Ninth summary for President Carter: 5 weeks

In the past 5 weeks, we have taken 3 family trips, so our missionary work has slowed down a bit.  

We have done the following:

taught 9 lessons with the junior missionaries,

visited no English Connect classes,

made 2 "airport" runs—Sis Stanger (Burbank, returning from nephew's funeral); Hna Mayne to Santa Barbara pharmacy, from Camarillo and back to Simi Valley

We also did our usual community service (piano lessons, helping the elderly).

We attended the baptismal services of the Hernandez family (3) in Newbury Park and for Deyana Tenorio C. (child of record).

the ECR ward held another "late" Sacrament meeting with 8 members, 3 friends and a total of 23 in attendance.

We helped with car inspections at 4 Zone Conferences.

Other highlights include:

4 Temple prep classes to Everardo Corral

2 priesthood prep classes to Abelino Hernandez, Jesus Pasos

Taking Abraham Torres to the LA Temple for the 1^st time (baptisms for his ancestors—father, 4 grandparents, 2 g-grandparents), visiting the Visitor's center, then eating at Pollo Campero afterwards

A meeting with Pres. Thunnell (working on a Spanish branch in Camarillo area)

Overall, the Lord's work is doing great in this area and we see evidence of His hand all around us.  what a blessing it is to serve our great God in His most important work of gathering Israel!!

...

Weeks 30 and 31: Camarillo, CA

We returned back from a beautiful week in Hawaii on Saturday evening. It was so relaxing . . . . And then on Sunday, we drove a missionary up to Santa Barbara to get her medicine. Sunday was the strawberry festival, so the traffic was crawling, and the trip took 4 hours. On Monday, we picked up a missionary from the airport. She returned to Portland for a funeral of her 6-month-old nephew who was accidentally suffocated by a piece of plastic. She was really sad, so we quietly drove and didn't know how to help. That's how our service goes sometimes; the circumstances are bigger than the love we can bring. And then today, we were busy with helping at the courthouse in Ventura and visiting with the owners of Shorty, the feisty dog who bites and barks at Dad. 

 . . . Until our friends with Shorty called to cancel our visit because it is way too cold outside. They live in a small house, and so they were hoping to meet in the yard with the falling oranges and biting dog. Plus a lot of bugs this time of year. But the temperature is only 62 degrees and it is cloudy, so they cancelled the visit. We had to laugh. That temperature would only feel cold in California. In Wyoming we would be wearing shorts! 

We had such a great time with the Balaich family. And, yes, Juliet LOVED Hawaii! Amy's video shows in a cute way what a wonderful time we had. When we returned, a missionary we work with came up to Dad and said, "Elder Weatherford, you seem to have gotten a tan while you were visiting with your daughter. It makes me wonder about that visit . . . "  Yes, we kept our trip to Hawaii a secret as much as we could. Most missionaries don't go to Hawaii during their mission. 

Upon returning home, we realized that all the missionary couples except for the one who arrived last month are going home in June and July. Two couples are going home early because of family emergencies (one couple owns a pharmacy which their son runs but they need to come back to run it because the son struggles with opiod addiction and the other is a sister whose husband died of a massive heart attack and her health is not great). So Dad and I are going to step in and manage the housing arrangements for our 140 missionaries and 6 couples. We will be working in the office and driving the truck (poor dad), delivering utensils and furniture, unclogging drains, cleaning carpets, paying rents, etc. It will be a totally different experience for our last 2 months on the mission. We will wear pants and t-shirts. But the leadership needs some help with the office, especially because our mission president is going home at the end of June, and the new mission president will need some help getting settled with the housing and finances. 

In the meantime, we try to spend as much time as we can with our wards and our friends. We will teach a couple more piano lessons, attend baptisms, go to the temple with our friends, play and lead the music, and support them anyway we can. We still have a few sights to see on our preparation day, like the Hindu temple in the picture that is close to Malibu. What an amazing place! 

We are always fascinated by living here. We have foggy mornings almost every day now. We are not as hot as I thought we would be. We feel like Oxnard and Camarillo really have become home. That is the wonderful thing about serving a mission here for 9+ months. We have made a new home and new friends. And I always tell dad, home is where he is. So we are very happy and healthy. 

The highs and the lows of mission life continue. Our friend Carmen is a bright young mother of two who we married and baptized in February. We are going to go to her daughter's honor's presentation at middle school this week. Carmen has sacrificed and hoped for a better life for her daughters. Carmen is a hero! Her daughters were born in the US and they will be able to go to college and choose careers. It is really exciting for the whole family. But Carmen's husband struggles with alcohol and drugs, and we are praying for a way to help him overcome those without revealing that Carmen asked us for help. We love them all and we want all good things for them. The drugs and alcohol can be super hard to get past as we see with so many of our friends. 

Weeks 28 and 29: Camarillo, CA

We have had a lot of joy these past two weeks. If you remember, we were scheduled to return from our mission on April 21. This would allow us to attend Emma's college graduation, Hannah's baptism, Amy's turn to go to Hawaii, and Rob's residency graduation. But our mission does not have any new couples to take our place or the place of the housing couple. Our mission president, who is very kind, was grateful for our willingness to stay longer, and he said that we could take these trips during our mission extension. Not all mission presidents allow trips, so we feel very blessed. And we are grateful to work here a little longer. We will probably shift from teaching with younger missionaries to taking over the housing responsibilities next month, and we will be happy to help however we are needed. 

