El Dia de Los Muertos

Happy Halloween and Happy November!!!

First of all, Halloween is a little bit different here. They have a cool ancient Mayan Tradition for the Day of The Dead. Halloween here is actually a 3 day thing. It starts on the 31st and end on November 2nd (Today). A member explained it to me a little bit that, November 1st is when the spirits of the children haunt the town and November 2nd the spirits of adults. They all make an altar with food offerings for the spirits. The altar is decorated with candles and yellow flower pedals. Its pretty creepy, but kind of cool. I miss the Jack-O-Lanterns. They don't have big orange pumpkins here, so it wasn't the same without seeing those around. 

There are also a lot of pyrotechnics that everyone buys. They are fireworks but kind of lame fireworks. They just go boom super loud. I´ve been hearing them go off all day since the 31st. It´s given me a headache. 

We also some great news...WE HAVE WATER. We can bathe and wash our clothes! Hahaha I have never felt so blessed to have water. So if you are ever thinking that you aren't receiving blessings, think again. Because there are a lot of things that I took for granted when I didn't live in Mexico. We had a member check out our hose and fix whatever the problem was. He discovered that our hose where our water comes from was clogged with dirt. For that reason only a little bit of water was arriving when the water came weekly. (*editors note* He does mean weekly. He says water comes on Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday.) He replaced our hose and now the water comes in like Niagara falls. My companion and I were almost crying of joy in it´s purest form when we heard the water falling into our tank Friday night. 

We have a Zone conference tomorrow, and I am super excited for it. Also, we had interviews with President Madsen today. It went really well and Sister Madsen gave us chocolate so that was another bonus. 

I can´t believe its already November! Enjoy the November weather in the States! 

Con Amor,

Elder Smith