Fwd: Dia de los muertos

From: Zachary Taylor BlaszczykDate: Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 10:53 AM
Subject: Dia de los muertos


So here in Guatemala there is no such thing as halloween, instead on november 1 its dia de los muertos. and its a national holiday so everyone is not working. So i instead of taking pday like we usually do on mondays, we all went to the cemetary´s in our zones and just contacted like all day. It was way sweet, that also explains why i´m writing late. So to give you all an idea of what dia de los muertos is ilke, lets say this we had to go to the office downtown later that dayh and when we went we were litierally 2 of about 10 people on the reforma(its the road where all of the office buildings are in guatemala) adn usually they´re are several thousand people with several hundred cars. Yesterday nada. IT was actually kind of spooky. On dia de los muertos what you basically do is go to the graves of your loved ones and leave flowers and picnic. We went to the cemetary in mixco which is not too big but a decent size. And usually the bus we take passes the cemetary and contiues up to mixco parque but today there were so many people that it stopped a block before the cemetary to let us off and take another route. Literally there were tens of thousands of people there at the cemetary. It was nuts, and then the food, Outside of the cemetary there were about 2 blocks straight of food vendors.  I took some pics but didn´t bring my camera today but next week i´ll show you all some pics so you can get a taste of what its like. As a zone we jsut contacted most of the day and then sang some hymns. But by about 3 everyone was leaving so we also decided to head out but at the beginning it was a fight just to enter the cemetary to contact. It seemed that it was reallly positive and we had a lot of contacts.
As for the rest of the week, not a lot of people came to church because of the long weekend a lot of people went out of town. As far as investigadores we´ve hit a lot of walls as people need to get married in order to get baptized to we got to wait for that. Wiht the family espana there are problems with their papers so its going to take a couple of months until they can get married. The thing is down here how they register people is just terrible. The old system is that to register a person yuo had to go the municipal and the people there just wrote down all the dats in a book. The problem is there´s a lot and i mean a lot of errors when they do this. Because you register a child about 2 weeks after the birth not at the same time. So with just some of my investigadores here´s some problems i´ve found with the system. One they write down the wrong date of birth but the family doen´t know that and take out all of the other papers with the correct date(thats a 3 month and 3000 quetz mistake to fix). The dad goes and registers the child while hes drunk( yes that actually happened to one of my investigadores it took 3 months and 2 weeks straight of standing in a line to fix) and just use your imagination on that one on how many dats that could be given wrong.
So thats the deal wit hthe investigadores and this week we´re going to be doing a lot of finding. But from what it looks like we found a lot of people yesterday.
Well take are, Elder Barrett and i are getting along really well.
Con amor Elder Blaszczyk

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