Weeks 34 and 35: Camarillo, CA

We are so busy taking care of housing! Here's how it goes. We were assigned to take care of housing and to give up our mission leader support (MLS is what we loved). But our friends in mission leader support all love us, and they know we still live here, and so giving it up is not possible. And that actually makes us so happy! We are trying to do both jobs.

So we stopped piano lessons, cleaning for our friend who hoards, teaching with missionaries (for the most part), and driving missionaries to the airport. We are still supporting both of our wards/branches as ward clerk and music people. We still speak and bear our testimonies in Spanish. We are still working with our friend to go to the temple in the next few weeks, and we had an amazing dinner with our friends last night (soup, chiles rellenos, salad, stuffed quesadillas, and more). It was so good! We are trying to help these friends we love; the wife wants us to stop her husband from drinking, and the daughter wants us to stop the wife from yelling. We feel the pressure to make it all better because we love them so much. 

Two weeks ago, Rob and Tej paid us a wonderful visit. We were so happy to finally meet Tej in person, and we were delighted with him. We went to beaches in Santa Barbara and Malibu (Zuma), even though it was cloudy. We also found some fun restaurants. Our feet got stained in some weird brown oily tar on the beach and our clothes are permanently stained. But all in all, we had a wonderful time. The day after Rob and Tej left, we received our first eviction notice for a missionary apartment, which was a little traumatic. The housing records are completely disorganized and even mission. So we learned that we have to go through each of our 80 apartments and update rent amounts and contracts for the Elder who pays the bills and the auditors. Can we finish in the 4 weeks we have left? To be honest, probably not.  

We also moved 3 sets of missionaries out of dangerous apartments into safer areas up in Paso Robles, which is about 250 miles from our duplex. Dad drives a huge truck, and we load up mattresses, furniture, and other stuff. We tell the missionaries not to accept giveaways like treadmills and couches because we do not and cannot move those. But the missionaries still have a lot of junk. 

On Sunday we attended our wards. The members are very talkative. During the lesson, the teacher called on a sister who wanted to make a comment. The commenter was on the other side of the room, so I could not hear her very well, but she started telling a long story in Spanish. The teacher was so patient. She turned around and wrote out the lesson on the board during the comment. Then she went to her seat and got a treat out of her bag to give to a baby in the classroom. For about 10 minutes, the teacher didn't even look at the commenter. When the commenter was finished, the teacher just went on with her lesson as if nothing had been said. Then in our next ward, a sister who likes to comment raised her hand in Sunday School and tried to explain some conspiracy theory. Our teacher just said loudly, "No! I asked what ways we follow the Savior, and that's all I want to hear!" in Spanish of course. So I saw two completely different ways of dealing with comments last week. 

Last week, a gringo friend who has lived in Camarillo and raised her children here invited Dad and I to a party. It was amazing! Her husband built a brick oven in their backyard. They have a gazebo and all sorts of beautiful flowers. We made our own pizzas and her husband cooked them in his brick oven, then we ate them outside in this beautiful backyard that they have spent 40 years building. Their children were married in their backyard. 

Two days later, we flew to Baltimore for a wonderful residency graduation, and we loved congratulating Rob on successfully enduring a hard four years. The fellow residents voted on Rob as the "most likely to know the name of the patient's second cousin best friend's dog" because he loves to listen to his patients. It was a meaningful compliment. Also, on the program, Rob was listed for almost every award and the host just introduced him as, "well you can see that Robert won all the awards." The host was a little dry. :) It was so fun to see Carolyn, Laura, Andrew, Tej, Josh, and Emma there, too. 

Tenth summary for President Carter: 3 weeks

This past 3 weeks we've seen a big change in our mission assignment--from MLS Spanish to Housing Coordinators.  we're still getting used to the new assignment, but we really miss the old one and the great opportunity to teach with the young missionaries.

We attended 2 baptisms (Hector Arciniega and Francisco)...we taught several Gospel lessons to Hector and Larry baptized him.

We taught 7 lessons with junior missionaries, much lower than normal as we wound down that area.

We did 1 airport run to Burbank to pick up Sis Stanger as she returned from a family funeral.

We did a lot of housing work and prepping for supplies prior to MLC to distribute to the Zone leaders.

We attended 2 late Sacrament meetings of the ECR ward and had 21 and 27 souls in attendance (the latter being a record, I believe).  it is such a sweet way to minister to the needs of our faithful Saints and friends who must work on Sundays to keep their jobs and provide the needs of their families.

We had a "killer" busy week of Zone Conferences, including both car inspections and housing training/awards.  We always love interacting with all the young missionaries!

