Living,Writing,and Growing Things in Southern Idaho
Dia de Muertos and a Big Announcement
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Dia de Muertos is November 1 and 2, which was Tuesday and
Wednesday of this week. Tuesday evening, we went to the pueblito to look at the
decorations there and to see if they were having a celebration. The little church
up there doesn’t have a graveyard, but in the gardens around it people had created
little memorial plots for their loved ones who have passed on. They were decorated
with flowers and candles, and in the dimming light of evening, it looked very
lovely. They community was putting on a program that evening. We stayed for the
first part of it. Our favorite acts were the ones put on by the kids. It was so
fun to see them sing and dance.
One Dia de Muertos tradition is making pictures on the ground out of flowers petals and other plant material. This one was in the courtyard outside the little church in the pueblito.
The pueblito had a community ofrenda inside a gazebo on the church grounds. this border was all the way around the inside of the gazebo.
This display was outside one of the businesses in the pueblito.
Wednesday was the official holiday, and the office was
closed, so we took the day off. We went with the Wrights to some markets and
then to Reforma. Last year we went to Mixquic for Dia de Muertos, which had a
big fair and celebration, and I expected Mexico City to be like that. I guess
its big celebration was last weekend with the parade, because everything we saw
on Wednesday was pretty lowkey. There were displays of the giant skulls and Alebrijes
along Reforma, which have been there for several weeks. Alebrijes are mythical creatures that are intricately
painted. A lot of people were walking along Reforma looking at them, but it
wasn’t crowded. Some of the people had their faces painted and wore costumes. I
really liked the way one woman in particular had her face painted, and I kept
trying to sneak a photo of her. Then at one point she was taking a selfie in
front of one of the Alebrijes, and Ron asked if she’d like us to take her
photo. She said yes. As I took her photo, I wondered if it would be okay if I
asked if I could take a photo of her with my camera, but before I said anything,
Pat (who is much braver than me) asked if she would let us have our picture
taken with her. She agreed, so I got a photo of her after all.
This is one of the sneaky shots I took of the woman with the great face paint.
We’ve heard the weather is getting cold back home. Not to rub
it in (okay, maybe to rub it in a little) here are some photos I took on our
Saturday morning walk. Some of the trees and bushes here are losing their
leaves, but most aren’t. This is as close to autumn as it gets here. The people
here think they have seasons, but they really don’t know what seasons are.
We've been watching this wall be built all summer, and it's almost complete.
Last week I told you we had a big project we’ve been working
on that we would be ready to announce this week. If any of you read the Church
News, you may have already seen that Giving Machines are coming to Mexico City!
If you don’t know what Giving Machines are, here’s a link to a quick video about
them.
Early this year, Gustavo told that for the past few years he’s
been wanting to bring Giving Machines to Mexico. However, he already had so much
on his plate that there was no way he had the time to devote to getting that
done, so Ron said, “Let me work on that.” Ron contacted Salt Lake and spearheaded
getting the approval. Once that was done, he worked with the welfare department
to line up the humanitarian organizations which will be represented in the machines,
with the purchasing department to get the machines ordered and built, with the
finance department to figure out how to handle the money, and with the legal
department to get the contracts translated and changed to fit Mexican law. This
is the first year Giving Machines will be in non-English speaking countries, so
we’ve had to do a lot of translating and figuring out how to do it here. And
the work isn’t done yet. Our whole team is involved in working on promotion,
finalizing the contract with the location, planning the launch event, etc. Getting
the Giving Machines here and making it work, will be the result of a lot of
hard work by a lot of people.
It has been really interesting seeing firsthand all that
goes into the Giving Machines. The Church covers all the costs—the machines,
the publicity, etc.—so that every penny the machines take in goes to the humanitarian
organizations. The Philippines had Giving Machines before Covid. The total
amount they took in was very small compared to the machines in the U.S.
However, when they looked at the number of donations, it had as many donations
as the machines in New York, so it was considered a success. I love that! The
Church isn’t looking at the bottom line as being how much is brought in versus
how much was invested. Instead, they are looking at how many lives were
touched, including the lives of the people who donated. The reason the Philippines
took in so much less is that the cost of the items in their machine was much
lower than the costs of the items in the U.S. It was done that way intentionally
to make giving accessible to everyone. Our prices will be higher than the ones
in the Philippines but lower than the ones in the U.S. We are hoping this will
be a blessing to many people in Mexico, both those who give and those who receive.
We’ve had (and are still having) some stressful moments on this project, but it
is something we very grateful to be a part of it.
At the end of our Communications Committee Meeting on Monday, Gustavo asked if anyone had anything else. Ron said, “Just one thing, when are we going to get shrimp?” That harked back to a couple of months ago when Armando told us there was a place where people line up to get shrimp. We said we wanted to go there sometime, but we never had. Gusatvo laughed at Ron’s question and said, “I like how you think, Elder Searle. We’ll go tomorrow.”
Whenever my son Colby visits from college, he walks over to my father-in-law’s house to have breakfast and watch The Price Is Right with grandpa. A few months ago he said to me, “I want to go to The Price Is Right so that Grandpa can see me on TV if I get called down.” As a mother it is my natural instinct to want my children to be happy and successful and get pretty much everything they want. Grandpa is getting quite frail, so I knew if what Colby wanted to happen was going to happen, it needed to happen soon. And so I went online to check out the taping schedule for the game show and when my son’s college had spring break. Then last week, when those two things converged, I made my husband get in the car, pick up our son and his cute wife, and drive thirteen hours to Los Angeles for a taping of the show.
Each year as people speak of their favorite Christmas memories, my mind goes back to a Christmas in the late 1980s when our children were young and our budget tight. About two miles from our home and down a gravel country road, sitting beside our potato cellar were two trailers which housed our workers during the summer. That fall my husband, Ron, was approached by two families who wanted to rent those trailers to live in for the winter. Ron hesitated. The trailers were not normally occupied during the winter, and he wasn’t sure how well the furnaces worked or if they were insulated well enough to provide adequate shelter during our difficult winters. But the two families, who both had just recently come to the area, were so desperate that Ron finally agreed.
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