"Echoes of Eden" Dayle King Searle

This past Wednesday was the busiest day we’ve had on our mission. We got up early so we could do our laundry, get ready, and arrive at Hacienda de los Morales by 7:30. Mark L. Pace, the general Sunday School president for the Church, and Ahmad Corbitt, the first counselor in the general Young Men Presidency, and their wives visited Mexico last week. Wednesday morning our department hosted a breakfast for them. Also invited were government officials and officers of other organizations which are concerned with the welfare of young people. Ron has been involved in making the arrangements for this event, so we arrived early to get a few things set up and make sure everything was ready. (The venue took care of the tables and food, so we didn’t have to do any of that.) We are the behind the scenes people at these events. At this one, we helped greet the guests and direct them to the room. Traffic can be very congested here, and we had people arriving up to 40 minutes after the breakfast bega...

 Thursday Alfredo told us he had two tickets to a special viewing of the World Press Photo Exhibition that evening but couldn’t go. He asked if we wanted them. We didn’t know what the World Press Photo Exhibition was, but it sounded like it might be interesting, so we said, “Sure.” After that, we looked it up so we’d at least have some idea of what the event was. World Press Photo is a foundation based in Amsterdam which holds an annual competition for professional photojournalists. This year, over 64,000 photographs from over 4,000 photographers from all over the world were entered in the contest. The exhibition was of the top 122 photographs. It was held in the Franz Mayer Museum, which is in a lovely old building we’d never been to before. People can view the photographs at the museum during its regular hours, but this was a special “by invitation only” viewing. When we arrived, we had to tell the “gatekeepers” we were Angelique’s guests. (Alfredo had told her we’d be coming in ...

Thursday was our wedding anniversary. We’ve been married 44 years! In some ways it seems like it hasn’t been that long and in other ways it feels like we’ve been together forever. Either way, putting a quantitative number to it—44 years—just doesn’t seem to express it correctly. Still, it was a reason to celebrate. However, we celebrated in a rather unconventional way. We got up early, caught an Uber, and arrived at the temple visitor’s center before 8:00 am to watch the filming for a video our department is doing.

 This week we only ate dinner in our apartment one evening! Seriously! I think there is stuff in my refrigerator that is going bad because it needed to be used, but we just haven’t gotten to it. The first dinner was Monday evening. Let me give you some background. When we got our mission call, it confused us because it said we were called to be area missionaries and would be working under the Area Presidency, but it also included information about the Mexico City West mission president. The best explanation we got of how it works is that it’s like the Mexico City West mission president is our bishop, but we have a stake (area) calling. Because of the way it works, we don’t have a lot of interaction with the mission, but they oversee taking care of things like paying our rent and making our travel arrangements when we return home at the end of our mission. We got a new mission president about a month ago, President Grant. Bob Alsop arranged for the Grants to go out to dinner with ...