A Skype Christmas

Our family was very blessed yesterday that skype, the internet and everything else in between work well enough for us to have video calls with our missionary.

We learned a lot about his first week. First, He LOVES the food (no shocker there). His companion is Elder Coutiño from Chihuahua Mexico, and has been in the mission field 4 months. Interestingly however, from Tijuana's Reforma district, where they are located, Elder Smalley might be the one who is closer to home than his companion as the capital city of Chihuahua is 937 miles away, while Herriman is just 762 miles away.

Cerro Colorado in the background,
which has a sign atop that reads
"Jesus Christ is Lord"
(in Spanish of course)

We also learned that his first week has been quite stressful and very frustrating for him. He did not expect to struggle with the language at all because of his success with Spanish in the MTC and prior. But the speed, the figures of speech, the slang, and all of the abbreviations common to the local language have really thrown him for a loop. So, he has become pretty stressed because he wants to reach people now! He doesn't want to lose even a week of his mission because he can't understand what people are saying. He received many words of encouragement from all of us yesterday. And as he was told, we could not be more proud of and grateful for him.

Perhaps most of all, we are grateful and humbled that a loving Father in Heaven knows exactly what He "seeth fit to inflict upon him", in order to form Joel into the servant the Lord wants him to be.

All our Best,
Debbie & Jon (Joel's parents)

PS.
The other interesting geographical fact we've since learned is that their apartment is only about 3 miles from the site of the Tijuana Temple now under construction. (See map below)

A is the location of the mission home, B is the Temple site, and C is their area in Reforma.