We left Paraíso and headed back to Veracruz which is a solid 3.5 hours away. On the dirt road leading from Paraíso to the hard road, we passed this cement house. Electricity is very hard to come by. A very few people have generators when they are so far away from even a small town. Many just rely on sunlight. But this man, whom you can see sitting on his hammock, has solar panels! Now he can watch soccer all day long.

The first foto is of Mom standing outside the metal meeting house with two member sisters who were spending the entire day at the property with another sister and her little boy. They were cooking pozole, a chili and chicken soup. They were very proud to tell us that the whole chicken floating in red broth in the huge 10-gallon pot over the open fire was puro pollito de rancho, or pure ranch chicken. None of this store-bought bird. They were cooking for a branch party that evening. In California, we might call this plucked pollo a free-range chicken. Very expensive, that free-range chicken, but not in Paradise (Paraíso). They are all over the place.

As we drove back to Veracruz that afternoon Mom marvelled, and she was right, at how the Church works. On the board hanging on the wall of the meeting house is written "Isaiah" and "2 Nefi 9:6." It seems that someone had been teaching the Isaiah chapters of the Book of Mormon all the way out there in Paradise. They are too distant for the stake to really help them a lot, but not too distant for the spirit of the Book of Mormon to open up to them. So, now we will send missionaries to try to help for awhile.

It is all about timing. Timing is influenced by the numbers of missionaries we have. SLC is sending a lot right now. I have talked with them and they are trying to get us up to a full complement before the mission division. That gives me the opportunity to do some things I have wanted to do for some time. Fun!

This is El Paraíso, Paradise. It is quite remote, almost primitive. There is no grocery store, but a couple of abarrote stores where you can buy the essentials--Coke and chips. There is not a real town square, very rare for Mexico. There is no pharmacy, but there is a veterinarian and vet supply shop. Good enough. It is jungly and a dengue fever zone--all of southern Mexico is a dengue fever zone. The branch is very small with an attendance of 15-18 each week. There is no cell phone service for miles. There is no internet cafe for the missionaries to write home each week. They will live in a small cement house behind a bigger cement house. Neither have a toilet or shower. There is a community setup kind of in between the buildings, but it is private and clean. The picture shows zone leaders Elder Reyes and Moyar walking along a path to find the Relief Society President.

The Paraiso Branch has been in business for a long time and was once strong enough that the Church approved a building to be constructed. The members began on that project about 22 years ago. The town priest stirred up the locals against the Church. They told the members to stop building. The members continued. The opposition forces rallied and came to the property armed with clubs and threatened to kill the branch president. They stopped, but appealed to a higher authority. After a short time, the mission president, I think, came to town with a letter signed by the governor declaring the building project to be legal, reminding the pueblo of religious freedom, and demanding that they leave the Mormons at peace. The town thumbed their nose at all of that and continued with their threats. The building project stopped and was never revitalized.


There is a small metal building on the property where they meet, but the formal chapel has yet to be constructed.

Eight or nine years ago some missionaries came to town. One was named Petersen. The sisters we spoke with didn't recall the name of the Mexican missionary. The missonaries had lists of membership records. They began to work with the branch and found that about fifteen young people, who thought they were members and were all very active, were not baptized and confirmed according to the records of the Church. So, one day, they were all baptized together in the nearby baptismal font--the river. Some time after that the missionaries left. Now, years later, on April 6th, Elder Taylor from Weed, CA and Elder Rodriguez Salinas will go and reopen the area. This will be quite an adventure.

Honestly, I don't really know the story of this baptism. It happened in Xalapa and and the two missionaries are Elders Del Rincon and Tobler (O'Fallon, IL). They sent us two baptismal fotos. One was reverent and we used it in our slide show, but this was shows the huge muscles of our missionaries. You wouldn't want to mess with these two would you?

On the Friday afternoon before general conference Mom and I left the office and went home to work. I planned to doing some computer things and working on zone conference presentations, but first dinner. I had just dived into my bowl of Cheerios when I received an email on the Blackberry. It was from Salt Lake. First the setup.


