Musser Mission Blog

This week started off with my facebook page being hacked, and completely taken over. I can no longer even access my own page, and whoever took it over decided to make me some expert in Crypto Currency, which is to laugh at. Just for your information, whatever you see coming out of my facebook page from the beginning of this week going forward is NOT from me, and should be reported as criminal. I have no plans of creating a new account, and it's kind of a blessing in disguise because I'm now no longer tempted to "Death-Scroll". This week is Thanksgiving for you all back home, we're going to have a big dinner here as well. It started out that the Elders were going to cook for about 65. That number has grown and now the office Elders are going to cook for more than 80 people at last count. We took them to a place called Makro which is a lot like a Costco without the delicious hot dogs. They purchased a ton of stuff, and they're very serious about it. Can't wa...

  This week started with Brenda and I finally getting our appointments to establish residency. Trying to get these appointments is like trying to pan for gold in your bathtub at home. The entire office staff jumps on their phones at exactly 3:00 PM every Thursday afternoon, and frantically calls to try to get whatever appointments they can get. There is literally a 10 minute window at best before they shut it down. So, the fact that we were able to get our appointments is a miracle in and of itself. Brenda's was in a place called Rubi which is about an hour train ride from Barcelona, and mine was in Terrasa which was about 1/2 hour longer train ride. The above photo was taken as I was waiting for Brenda to come back out (they wouldn't let me go in with her). Basically all they do is look at our paperwork and visas, take our fingerprints, and scan a passport photo. We now get to wait for about 45 days until we can go back and get our residency cards. Kind of a pain, but what can...

 This has been an amazing week. With great anticipation, we worked hard toward having a wonderful weekend with Elder Soares of the Quorum of the Twelve. He wanted to have a conference with just the Spain Barcelona mission and so there was a ton of logistics that needed to be attended to. We would have normally held 4 zone conferences this week, but since all of the mission was going to be coming together for Elder Soares, the President decided to hold one giant zone conference for the whole mission. It was on Friday because the next day was the conference with Elder Soares. This meant that all of the missionaries from the outlying areas needed to travel to Barcelona and stay with the missionaries here. We had to buy a bunch of air mattresses to distribute so that people weren't having to sleep on tile floors on yoga mats. We had a couple stay with us. Elder Gwilliam was amazing as he pulled all of the travel and sleeping arrangements together. He even had to deal with a train from ...

 This week has had both the good and the bad. First, the bad. There was a massive flood in the communities around Valencia here in Spain. It is part of our mission, and about a 2-hour drive from Barcelona. They said that they got almost two years worth of rain within a very short time. It was horrible for the people there. I saw videos on the news of cars being washed away. Some streets had almost 3 meters of water running through them. They are still finding bodies in cars. Cars were stacked up like wood (as you can see). We are blessed that the missionaries in the affected areas are all safe and sound. Although, they had some close calls. Two sisters were at the chapel when the excitement started and opened the the garage to leave, and water came rushing in. Luckily there are upper floors in the chapel building, and so they were able to take refuge there until the next morning. Another set of sisters were visiting a member of the stake presidency when things started and tried to ...