Oct 11

October 11, 2006

Robert is celebrating. We finally have satellite! Our TV fast has come to an end. Now I have to hurry and finish this before CSI starts!

Other than going for a little walk and driving up to the post office, we stayed home all day waiting for Ernie, the satellite guy. We were afraid this was our last chance. Cibicue isn’t exactly on the way to anywhere so we didn’t figure he’d be making another trip if we messed this one up. However, we did hook up with him and Ernie turned out to be a very nice young man. He’s a Navajo who recently moved to Show Low from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He also got married a couple of months ago. Robert saw to it that he left here with a Book of Mormon, a pamphlet, a bag of cookies, and a diet coke (caffeine free).

We met an interesting woman at the post office. She works for Child Find but she’s also the secretary for the Catholic Church down the street. It’s a very beautiful old church. We mentioned that we would love to see the inside of the church and got ourselves invited to Catholic Mass. We accepted and invited her to come over to our church. She didn’t accept, but we definitely will drop over some Sunday and meet the Priest.

Last Sunday in church President Benito announced that there would be a wedding at the church at 5:00 today. He said everyone was invited, so we put it on our schedule. At 5:00 sharp we went to the church. Our old Anglo habits are so hard to break! Not only were they barely beginning to decorate, but we discovered the wedding had turned into an engagement party. This is a very sweet couple who have lived together for quite some time but are anxious to get married now so that the wife can be baptized. The husband is a member and they hope eventually to go through the temple. They wanted to get married today because he has a brother who died recently (I think I already wrote about this) and today would have been his 19th birthday. They were going to get married today but then have the real wedding Nov 4. Who knows what that will actually turn out to be. President Benito decided he didn’t really want to marry them twice, so they all decided it would be best to wait for the wedding on Nov 4. But they already had today planned. So the wedding/engagement party/birthday party/memorial turned out to be punch and cake and ice cream and releasing 19 balloons to remember the deceased brother. Oh, and the whole thing finally started at 6:20. About 6:00 the decorating was all done but the bride/fiancée left to go get the ice cream.

So for about an hour I sat on a chair, smiling sweetly and saying hello to everyone who looked my way, silently chanting to myself, “Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility.” My OCD tendencies almost overwhelmed my desire to make a good impression. About the time I felt I was recovering, Sister Benito came up and said she needs to do another food order. She’s 1st counselor in the Relief Society. She wanted to know if I could go with her again and I said sure and she asked if tomorrow was OK. I said yes just call the cell when you’re ready, thinking what progress I was making. I didn’t even ask for a specific time! About the time my head quit spinning from all the chaos of the “event”, Sister Benito walks over and says, “Let’s go now.” So right in the middle of the party we leave to get a food order.

There were a number of problems with this plan. First of all, we park the truck at the top of a little hill with a locked gate at the bottom of the hill. No problem. Robert just walked down and unlocked the gate. The problem was that a car from one of the partygoers was parked in front of the gate, so Sister B. had to go find someone to move that car. Second, I had to back out down the hill through a very narrow gate, barely wide enough for our Avalanche. Third, it’s pitch dark. I can’t see the gate, I can’t see the cars parked outside the gate around the church, and I sure as heck can’t see any of the 400 children playing on the church’s front yard. Sister B is trying to guide me, but her English isn’t the easiest for me to understand. I don’t know if she’s telling me to turn right or left. By the time I actually got out the gate and onto the road I think I had pretty much traumatized 80% of the town!

We did get the food order, so now we’ll be making our trip to Snowflake again tomorrow. The woman we went to visit is a single mom (I think) with one daughter who lives with her and another who is in the military. That daughter is stationed in Japan and repairs fighter jets. She was taking a test flight in a fighter one day and something went wrong and they made an emergency landing in Okinawa. No one was injured but it upset the mom. Then the mom heard about North Korea testing their nuclear weapon and I guess she kind of freaked out. We said a prayer with her hoping to help her calm down and at least help her get some rest. She had contacted the Red Cross to check on her daughter and they said they’d have the girl call her mom within the next 24 hours.

By the way thanks for all the comments yesterday.