is a few blocks from the train station, so it's easy to get there for us. The elders usually drive because they have to bring supplies, etc. We really have a good group of elders and sisters in this mission and it has been wonderful to get to know them and feel of their spirit.
We hope you have a wonderful week and we will also.