On Sunday, March 7 of 2010, Mom and I attended the Acayucan Stake Conference. There lives a man, a Bro. Garcia (named changed). I had known about him for over seven months. The missionaries had found him, and he and his family desired baptism. The problem is that he had been involved in a couple of murders. He worked for a while for the treacherous Gadianton-like Los Zetas gang. I was very skittish about this man and his history because of what I know about the gang. As I sat on the stand, there he was, seated on the fourth row with his family. Before the meeting started, I was urged to leave the stand and greet him. Something very unique happened to me.

Normally, as you know, Latinos shake hands and then embrace in a traditional abrazo. I did not shake his hand but opened my arms to him. As we embraced something inside of me said in Spanish, “Háblalo.” “Talk to him.” He was weeping. So was I. I had no intention to interview him that day, but my mind was changed. After the conference I did so.

Bro. Garcia went to jail at age 16 for stealing cars. Very shortly after his release he was married. He and his wife have been married for 15 years. He is 33. They have three boys, aged 12, 6, and 4. Within a few months he joined the Mexican Army and resigned after a few years. Feeling the need to leave their native town, Jáltipan, they moved to the border. He traveled into the United States several times to work in the fruit. He said that he never did anything against the law and always returned home faithfully to his wife.

At the same time, some of his old army buddies had joined Los Zetas. They recruited him. There are levels of pruebas, tests, which one must perform to become part of the gang. That can include various crimes up to and including murder. Bro. Garcia did not actively participate in a murder, but he covered evidence of a couple of homicides. He also trafficked drugs for the gang. He was involved with them for about two months when he decided he had to escape their grasp. The only way out of the gang is to go to prison or to be killed by a gang member. Taking the risk of them tracking him down and killing him, he left in the night and returned to Jáltipan.

Immediately, he and his wife began to search for a religion to join. They needed peace in their lives. She was visiting to a local Christian organization, but he found no peace there. A friend invited him to the Jáltipan Branch and he went alone. He found what he had been looking for. The next week he took his oldest son with him. After a couple of weeks, his wife joined them.

Bro. Garcia has been waiting, studying, attending, and living the life of a member of the Church as best he can without having received the ordinances. They hold family home evening every Monday. They pray and read the Book of Mormon as a family every day. He has now completed it three times. He has almost finished Jesus el Cristo. He cannot home teach because he does not hold the priesthood. So, he goes out on his own and visits members. He introduced his brother and family to the Church. They have been baptized. Ten friends and family are taking the missionary lessons because he has introduced them to the missionaries. He was a true convert, not baptized.

He has not ever talked with the police about his crimes. If he did so, Los Zetas would have him killed, either in prison or out. He told the missionaries that if Los Zetas find him and kill him before he is permitted to be baptized that he knows that his wife will have his temple work done for him and that they will be an eternal family.

I wrote a letter to Salt Lake and presented his case. Only two weeks later, the Blackberry buzzed. I opened the email. His baptism had been authorized. Immediately I called the elders and told them that I was on the way to interview him again, a nearly three-hour drive.

Mom and I pulled up to the beautiful little Jáltipan Branch Chapel in the Acayucan Stake. Bro. Garcia was waiting outside dressed in white shirt and tie, pressed slacks, polished shoes, and weeping. At his side was his wife and three little boys, all baptized except the youngest. The baptismal interview was very spiritual. Particularly when we talked of Pres. Monson, he wept and said in response to the question about his belief that Thomas S. Monson is a prophet, he said over and over again, “Lo sé. Lo sé. Lo sé.” “I know. I know. I know.”

We had just concluded our interview when a little knock came at the door and Hno. Garcia´s youngest son, maybe 3 years old and just learning to talk, peered in with his big black eyes shining. His dad asked, “What are they going to do to me?” The little boy closed his eyes tight, put his thumb and finger aside his nose and squeezed it shut while pointing down the hall toward the baptismal font while smiling and peeking out through those closed eyes. “Él conoce la pila,” Bro. Garcia told me. “He knows the font.”

We were done. I opened the email on my Blackberry and translated the letter for him. Then, I showed him the letter. He wept again. We talked about his working toward his sealing with his family in a year or so. He said they would be sealed in a year, That is their goal, but, “First”, he said, “we will be there many times to do baptisms.”


