April 5, 2011 - General Conference Week

Our missionary work included making two different trips to Belmopan this past week. It takes us about one hour to drive there.

Belmopan is the capitol of Belize. Belize City used to be the capitol, but too much damage was being done here by hurricanes, so the capital was moved to Belmopan, as it is much further inland. The ironic thing is that last October, when Hurricane Richard landed, Belmopan had far greater storm damage than Belize City did.

Police Headquarters at Belmopan

The first trip to Belmopan was to get a police record report for a missionary leaving tomorrow. This is standard procedure for all missionaries. The second trip was for a EFY planning meeting. In Central America it will be called SYC (Special Youth Conference).

Center of government offices at Belmopan City

The two trips put just enough mileage on the mission van that the odometer turned over 100,000 kilometers. This is magic number, because it means we now qualify to get a new van.

The missionaries here were very excited about it, so Elder Pattee let the zone leader, Elder Choc, have the privilege of driving while the odometer turned over.

Road to Belmopan

We also made two trips to get loads of merchandise at two different warehouses in Belize City area. It is a long process to pick up merchandise for the Church because of customs, and also because of the masses of paperwork. It took 1 1/2 hours at an airport warehouse and 2 hours at the TACA (name of an airline) warehouse.
Even though Elder Pattee took 4 missionaries with him to TACA, regulations made them stay on the other side of the fence, so Elder Pattee got lots of exercize loading the boxes all by himself while the missionaries watched. Good thing he has strong muscles.

This is about half of the boxes we picked up. These contain books.

Our mission is starting a new policy of giving each new convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a copy of not only the Book of Mormon, but also a Bible, a Triple Combination, and a hymn book. The branch president will hopefully present these at the baptism. Thanks, Sister Sandberg, for this great idea.

We enjoyed general conference this past weekend. What a great blessing to have inspired leaders to counsel us. Being far from home, we are also thankful for the modern technology that brought conference to us.

We had really great attendance for the Sunday morning session. The following photos are of members from Belize City, Cinderella, and Orange Walk Branches visiting after conference. Sorry our photos aren't quite up to "Ensign" quality.