"Echoes of Eden" Dayle King Searle

Thanksgiving is not a holiday in Mexico. Still, Thursday felt like a holiday to us, even though we spent a lot of it working. We missed our family, but we had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with the other Teca Once missionaries. The Deavers organized it, and it was perfect. If we couldn’t be with family, being gathered around the table with such great people was the next best thing. We had turkey, stuffing, homemade rolls, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, the whole works. We provided the mashed potatoes. We were able to find some actual Russet potatoes at Costco, though they were Norkotahs not Burbanks. Still, they made better mashed potatoes than the usual white potatoes we get here would have. It was a lovely evening, and in true Thanksgiving style, we had enough leftovers that we all ate together again the next evening. Vicki Deaver and Pat Wright had the table looking so lovely.           If you follow futbol (soccer) you know that the World Cup is going on now. Futbol is Mex

  A lot of changes are taking place here. First, the Alsops are going home on Monday. They’ve finished their mission. The Wrights were leaving town, so they invited a group of us to go with them and the Alsops for a farewell dinner early in the week, and on Friday, the Teca Once women had a farewell lunch for Jessica. On top of that, the Alsops had us over for dinner a couple of times. Jessica is a great cook, and she was trying to use up what was in her fridge. She has fixed dinner for us a lot since we’ve been here, and Bob loves to go out to restaurants and often invites us to go along. We’ve joked that we’ll really miss them because now we’re going to have to start cooking for ourselves. But in truth it will be more than that. They’ve been our cohorts on many of our adventures, and we have many fond memories of all the time we’ve spent together and the fun things we've done.  Another change is that today was our last day helping at the CCM (the Mexico City MTC). We said good-

Last Monday Pat Frandsen, Ron, and I took a quick day trip to Puebla. It’s only about two hours from Mexico City, but the hardest part of the drive was getting out of the city. When there are three roads right beside each other and one over the top, it can be a little hard to tell which road Google Maps is telling you to be on. We took a few wrong turns, so the drive for us was closer to three hours than two. We went there to interview and film two people with “inspirational experiences” for a project we’re working on. The first one was with our friend Mercy, who invited us to her son’s baptism a few months ago. We met her at the University where she works, and she showed us around before we started filming. She was obviously proud of the University and with good reason. It is Universidad de Las Americas Puebla, and it has been named the best university in Mexico. The campus and buildings were beautiful. Mercy works in the library, and we went to her office to do the filming. While we