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Throughout this summer I’ve been stunned by the heat. Who lives in a place like this? It’s nuts! Well, once Halloween arrived, everything changed. Now it’s in the 70s every day, and it cools off to around 50 each night. It’s glorious.

Tonight, Pepper and I enjoyed a neighborhood walk in the lovely cool of the evening. We were in shorts and t-shirts.

Now I understand why people live in a place like this.

As missionaries, we’re encouraged to be involved in service work in the community. When we arrived, we were told there was a local food bank who distributed boxes of food to people in need, and we attended a couple of their projects. It was a good opportunity to serve, and after seeing the need for more help, Pepper shifted into high gear. She talked with the volunteer coordinator at the food bank and said we have a group of young adults who are eager and willing to help… what could we do? Now, a few months later, our little missionary group attends food distributions multiple times a week, in locations all over the Valley.

Our mission leaders heard about our work here, and asked us to coordinate service efforts throughout the mission. That includes all of San Diego and its surrounding communities, and over 200 missionaries. We used the magic of delegation by asking various senior missionary couples to find organizations in their areas, then figure out how to put the young missionaries to work. They’re at food banks, thrift stores, churches, soup kitchens, senior centers, city parks, and a dozen other good causes. It’s been a rousing success, with those 200 missionaries contributing many hours of volunteer service every month.

For us, our morning begins when a trailer full of food is unloaded in a parking lot. There are boxes that volunteers have packed (in a central warehouse), pre-packaged food, frozen food, vegetables, canned goods, milk, juice, and on and on. It’s always slightly different– depending on what’s been donated or purchased by the food bank– and it’s an impressive setup when it’s all ready to go.

Volunteers stand on both sides of these piles as the recipients pull up in their cars. We load the food into their trunks or back seats. They move along, and another car comes through the line. It’s actually quite efficient, and I love talking (briefly) with the recipients as they come to my station.

Here’s our hard-working crew this morning:

Today we had a record distribution: nearly 600 cars came through our location! That means we fed at least 600 families (actually probably more like 800, since some cars receive double or triple portions because they’re collecting for other families). It’s a good feeling.

For almost two years I’ve been working on Spanish, first with Duolingo and lately with the people here in the Valley who are fluent. I’ve found that native speakers are very patient and forgiving as I stumble through their language. For some reason, I find that even though I know the words, when I attempt to string them together into a sentence during a conversation, my mind turns dull and I stumble over the simple stuff. Practice, practice, practice.

Well, Sister Maravilla, one of the missionaries here, challenged me to speak in church (as in, over the pulpit) in Spanish. She supports a Spanish congregation, and we attend when we can. Frankly, I spend a lot of mental energy listening to the talks and attempting to make sense of them, but hearing the Spanish is helpful as I learn the cadence and flow of the words. We agreed that if I rose to that challenge, I would “earn” a Spanish mission name tag.

Well, I did it. I went in front of about thirty people (it’s a small congregation!) and talked for maybe two minutes entirely in Spanish. Sure, I stumbled over a few words, and I probably sounded like a toddler, but I got through it. Afterward, an older Mexican woman came up to me, grabbed my arm tightly, and said enthusiastically in broken English, “You keep doing it! Keep doing it!” She said that’s how you learn a language, and how she’d been learning English. She was really excited for me.

I talked to our mission office and explained my little challenge with Sister Maravilla, then asked if I could get a Spanish name tag. It arrived today!

Pepper received one as well. She’s much stronger in Spanish than I am, since she spoke Spanish on her mission in Boston thirty years ago. She says she’s “still rusty”, naturally, but that it’s “coming back”.

It might seem like a silly little thing, but it makes me pretty happy to see my progress in the language. I’m a far cry from fluent– and don’t expect to be even at the end of our mission– but it’s been a rewarding journey.

Every six weeks, after a missionary transfer, we all gather for a set of meetings called zone conference. It’s a bit of a misnomer, because it’s actually four zones, and there are two separate conferences since there are eight zones in all. The entire mission is divided into those eight zones, so half the missionaries (roughly a hundred in all) gather on one day, and the other half the next. Confusing? It sure was for us when we began our mission.

Anyway, today was our session of zone conference. We drove out to San DIego, along with the fourteen missionaries in our zone, and enjoyed about five hours of training and discussions from the mission leaders and some of the younger missionaries who’d been invited to present topics. Although much of the training doesn’t really apply to us– as senior missionaries our responsibilities and rules are very different– it’s valuable to understand what the younger missionaries are learning so we can better support them.

At the end of each conference, we all gather in the church chapel and sing “the mission song”. Yes, there’s a mission song. It’s fun to watch because all these young adults stand up, put their arms around each other, and really belt out the song. It thunders in the chapel.

During our time at the MTC back in May, it was really cool to see hundreds of missionaries on campus. Here, it’s just as cool to see a hundred of them as they navigate this difficult job they’ve volunteered to do: learning and growing and making mistakes and being frustrated, but all united in purpose and dedicating their time and talents to this work. We sure love them.