So, yes, last week we watched Emma graduate from BYU with honors, and we were so proud! Emma gave a presentation on the effects of financial programs which help mothers with childcare in the workplace with huge statistical regressions that compared variables across states in the US. Of course, I LOVED it! It was very technical. And thanks to Dad and the Websters, we ate a couple of delicious meals and spent a little time catching up. Stacey went home to Arizona with the Websters, and Joshua and Emma put their furniture in storage, and they headed off to Wash DC for the summer. We're very proud of them.

This past weekend, we went to Morgantown for Hannah's baptism. We had so much fun. The baptism was beautiful, and we enjoyed celebrating two birthdays (Hannah and Evelyn), plus an early celebration of Nora. Dad was feeling very California-ish, and so he rented a Tesla for us on the trip. We needed to charge the car three times. Fortunately, the charging station shared a parking lot with a Dunkin Donuts. So yes, we celebrated the baptism with donuts. We also had some wonderful meals, and we LOVED seeing the Holdernesses. We're also very proud of them. 

Here in California, we have been eating the biggest strawberries we have ever seen! They just keep getting bigger! We had fun celebrating my birthday, and I posted a picture of the watch that Dad got for me, with "L Luvs J" engraved on the back. All in all, it has been a great couple of weeks.

Week 27: Camarillo, CA

This week was so busy that Dad and I had to be very careful to eat and rest so that we could do everything that we planned. We are getting old. 

We began on Monday with our typical office meeting where we go through the schedule and assignments for the week. Then, we met with our friend, Abelino. He was exhausted from picking strawberries all day. We thanked him and told him that we were so impressed! When we feel tired, we try to think of how hard our friends work. On Tuesday through Friday, we attended four zone conferences in different parts of the mission. The couple who took care of cars in our mission went home so we helped with taking care of the cars. We arrived at each conference at 8:00 AM and we taught each missionary how to measure tread depth on tires, refill engine fuels, clean their car, and stay safe. We loved all the one-on-one time with our missionaries. I think we worked on half of the 62 cars. 

Our first conference was in Santa Maria, a 2 1/2 hour drive north from Camarillo, so we decided to spend the night there and have less driving for the next day, which was 1 hour north of Camarillo. We helped some missionaries move furniture into a new apartment, and then we drove out to the ocean at Morro Bay. We saw sea otters up close, and we were amazed at their antics. We felt so lucky to see them! We had a fun dinner in town, visited the Madonna Inn, and we were fast asleep by 9:00 PM. The next day our conference was in Goleta, just north of Santa Barbara, and after our conference, we ate tacos outdoors in our favorite restaurant. Our last two conferences were closer to home, so we were able to drive home at night and rest here. In the evening, we taught our friend Everardo about the temple, and he asked us about a female spirit that hangs around his home. His children have seen her, but Everardo has not. She seems to be pretty nice and harmless, so we eventually recommended just living with her and not worrying. (?!?!) This was a new one for me. 

On Saturday, we took our friend Abraham to the Los Angeles temple to do baptisms for his father (who was murdered when Abraham was 4 years old in Honduras) and his grandparents and two great-grandparents. He baptized me for the women and Dad baptized Abraham for the men. The sun was shining and there were beautiful roses everywhere and we had a beautiful day. Both Larry and Abraham wore a temple pin on their suit jacket to commemorate this special day. Afterwards, we asked Abraham for his favorite place to eat, and he suggested Pollo Campero. It is actually a chain of restaurants, and the food was delicious. Chicken with platanos and beans and fresh corn tortillas. That night we attended a baptism. It was supposed to start at 6:00. The room was packed with people. The leader announced at about 6:10 that we would wait for the parents to arrive before we started and that they were only 3 minutes away. Finally, they arrived at 6:40 and we started. There were about 15 children there, and they were all so tired of waiting in that tiny, crowded room and they were very noisy during the baptism. But that is the culture. And we may never get used to it, but we try to be patient.

By Sunday, we were starting to be a little tired. We forgot things like turning our heater off and bringing our water bottles. But we arrived at church in one piece. We saw that a gang had tagged our church with gang language. Do you think this was a result of the blessing Larry gave to a gang member inside that church? We do not know. We are so safe and protected in Laramie. As Dad and I sat in the front and led the music, we looked over at our favorite little family. They have seven children, and they sit in the front row every week. I wish I had a picture, but all seven children were active, coloring, fidgeting, etc. And BOTH of the parents had their eyes closed, their heads tilted, and were fast asleep. That's how we felt, too!  After this first meeting, we drove to our second branch, and there, Dad and his friends Everardo and Jose joined the men's choir to sing a hymn. The conductor was another man from our branch, and I was so proud of all of them. Music is not something that our friends can learn growing up in Mexico. Finally, when we visited our friends with two cute little girls, during our lesson, the girls snuck out, went into a storage room, and they came back with two bottles of water. They wrapped these in paper towels, like a present, and they brought them to us. We loved it so much! The simple ways people show love have taught me so much about showing love to others.

And that's our week. One in which I learned a lot about loving and being patient. One in which I gave a very short surprise talk in a church meeting - in Spanish, of course, and one in which we learned to pace ourselves so that we could do everything we wanted to do in order to help our friends and fellow missionaries. We feel so blessed.