First Week in Xela

The name of our city, Quetzaltenango, has a lovely meaning.   The last part of the name, tenango, means 'good land' so this is Good land of the Quetzal bird. This is a beautiful bird with a long colorful tail that lives high up in the mountains but cannot survive in captivity so no one every sees them.  They use the symbol of this bird on their money and designs everywhere. The name Guatemala has a significant meaning also. Gua - alimientos (food),Te - tierra (land), ma - mama, ala - hombre (man) so putting it together means Food from Mother Earth for Man. This land is soooo beautiful with all it's lovely trees and green everywhere.  We are loving it here!

 These are cultivated farm plots going right up the steep mountains.  Looks like it makes it easy to work without having to bend over.  We saw a lot of these as we traveled from Quatemala City to Xela.

 This is President and Hermana Perez that were here to greet us when we finally arrived after 4 hours of traveling on very windy roads up through the beautiful green mountains. They will only be here this week as their three year term is finished and we will be getting a new presidency.

Ken and Chrys Meadows, our dear friends from so many years in Tucson in the same ward, were there to welcome us also.  We are standing in front of the Temple Annex where we have our very nice apartment right on the temple grounds.  The Meadows are just across the hall from us.

 President and Hermana Perez took the four of us to lunch right away to a lovely restaurant.  The food was delicious but I don't think any of it was typical Guatemalan food.  This was our fancy dessert, Mango Creme.  It was almost too pretty to eat but it was also very yummy!

Our beautiful temple at night.  It sits high up on a hill  so it can be seen from all around the city.  Which means also, that we have great views of the city.  Quetzaltenango is a city of about a quarter of a million people but they are compacted into a little valley with 10 mountains surrounding it.  Several of those mountains are volcanoes.  Out our living room window we see a tall cone that is not active, Santa Maria, but she has a little son by her side, Santiaguito, who has steam or vapor coming out most of the time.  They are often obscured by clouds or fog.

The Meadows go walking for exercise or exploring almost every day that the weather permits. They took us with them for our first walk-about and showed us the local laundry facilities.  This is just a big square concrete tub with washboards built in.  They said sometimes all of the little washboard areas and occupied with women doing their washing.  

It appears this is an economical way to take care of the grass.  There are two more goats on the other side of the tree doing the same mowing.

Some of the local temple workers planned a good-bye lunch for the Temple Presidency who will be leaving this week.  They invited all of us gringos to come too.  We were served some typical local food.  The soup was 'Sopa de Gallina' which mean 'Rooster Soup'.  The clay bowls held broth, vegetables, pasta, and thin noodles.  It was delicious!  There was about a quarter of a chicken on the side with nothing but a spoon to eat with so we just tore into it with our hands like they did.  There were platters of rice that we spooned into the soup too and little corn tortilla also.

The  next course was Camote which was a dish made with a type of sweet potato cooked in panela and water.  I think panela is sort of like piloncio that we get in Mexico which is a cone shaped sort of rough cane sugar that tastes like molasses.  It was quite good.  Then we had dessert after that!  Slices of a delicious cake that was pretty much like any cake here.  We were happy that we finally got to taste some local type food!

These two ladies are dressed in the typical dress we see everyday here with all babies and little children tied on their backs.  I will have more pictures of them with huge bundles on their heads.                                                       There are amazing things we see everyday and we are learning to love these simple people.  They have welcomed us with open arms and hearts.  When I shake the hands of those who enter the temple, I feel the hardened callouses from a life of hard work yet they always have smiles on their faces and love in their hearts.  We are so happy to have been called here to serve them. 

Preparing to Serve in Guatemala

I am finally getting started with this blog so I have some catching up to do so even though we are now down here in Guatemala, I'll start back at the beginning.  We were happily working on our house, planting our garden, and serving in the Mesa Temple when we received a phone call asking us if we would consider coming to Guatemala and serving in the Quetzaltenango temple.  It was a surprise but we knew right away that this is what we should do.  So we started all the preparations and moved out of our house the end of August and turned it over to our friend Briana Huish and her two lovely daughters. We made Nancy Sloan's home in Willcox our home base as we traveled around the Southwest to visit our kids.  

We came back to Tucson for our farewell talk on September 28 and were delighted to have all three of our Arizona kids and families there with us for that and our setting apart  by our Stake President.  We had a nice family dinner afterward then bid them all farewell.

We flew to Utah on Oct. 1 and enjoyed being there for General Conference.  Then on Monday Oct. 6 we began our intense language immersion training.  This is an optional program available for Senior Missionaries and they don't provide housing or anything except the language training.  Part of the stress was that we drove 175 miles each day round trip in rush hour freeway traffic.  Ugh!  Then we had our training in a chapel near the MTC from 9-4 each day.  We each had our own classroom and our tutors that we had been SKYPING with for a month.  There were also volunteer Spanish speakers who came in to chat with us for 1-2 hours a day so we could practice what we were learning. We also had 1-2 hours a day for personal study and the balance of the time we had tutors who were excellent! But it was intense!

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On the left is Jamison Peterson who was my personal tutor, although I had others too.  

The one on the right is Christian who was Brannick's tutor part of the time. We just didn't get a shot of Lee until the last day.

Brannick's tutor was Lee Essig but he is not in his usual dress uniform because we didn't get a picture of him till we invited both of our tutors for lunch the last day.  We had some fabulous sub sandwiches next door to our chapel.  Just the right size (about 15") of freshly made bread for hungry college boys.

We started the next phase of our training in the Salt Lake City Temple on October 20, 2014.  We were there for three days of wonderful spiritual preparation to serve.  President Richard Walker and his wife Kathleen were our main instructors.  They had been past president and matron of the Salt Lake Temple.  Our last day they took us on a 'walk-about' through many of the rooms in the temple that people usually don't get to see.

We flew to Guatemala on October 23, stayed in a lovely hotel overnight and then were taken by van on a drive through beautiful mountain scenes for about 4 hours to arrive in Quetzaltenango.

Ken and Chrys Meadows, our dear friends who have been here for a few months, took us to the open air market to buy our fruits and vegetables.  Oh, it is so nice to get back to this kind of shopping which we enjoyed so much in Chile and China.  You just can't get food this fresh in the States.

Here is the view at night right outside our front door of our beautiful temple.  We can tell already that we are going to love our experience here for the next 18 months.

Ken and Chrys are taking us to some lovely place up the mountain so I will have more pictures soon.