That was Friday night. Hno. Garcia was baptized Satruday morning between the first and second sessions of conference. The man who introduced him to the Church performed the ordinance. The little blask-eyed boy is also in the picture. He is never too far from his dad. The missionaries are Elders Ramirez Arambula and Menet who is from Manti.

Below we mentioned the old pueblo Cuetzalan. What an interesting and old village. At the center, the zócalo, is a huge Catholic church. Huge and very old. They must have had quite a building fund a couple of hundred years ago. The elders and Mom went inside. I parked illegally and guarded the van. I guess it was illegal. A guy trying to show us where to park, for a fee, said it was. So did a cranky lady inside a little grocery store. But across the street was a very interesting store loaded with tools and TV's and binoculars and knives and appliances and everything else almost that you could think of including toilets and several kitchen sinks. The proprietor had to be Jewish. I asked if I could park out there. "Of course," he said. "Come in.... but only for 30 minutes!" In other words, "I want some of your money and then you should leave."

He knew that I was very interested in a machete hanging out front. I have looked for a machete with something other than a plastic handle. This one was steel and the handle was wrapped in leather. It was in a nice sheath, leather and was marked at 250. I asked if that meant pesos and he said that it did, but that today's price was 200 pesos. That is $15.3724, American. The best price I have seen for a decent working machete with an orange plastic handle was 550 pesos, no sheath. I pulled it out of the sheath and it was engraved! It was really more a sword than a machete. I thought for a minute that I had found the sword of Laban. Guess not. The guy had about 25 of them hanging there. The one I bought had some Spanish saying engraved on it which loosely translates, "Don't get your undies in a bunch." I will need to work on a more accurate translation. Elders Collins and Ricks returned with Mom from investigating Catholicism. The elders immediately went crazy and had to have one, too. Theirs say, "It is better to lay your burden on a burro than to carry it yourself." Wise counsel.

Why do they cook so weird here? Some of the food is excellent. There is nothing like a real, live handmade tortilla. But, sometimes they do other stuff. Today after stake conference in the Minatitlán Stake (I learned that Minatitlán is an ancient dialect word which means La Tierra de Flechadores, The Land of the Arrowmakers) we ate lasagna. The sweet lady who cooked for the post-conference meal---it is a tradition to feed the stake presidency and out of town guests--made that traditional Mexican favorite, lasagna. She cooks at zone conferences for us when we hold them in Mina. She and her mother before her have been cooking for missionary zone conferences every six weeks or so for 35 years! Today was a lower light, as opposed to a highlight.

These lasagna noodles are about a fourth the thickness of those you and I normally eat, kind of like phylo dough but made of pasta. Dry and stiff. It was layered with a little shredded chicken which was lightly seasoned with something red, dry, and basically taste free. The sauce was, OH! There wasn't any sauce. The only red in the meal was what was on the chicken. It was five or seven Sahara-like layers deep. You had to cut it with a knife. Sedimentary rock. The chefs, following Japanese tradition to make food that looks nice but doesn't taste so hot, drizzled a decorative swirl of catsup on the side of the plate, near but not touching the Lasagna a la Sahara. But the mashed potatoes and gravy (with little pieces of ham and something green in it) were okay.

When is the last time that you had mashed potatoes and gravy with lasagna? Me neither. Very often at zone conferences, the good sister feeds us a piece of meat or chicken with mashed potatoes and also green spaghetti. I love green spaghetti. It is thicker white spaghetti noodles with a sauce made of something and a little habanero chili which turns the sauce light green and provides a little horsepower. Lots of carbohydrates here. Most Mexicans I know have never met a carbohydrate they didn't like. The fact is, I do interviews after zone conferences and by then the food is either cold or gone, so Mom and I go to Burger King on the way out of town. But, she, the Mexican lady, is a truly a great sister and has given years and years of service. The missionaries love her dearly. So do we.

Please don't give her this blog address. If she reads this I am in trouble. Oh! It is in English. We're okay.

Mom is a good sister, too.