"Echoes of Eden" Dayle King Searle

  Happy day after Christmas! I hope your holiday celebration was wonderful. Things were really slow in the office this week leading up to Christmas, which meant we had time to go do fun things. Monday we took off with the Wrights and Cluffs. We caught a bus just up the hill from our hotel. There was a man standing on the bus playing an old battered guitar and singing at the top of his lungs while we rode. He wasn’t the best singer, but he’d be in the running for most enthusiastic. I was impressed with how he managed to stand there while the bus jerked and jolted along. I only saw him lose his balance once, but he stuck his foot out and caught himself without missing a beat on his song. Ron gave him a good tip, which he well deserved.

  I learned two very important lessons this week. First, if you delete pictures from your icloud account it also deletes them from your phone. Yes, this lesson was learned from experience. I backup the photos on my phone to my google photos, so normally this would not be a problem. However, on Friday, when I learned this lesson, I had not backed up my phone since Sunday. That meant that all the pictures I took this week were gone—all of them! Noooooooooo! Then I learned the second lesson—when you delete photos from your icloud, you have thirty days to change your mind and restore them. I’m so glad I learned that second lesson, or there wouldn’t be any photos to accompany this blog post, and I know the pictures are the best part.

The first thing I want to point out is that in this photo, I am standing between two average sized Mexican women. In Mexico I am not considered short, I’m average. Yes, there are taller Mexican women, like the woman on the far left, but there are a lot more who are shorter. Much shorter. I have rarely in my life experienced the sensation of “towering over” another adult woman, but here it’s fairly common.

We just got back from Guadalajara where we’ve been for a week. We were there for FIL, which is short for Feria Internacional del Libro. Most of what we’ve read about it says it’s the second largest book fair in the world, but one source said it was the largest. Either way, it’s huge. I think every major book publisher in the world, as well as many smaller ones, were there. It wasn’t held last year due to COVID, and this year they limited the number of people who could attend, so we heard that it was about half the size of normal. Even at that, it was massive. It had booths with games, movies, and crafts, but mostly books—so many books, vast numbers of books. Sadly for me, they were mostly in Spanish.

  About the only excitement we had the first part of the week was that we ate a Burger King hamburger and fries. It was the first fast food we’ve had since we got here. We saw it when we came out of Chedraui from grocery shopping and were hungry. We’re enjoying all the good Mexican food we get here, but it was nice to have a bit of a taste of something from home.

Inside the temple Visitor's Center Our communications department is planning an event in conjunction with the lighting of the Christmas lights on the grounds at the Mexico City temple, so this week we went there to work out the logistics. It is a big event. Gustavo and Lucero have invited influencers and VIPs to a reception in the visitor’s center, followed by a Christmas program in a Stake Center on the grounds, and lastly, the actual lighting of the lights. It kicks off the church’s “Light the World with Love” campaign in Mexico and the Christmas season. The young, sister missionaries who are serving at the visitor’s center will be acting as hostesses for the event. We met with them to tell them about it and to explain their responsibilities. The church has just started sending young missionaries back into Mexico since they were taken out due to COVID, so most of the sister missionaries were Mexicans. Lucero arrived back here from the United States this week because of this event

  We got our green cards this week, which means we are now legal residents of Mexico! Although we are area missionaries, the Mexico City West mission is assigned to take care or our temporal needs, so they got all the paperwork ready for us. Then Thursday two cute, young missionaries met us in front of our office building, ordered an Uber, and escorted us to the Immigration building. They made sure our papers were all in order and sent us in. I was a little nervous because we had to go through the process separately, and I don’t speak Spanish well. I was worried I wouldn’t understand what they were asking me or that I wouldn’t be able to answer something important. Then I thought, “What’s the worst thing that could happen? They might decide I can’t stay and send me home.” That didn’t seem too bad, so I calmed down. Between my limited Spanish and their limited English, we managed to get the process done. I even had one exchange which gave me more confidence when it comes to trying to sp

This week, Monday and Tuesday were holidays in Mexico—Dia de los Muertos is an actual national holiday here—so we didn’t go work those days. We started our celebration Sunday night with the other missionaries here at Teca Once. Pat Wright set up a table as an ofrenda where we could all place pictures of our deceased loved ones. Then we gathered together on Sunday evening, and each couple told about one of their people. It was sweet to hear the tender stories, mostly about parents or grandparents. Afterwards we had the traditional Dia de los Muertos bread (which is sweet and almost has an orange taste to it) and hot chocolate. Ron and I also brought fried plantains and the Alsops brought churros. The night was also a bit of a farewell to the Burtons, who finished their mission and returned home this week. The missionaries here humorously refer to couples who have finished their missions and gone home as being “on the other side,” so it fit right in with the Dia de los Muertos theme. The