I did a lot of translating in our Sacrament meetings.  We helped Rogelio Rivera complete his divorce papers and take them to the Ventura County Courthouse.

We organized and paid for a 50^th Anniversary celebration dinner for Elder/Sister Haslam at Stonefire Grill and it was a lot of fun!

We finished 2 different Temple Preparation seminars—one in Spanish for Everardo Corral (6 lessons) and another in English to 5 YSAs (2 lessons to Daniela Ramirez, Eric Terry, Sarah Surges, Kalixta Basua, and Lev Zurcher).  We really enjoyed teaching all of those classes.

I taught Everardo C. and Jose Rangel how to consecrate oil and give a priesthood blessing of health, along with other MP ordinances that don't need priesthood keys.

I did quite a bit of Ward Clerking for ECR ward.

We had to end several of our old activities in order to focus on Housing Coordinator duties—including piano lessons for 2 sisters, serving Coral Shapiro, end our English Connect supervision duties, etc.

All in all, it was a very busy 3 weeks!

Weeks 32 and 33: Camarillo, CA

Our big news is that we are now officially serving as housing coordinators. We have an office job from 9 to 5 weekdays. On the weekends, we still attend two or three church meetings with our Spanish speaking friends. We still have been teaching temple preparation lessons, with Spanish at 6:00 PM and English at 7:00 PM. We still drive to the airport with missionaries who need to go home for surgery, etc. and Dad is still a ward clerk in the Spanish ward with 542 people on the list, about 150 who attend. That's almost 400 people we do not know. Many have moved back to Mexico. 

We spent a lot of time training to be housing coordinators and we were very tired. So when I woke up in the morning, and I saw a text in Spanish, I thought it was our missionaries and I thanked them for confirming our appointment. It turns out, the message was from Dad asking if they had confirmed our appointment. Spanish is still a weakness of mine. However, today, I bore my testimony in church. I accidentally said that I have "force" instead of "strength" but that's okay. May the force be with you! 

The ward had a girls camp fundraiser, and the food was called tinga chicken. Dad and I paid for a plate of chicken, rice, and beans. We enjoyed the chicken that night. The next morning, we had diarrhea. We felt sorta sick. And we knew it was the tinga chicken because it was in a huge pot and it had been sitting out, sorta warm but not really hot, for a long time. Thank goodness we dodged anything worse than diarrhea. We also said hello to our friend, Nathan, and told him that we love him and support him. He attends every activity with the young women because he was born female. He never complains, but he is quiet. His father needs (because of finances) to live with his sister's family, and they do not really understand the support that Nathan needs. They insist that he attend young women at church, not young men. So we just love everyone in this crazy situation. Nathan will head off to college this fall, and he told us that he is doing well. He has some great dreams for his future. 

For weeks now, our friend Juan Zurcher has been begging the members of our tiny branch to come loquat picking with him. He puts his requests in a group chat, and then the leader makes jokes about it Saturday after Saturday. Finally, I told Dad that I would like to go get some. So we went loquat picking and our friend Juan was so happy. No one else in the group would come, just us and Juan and his wife. We came home with 3 huge bags of loquats. Juan gave some to the chicken tinga young women dinner (no one bought those). Then we brought a bag to church with a sign saying "free." No one took a loquat. Then we realized why. They really are delicious. BUT, they have huge seeds in the middle and it is almost impossible to get the skin off, and they are the size of large cherries. It takes 5 minutes to eat each one. So much work for a tiny bite of fruit. We couldn't eat our two bags, and we gave up. Now we know why our other Mexican friends made jokes about the loquats. Juan, though, earned a college degree in plant science in Mexico City in the 1970s and he is fascinated by all growing things. Of course, his job in the United States is cleaning hospitals, not in plant science where he would like to work. He sacrificed so much so that his children could have a better life! 

This week, I have been very worried. Our mission office is run by people in their 70s who have never done office work. The secretary asked me to show her how to start a new line in Word. I showed her that she could push "enter." She gave me a message with an 800 phone number, saying that some utility company called to say we were late on our bill. We have 80 apartments with water, gas, and/or electric with 3 companies each under 3 names (church, mission, and office). That's about 21,000 possibilities. There is no way that we will ever know who that phone call was intended for. When we call back, the company cannot help us unless we know our account number, and we cannot guess which account it is. We figure that when the lights go out, the missionaries will let us know. The records in the office are horrific. So Dad and I are working so hard to create a record for every apartment. We have a hard time falling asleep at night because we get so stressed. So I practice giving a talk in Spanish and that lulls me to sleep. That's my secret sleeping pill. I have to focus so hard on the Spanish that I block out all the stressful thoughts, and then I fall asleep. 

