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.