The Haslers in the Peru, Limatambo Mission 2023-

When we were hanging fire in bureaucratic limbo, our mission president contacted us often to check on our level of frustration and desperation. On one of his calls he showed us the apartment he was considering for us. It is the apartment we are in that is on the boundary between the district of Miraflores and Surquillo in Lima. His big concern was that it would be too noisy for us. He considered that the night traffic might be too much for our tender old ears and would be a source of sleep privation. While there is some night noise and the odd, it is not worse than our time in Albuquerque nor the eruption of coyote voices in Edgewood. Still, when the morning gets going, there is a steady, rising urban thrum. It has its own quasi constant cacophony with its own weird beauty. Engines race, and horns blare making for a kind of ebullient, mechanical bedlam, punctuated all the while by birds. Others clamber for attention but it is really the parakeets piercing, raucous racket that rules t

Triple Baptism Of forty-six anniversaries, we can't count how many of them have been spent apart. However, we did it again this week. There is always a level of inevitability in the times we are apart, but there you go. We will be very glad to be back together this time. Part of our job here is to make medical appointments and submit them to the church's missionary insurance system. They in turn provide a guarantee letter to pay for the service that we then provide to the provider, usually the big clinic here in Miraflores. We then send them to the missionary's cell phone so they can pass the letter to the receptionist in the clinic and they can put it into their system. We have been kind of blown away by the sheer volume of stuff that missionaries get. One had to have two root canals. None of them are twenty yet! Anyway, some days we start off thinking we have nothing to do and yet, we wind up working at things like this all day long. Typically, Rich makes the appointments

San Luis District Meeting Somehow two weeks flew by and we did not get a blog out. We suppose this to be allegorical at some level. Anyway, thank heaven's for journals. We have noticed that the morning traffic sounds make a kind of music, punctuated by very vocal parrots with their blackbird cousins who flock into the neighborhood trees for some unknown fruit or nut. At the risk of repeating something he's said before, Rich's favorite verse has pretty much always been Jerry Garcia's: Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me Other times, I can barely see Lately, it occurs to me What a long, strange trip it's been… Highlights included a number of health appointments for missionaries ranging from root canals to breath analysis for stomach pain (It is not some hokey herbalist thing, evidently)… One elder had three ingrown toenails (ouch!). A number of missionaries quit taking their anxiety medications to answer, "No," on their missionary papers b