For our housing duties, Dad drives a big truck, and we fill it with beds and furniture. We try to see something fun on the way, such as the mission San Miguel. Our mission includes some beautiful sites! We buy furnishings and kitchen utensils for our missionaries, and we take trips to Walmart often. This is the crazy Walmart, always packed with people speaking Spanish, you almost never hear English. We pack lunches for the office every day. One day, when Dad was eating his orange, he held the knife that he used to slice his orange and asked if I wanted him to cut my head off. I already felt like my head was off! We had dinner with the office staff, too. 

We held zone conferences in which we said goodbye to our wonderful mission leaders. We were able to see some sleeping sea otters on the way home. We finally understand what they look like in the water, after searching for a few months. At first, I thought they were logs. We brought the binoculars so that we could see them close up. 

All in all, it was a beautiful week. Dad baptized a man who had a hard time giving up smoking. Dad gave him a blessing and he was able to stop smoking. He loves Dad. He was crying and trying to remember every detail of his special baptism day. We felt so blessed to be there! His name is Hector. We told him about your baptism, Paul. And how much we value your decision. 

From Elder Weatherford --

i wanted to tell you a little more about our recent convert Hector Arciniega.

Mom and i first taught him in early March with Hermanas Marshall and Darrington.  He was a recent "find" and was on his 2^nd lesson i believe.  We helped teach him the "Gospel of Jesus Christ"  He seemed very sincere to learn more truth, but also had a few significant barriers...one was his addiction to smoking and drinking coffee (i bet Amy and Josh never saw that one, eh?), the other was that he felt that his parents in Mexico (who of course are Catholic) would 'die if they knew he was talking to us, much less thinking about getting baptized.'

So eventually Hna Marshall suggested to him that he could ask for a priesthood blessing to receive God's help to overcome his addictions and i so i gave him a blessing as part of lesson.  Then another lesson, as he struggled with his parents' concerns, i shared via text after the lesson some scriptures from my "Words of Jesus" project that i've been working on for 1-2 years, as i always find great power in Jesus' actual words and His wisdom....for He truly is "full of grace & truth!"

We kept teaching Hector for a while and he began progressing more, giving up his coffee, whittling down his cigarettes each day.  we noticed early on that his left forearm had the worst scar we've ever seen, from a work accident, maybe a soldering burn?  long story, short...we eventually ended up being busy at the same times that Hna Marshall would schedule a lesson, that we kinda lost track of him...the Hermanas got transferred out, so that eventually Hna Dickinson and Peterson were now teaching him...we may have joined them fo a lesson or two here and there, but we were not really as close as we had been earlier.

Finally, Hna Dickinson called us about a week ago and told us the great news that Hector had decided to get baptized and he wanted me to baptize him.  It turns out, that as they were prepping him for baptism, the Hnas asked him who he wanted and he said "that missionary Elder", so she named off the 4 young Elders in our district (Schlensker-no, Aposhian-no, Wester-no, Lafferty-no), so she scratched her head and said "well, that's all there are"  Then he said, "no there's an older guy" and she said "do you mean Elder Weatherford?" and he said "yes, that's the guy!"

So i had the incredible privilege of entering into the baptismal font with him Saturday night and helping him make his first sacred covenant with God and i can tell you that he is a new man, he is happier, his face shines brighter, and he is closer to God and His love than ever before in his life.  This truly is one of the great miracles of being a missionary-- to be able to see the change the Gospel makes in people's lives is absolutely beautiful and miraculous!  

Hector had tears in his eyes much of the night at his baptismal service (and i had a few too).  After i baptized him, and they closed the curtain to the font, he just stood there...he splashed more of the water on himself and said "i don't want to leave nor ever forget this moment."  In the locker room, as we were changing out of our white clothes, he reminded me about the blessing i had given him (i honestly had forgotten).  He said it changed his life—he had received the power to give up smoking which he had wanted to do but hadn't been able to do without God's help.  He also said that the scriptures i sent to him really sunk deep into his heart and Jesus' words gave him the courage to follow Jesus Christ in the way he was now feeling.  He just cried and thanked me and hugged me and it was all so very tender, that i will never forget this experience.  And then he added, "by the way, my severely damaged forearm (that he used to always wear a protective sleeve over & that wouldn't function) that i couldn't use, it now works" and then he showed me how he could move it back & forth, in ways that he couldn't previously.

It truly was a beautiful and miraculous night and i thank my loving Father for the privilege of helping Him bring one of His precious children back to the fold and closer to Him.

i just wanted to share this 'rest of the story' with each of you.  i hope you enjoy it and can feel the Spirit as you read it.