A few months ago a couple of the missionaries asked Pepper to cut their hair. Then one of them was brave enough to have me do a bit of trimming. I warned him I’d never cut hair before, but he was unfazed. The result wasn’t too awful.

Then a couple of other missionaries asked if they could come over for cuts. I reiterated my warning, and told them I wasn’t responsible for damages. They consented, and afterward seemed pretty pleased. One of them even sent me a text from his mom:

Apparently word got out, because today two other missionaries asked if the barber shop was open. “Sure, elders, come on over…”

We were playing remote board games with the kids today, and Ollie was sitting with Alex. On Google Meet you can turn on “visual effects”, and Ollie thought it was hilarious to wear aviator glasses and a little mustache.

Then Alex turned on the wizard filter, and Ollie loved it.

He probably spent half an hour admiring himself onscreen, trying different poses and laughing as the rest of us played games. Super fun.

Every year, the tiny town of Westmorland holds a celebration called the Honey Festival. Apparently the town refers to itself as the “Honey Capital of the World”, which seems like a bold claim considering its size, but I guess everyone wants to be known for something. Anyway, we trucked up there to see what all the buzz was about. (See what I did there?)

There were around fifty booths where locals were selling toys and trinkets and handmade crafts. Two of the booths sold honey, so they legitimized the Honey Festival name. There was apparently a spelling bee and some sort of essay-writing contest for kids, both of which we missed. We posed with a beekeeper’s uniform, because it seemed fitting:

It was fun to bump into some friends there.

Pepper bought a jar of honey; it just seemed like the right thing to do. After looking at all the booths, we headed over to the Westmorland Date Shake Shop, where they sell– you guessed it– dates. Oh, and they make shakes using dates. Here’s the huge sign outside their store explaining why dates are so amazing.

It was a fun way to spend a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Small towns are such fun.

The four missionaries serving in Brawley were helping to clean out a house, and the owner happened to have a bunch of old sheriff’s uniforms in his closet. He didn’t need them, he offered them to the missionaries, and of course they accepted.

They asked me to take a picture of them and “do something cool with it”. The result:

It’s time to say goodbye to another fine group of missionaries. It seems our little family is growing; when we first arrived there were ten missionaries in the Valley, and then it became twelve. The incoming group will be fourteen.

We have a good time together. Here’s our farewell shot:

About an hour from our home is an area called Slab City. It’s out in the desert, well-known enough to have its own Wikipedia page, and has sort of an odd legendary status amongst the locals. Anyway, today we drove out there with the missionaries.

The first sight that greets you is Salvation Mountain. It’s a fifty-foot-high man-made mound of… something. I don’t know. And it’s been painted in bright colors. Lots and lots of bright colors, using lots and lots of paint. According to the volunteer tour guide (!) it took over a hundred thousand gallons of paint.

Many of those paint cans are still there, probably from back in the 1980s.

You can follow the Yellow Brick Road painted onto the mountain to climb to the top, which of course we did. From that vantage point, you can see the desert all around, as well as Slab City itself in the distance. We asked the tour guide to take a picture of our group:

In addition to the hill and the paint, there are a bunch of rusted-out cars covered in Biblical messages.

Apparently it’s quite the tourist attraction, because in the brief time we were there, at least three other carloads of people stopped to get out and wander the area. There’s literally nothing else around for miles upon miles, so they must really be coming just for this.

Anyway, our next stop was the House of Dots. You can’t miss the road sign.

Bonus: it’s Next to East Jesus! We never saw mention of Jesus in any other cardinal direction, though.

We drove into “town”, which is really just a scattered assortment of burned- and rusted-out RVs decaying in the sand and hot sun. But people live here! We eventually arrived at the House of Dots.

We met Dot. She invited us to wander around her little area, which was more or less a collection of not-quite-habitable trailers and tarps.

Imagine all the junk no one wants from every yard sale you’ve ever seen, baking in the sun for years. That’s Dot’s house. After a bit of that we wandered over to East Jesus, which is an “art exhibition”. There we met Wizard, a grizzled old man who spends his days sitting on a busted couch under a tarp. The art consisted of things like collections of old whiskey bottles, a piano that you could hardly tell was a piano, a broken fishing boat, a bunch of propane tanks, and so on. Someone dragged a washer-dryer combo out here, for example.

The highlight for the missionaries was the giant seesaw, which launched you about twelve feet above the ground and was extremely rickety. There was a sign that warned us not to use it, but Wizard said it wasn’t really all that dangerous. Thanks, Wizard!

More art:

Some of the “displays” had obvious messages, like these old televisions.

Others were just inexplicable piles of trash. Art comes in all forms, I suppose.

The best description I can give for Slab City is from Elder DeMordaunt, who quipped, “This is like if Mad Max had an art project.” It’s absolutely a one-of-a-kind place.