Laguna de Gautavita

familia mia,

antes que todo. I got your package, i just opened it to take out the what could be urgent, and put everything else right back in there to have a great christmas morning for me and my companions! THANKS!

I write today because we changed our prep. day so we could go to the laguna de gautavita (I bet you can wikipedia it). It was great. We had contracted a guy to drive our whole zone in a bus because it's pretty remote. The story is that it was a sacred ritual site of the native tribe that lived here before the Inquisition. The idea is that this place is special because it was a combination of the two creating forces of life --- masculine and feminine. Similar to spanish, every thing had a gender, the water being feminine, the mountians being masculine, so this little lake that resides in the top of the mountains was a fusion of the two forces. So they offered their gold to it. When the spanards found it they went nuts and cut a side out of the wall to drain the water and take out the gold. It's estimated that they took out over 8 tons of gold. resulting also in lowering the lagoon to about a half the size (the water got to about where we were standing before). So needless to say --- i was eating it all up, and the guide wanted to answer all my questions! And i hope you all remember how much I like to ask questions. The natives were concidently doing a rutual there to celebrate the end of their year, followed by a bunch of rich naturalist that wanted to help them out. The fun thing was as we watched these suposibly poor little indigeousness guys get secretly into their nice SUV. good stuff.

This week has been great. Last week i had the opportunity to go on interchanges with the whole zone, do to the fact that we are in a trio right now. I had some great experiences...

Yolanda and her 9 yera old daughter Natalia, have had nothing to do with the church for over ten years. Yolanda quickly inactived after being baptized when she was 16, but she always remembered the church when she saw the missionaries pass by, but every time they were never within reach. Two weeks ago, she saw them again, and gained the power necessary to greet them. This moment resulted in an invitation to go to christmas devotional where the spirit filled her, teaching her what she once had known, and even more. Her daughter, will be baptized the 1st of January.

... I ran out of time but i will tell you more when we talk this saturday!

JESS I'm glad your feelin better. you get that ear ready to hear my broken english saturday ok! btw the CD is great!!!!

i'm thinking 4 oclock utah time... ill call friday afternoon to verifiy...

I love you all, so much and can't wait to talk to you,

feliz navidad,

e. adams

p.s. it seemed like google talk was better, i guess we'll see!