"MEXICO is nuts! haha Im in Puerto Vallarta for my first area and I live on a street called Sol. I cant remember the address of my house but it is the house with the green Mormon van parked outside of it. Its a tiny street so you should see it. We have like the nicest house on the street. For rent it only costs 150 US dollars a month. Isn't that crazy??? And its a 4 bedroom house! People are crazy here! They ride in the back of trucks and on top of cars and the motorcycle drivers are crazy! People drive their quads on the street everywhere. Ive seen three guys on motorcycles holding their baby in one hand and a drinking a beer in the other hand! haha And guys are driving around in their trucks with a bunch of people in the back holding guns. Its crazy here, but I love it. But Im safe. Im really big here. haha Most of the people here are really tiny haha. The people are incredible though. I already love them and they love me even though I don't speak really well yet. They are so friendly and the members are so nice. Where I am serving right now, there is a lot of poverty and people are living with next to nothing, literally, but when we come over to visit, they give us all the food they have even though they have very little. They are so kind and helpful. To give you and idea of the kind of places we are serving in I wrote down a street that we were yesterday, for you to look at on google. Its called Lazaro Cardenas or it might be Lazaro Cardenos haha I cant really read my handwriting very well but its one of those. Me and my first companion get along really well. He's a native but he speaks a tiny bit of english. He's way cool. Even though sometimes I don't know what he is saying we have a lot of fun haha so thats good. The work is a little bit hard here though because we aren't allowed to knock doors in Mexico. We only work with referrals, less actives, and members. If we want to have a lesson with an investigator we have to have a member present or else we cant teach them. It makes it difficult because it is hard to find members who can come because everybody works so hard out here to provide for their families because they don't get paid very much. So there aren't very many baptisms here right now because its mostly reactivating non active members. This week we weren't able to meet with any investigators because we couldn't get any members to come, but we got to meet with a lot of non actives. And another thing that is difficult is that we have a really large area and every body lives really spread out, and we have to walk, so sometimes we don't get to see very many people because we walk over to less actives houses and referrals houses and they aren't there. It can be frustrating, but I love it here."
"We only get real mail every six weeks from transfers because I am so far from Guadalajara. So if you send me mail, I won't get it very fast and I won't be able to respond very fast. I'm sorry. But I would still love to get mail! :)...You can't send mail or packages to my address at home. You have to send it to the mission home in Guadalajara...I don't get Dear Elders for every six weeks as well ... I will have pics of Mexico next week!! Every Monday is my P-Day."
-Elder Brinkerhoff
