"You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too. That's a part of it."
--- Denzel Washington (Actor, Director, & Producer; 1954 - Present)
There's a reason why most roads nowadays are paved. It's no wonder that even before concrete roads there were cobblestone ones. All that extra time and backbreaking work to lay the rock brick by brick, stone by stone. It must have been worth it to them. I can see why. A little rain can convert an otherwise earthy path into an unearthly one. Each small step into the sloppy mud was a giant leap of faith. You were never completely confident that it would send you forward or in a completely different direction.
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THE CIRCLE GROWS
The season grew chill. I'd been in Mexico all of about 2 and a half months at this point. The sky seemed to turn perpetually gray and the streets emptier and muddier than ever. After a few weeks with Elder Lopez, he was transferred and the mission offices added two extra missionaries to our area (totally four missionaries in the Monterreal area).
My new companion, number four, Elder Nava from Zacatecas, Mexico arrived in Monterreal on the 8th of December, 2014. He only had a few months on me (seven months total) but he was solid despite his only slight experience advantage as a still fairly new Elder. He was considerably smaller than Elder Lopez, filled with an almost angry determination to find people to teach, and wore a serious complexity. He wasn’t always like that but most of the time he had a less than welcoming expression. We were sent Elder Williams from Idaho the next day who was fresh in the field being trained by Elder Hernandez. Again, as I had with the special transfer of Elder Howard (See "A-Maori-Cans in Mexico"), I had to show them all the area, introduce them to the members, and hope things would work.
We quickly came to grips that our house could not accommodate all of us because of its size and humble condition. The new arrivals were adamant that we had to move but a part of me felt attached to the family beneath us who’d taken care of me since day one. To leave them felt like an offense saying that what they did and had wasn’t enough and that we were unappreciative but we really needed an upgrade, and we found one. Not only was there not enough room for all of us, but we also had to heat up buckets of hose water if we wanted warm water to shower, and the single oil heater we had wasn’t sufficient either for the ensuing wet winter.
We found out over a lunch appointment that Hermano Alvarez had a spare place above his home. I knew Hermano Alvarez as a nice patient man with a fatherly sense of humor (appropriate enough since he is a father) who was willing to help the missionaries. He worked in construction as an upper man and would, without hesitation, pull a thick wad of pesos from his pocket almost too thick to fold in half just to make us laugh. He’d graciously offer us a few pesos every now and then to treat ourselves to evening snacks or anything else. We never had to ask for anything before he willingly offered it. Hermano Alvarez was one with the means to satisfy the needs of those without. A fine example of using money for good. (See "Intercambios")
A NEW HOME
His vacant place upstairs was near perfect. It was probably three times as large as our first place and included a built-in washer (no hose needed) and dryer and air conditioning installation. Considering the need for warmth in the increasingly colder weather, it was a bargain. Hermano Alvarez insisted that he didn’t want to charge us rent but we had to come up with a legal contract for the mission offices to manage so we settled on a cheaper fee than our previous arrangements. With current money exchange rates, it would have cost us $80 USD a month. That’s cheap! What a blessing!
Moving was a pain of course. It took days to sift through and toss all the junk. We had to come back later for the knickknacks; much of the miscellaneous apartment content was left behind by former missionaries over the months and years and had no use to us. We lowered the bigger stuff: the shelves, the tables, the beds, and the fridge by lowering them off the "roof-patio" and tying them to the pickup truck (See "1st Area: Monterreal, Rio Bravo"). We braced ourselves in the gaps of the bed of the truck in order to make sure nothing fell out on the bumpy roads or tight turns. Hermano Alvarez drove slowly but even then, the muddy roads and the cool humid air blowing on my face as we rode the back of the truck made it all the more exciting.
Getting everything upstairs into the new place was just as hard but worth it. The only real downside I recall of our new residence was that the ceiling would amass condensation and drip like a wet towel whenever we turned the heater on. It wasn’t our fault— the humidity just made it inevitably wet. The good heaters (climas) were fit for our two bedrooms but the rest of the house was a fridge save for the tiny electric oil heater of a radiator on the floor. We moved our desks into the bedroom to study and spent as little time as possible elsewhere in the house because it was so frigidly cold.
On the plus side, we had a real shower with hot water and actual water pressure. I'd take longer hot showers than I probably should have; it had been months since I had a shower with that kind of water pressure. On the mission, when electricity or gas couldn’t be used to heat the shower, we’d use something called a “Resistencia” (Ray-see-sten-see-yah). The Resistencia was specially designed to be placed in a container of water (It wouldn’t electrocute anyone), like putting a stove in a water bucket. It would take between thirty minutes to an hour to heat up a big five-gallon bucket; to speed up the process, we could pour half of the hot water in with a bucket of cold water to have two buckets ready to go to bathe with since missionaries keep tight schedules. We’d then use bowls to scoop and pour the warmed water over ourselves. When given the option of a warm "bowl-bucket bath" in cold weather or bathing in icy cold water, buckets don’t sound as bad as you might think.
THE MUD MONSTER
It was a blessing to have a warm shower, at last, what with the cold and the mud both being dialed up in the winter months. The weather was a nightmare. Humorously speaking, it was “silly chilly”. It never snowed of course but I swear it felt just as cold if not colder in the mission than it does here at home. Utah is a desert but the mission was located near the Gulf of Mexico so all the water in the air would get on everything. It felt as though it was always raining; it certainly looked like it was perpetually raining. You could see the glowing silhouettes of water droplets swirling in the air in any street light whether it rained or not. All that humidity that had made us sweat so much turned to bitter cold spray; like the runoff mist from a waterfall but all the time. Droplets condensed on my wool scarf and gloves.
The Spanish word for mud is lodo. The dirt streets turned into slippery slime-like mud. Unpaved roads were bottomless deathtraps for small vehicles. We would frequently take longer routes, hopping from sidewalk to sidewalk just to avoid the incessant slop. Each stride ran the risk of falling. Each leap thrusting us in an uncontrollable direction. When we’d come home every cold dark night, we’d find our black shoes caked entirely from the sole to the laces and up our pant legs. One has to practice walking in a wide stance in the mud or else he is doomed to come home with mud splatters all up the backside of his pant legs or caked against the insides of his pants where the heels meet and rub together. If you only have so many pairs of pants, you learn the little tricks to keep them clean, like how to walk.
We set a rule to leave our muddy shoes on the cardboard “welcome mat” at the door. As needed, I would take my shoes to the kitchen sink and wash them off with my hands. Walking in mud, dirt, rocks, and so forth accumulated thick layers on our soles like a crumbly club sandwich. Once the massive sediments settled, it weighed your feet down like there were weights on your legs. It was quite a workout. It’s like when wet snow clings to your boots and falls off in chunks when you lift up your legs.
At length, I bought expensive hiking boots that I made last my whole mission. It was probably one of my better investments. The hard thick soles protected my feet from feeling the jagged rocks or from letting water seep in. Feet are one of missionaries’ greatest commodities because, without them, you can only get so far. Every missionary would save himself a lot of trouble wearing proper footwear, including wearing clean dry socks.
Some nights I would come home and immediately throw my coat, scarf, and gloves into the dryer; they were always wet and I didn’t always want to run the risk that they wouldn’t dry by the morning in our humid home. It would get so cold at times that I would wear up to seven layers of clothing of some sort including two pairs of socks, the one on top of the other, to keep my feet warm. Unfortunately, you can only do so much to keep your legs warm unless you buy thermals to wear under your slacks. I looked like a dark delicious marshmallow man in my black raincoat. My desire to be outside kept dropping about as fast as the thermometer.
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