The In"Peru"ving Missionary

 Good morning.  This is Ray Holt in the Lima Peru Mission.   I'm just calling to tell you your boy's on his way home and that you for a wonderful young man who has blessed this mission and blessed the lives of Sister Holt and I.  We are very grateful to have known such a wonderful young man who we love. (He gets so choked up here he can't talk for a moment.).  Congratulations on such a fine son.  Thank you.  Bye.

 Happy 21st Birthday 🎂🎈🎁 Elder Baird, my good grandson Caden!  So great to hear from you. 🌟 So you and Pres Dixon share the same birthday, just 29 years apart?  😊 It is terrific how Mission Presidents are now instructed to help their missionaries begin to plan for transition into their post mission lives.  You have discovered a huge key to moving forward - staying close to Heavenly Father as choices and opportunities present themselves.  I was majoring in English and Music until I made a C+ in my Shakespeare summer class at the end of my Sophomore year at BYU. It really shook me.  Then my brother Brad broke his leg in the first Provo High football game just before my junior year was to begin. We followed the ambulance to the hospital, and for three days I visited him there. He had a BYU student nurse who took care of him, and she made all the difference in helping him go from depression to a positive outlook. And I said, that’s what I want to do - I wa...

  Hello Elders Baird, Hopefully the pics come through ok.  I wanted to share a little story about the fire pit.  Stick with it to the end if you can. Take a close look at the picture.  You can see multiple layers of stones.  It may be hard to appreciate, but the stones were all different sizes and thicknesses.  This means each pass around wasn't perfectly level, and it was like a puzzle without instructions.  As the circular wall grows, often portions of it are higher than others.  Using different size and thickness of stones, the puzzle is put together.  The mortar helps a little to level it out and account for height differences as it can be either a bit thicker or a bit thinner depending on the situation.  But you can't make up all the differences with just mortar--it takes careful placement of stones. Now, you are probably amazed and impressed by my mad skills to get it to look as good as it does.  I can't blame you because...

  You know, most missionaries that forget to write weekly emails apologize to begin their emails. Following that pattern I should apologize for not writing and so forth and so on. However, I ain't apologizing today. So instead I shall begin by saying, time flies when you're more than 20 months into the mission.  Most importantly I thought I would let you all know that transfers happened again and I was called to be the reference secretary of the mission. That means I'm in charge of every single reference that any of the missionaries in the mission get and also a few that are outside of the mission boundaries. This is not 3 or 4 or 20 references we are talking about here. I'm talking about ThOuSaNdS of referrals. It is quite a humbling experience to be a part of such a large work. To think that only about two years ago when I started my mission, we received an online referral once every two weeks. Now there are areas of the mission that receiv...

  Well I don't know how long it's been without an email from me.  A month? Two? Quien sabe.  I hope you all are just on the edge of your seats because finally here's some news about that one missionary.   I think I'll just start off with a few things that happened this week.  First off, Monday we climbed the hill (mountain) again. It was awesome because it's now covered in green. There's a wall that you have to jump to get to the second peak, and after crossing it we just got shlapped with fresh cold air because of the vegetation. We continued on past the second peak, and were well on our way to the third, but then that little voice that we should all listen to said, "Hey, bad idea." That was probably for the best. We were in the clouds and with all the vegetation it was super slippery. We were also basically climbing a cliff face to get to the third peak, and a fall would've meant death. Sad that we didn't make it, but happy that I at least ha...

  Well we made it to Peru everyone.  For those of you that have been following along with me in this multi continental excursion I call a mission, you'll remember that last time I was in Peru I started to forget how to write English.  Well I'm very excited to let you all know that it may or may not be happening again, but anyway.... What a JOY it is to finally be in a Spanish speaking country. I am the only english speaker for miles and EVERYTHING is in spanish. This has been a dream of mine ever since last year in October when I had my spanish breakthrough. It's also interesting to be the first white person to walk these streets in more than a year. I would draw less attention if I wore a Daft Punk helmet than my real head.  My companion is named Elder Caballero, from Lima. He speaks very rapid spanish, and is learning english just as almost everyone else here is trying to. He asked me to teach him a way to greet people that is common in the states. I told him that ...