September 17, 2013

Wow.  what a busy week.  We did learned how to do a lot of the financial surf in the office and had to multi zone conferences we went to with about 80 missionaries between the two.  Learned a lot about teaching the gospel to others through the Spirit, Book of Mormon, and asking good questions.  These young men and women are very uplifting to be around.  They have a great positive attitude although the places they live are not the best by US standards.  We also got to travel about 10 hours south of Lima along the coast to Ica and Nazca.  Both have long histories with ancient people having lived there with remains of temples and other structures.  The most famous are the Nazca lines which cover more the 450 square miles of lines, geometric shapes, and some animals marked out on the desert floor.  These lines were made centuries before Christ and took over several hundred years to build.  The people are called the Nazca.  There is a lot of speculation about why they built them ranging from religious to astronomy.  The lines can only really be seen well from the air.  We also attended a planetarium session about the lines.  We got to tour an Inca structure that was built about 500 years after Christ when the Incas took over the Nazca part of Peru.  The most interesting structures are the aqueducts that were built in Inca times.  They intercepted the groundwater at about 50 feet then piped it down to their fields through additional holes and aqueducts until the water was at the same level as their farms.  I am going to attach a bunch of pictures for everyone to see.  The photos will give a better perspective of what we saw.  In Nazca we stayed at the Nazca Lines Hotel named after the Lines family I suppose.  It was a very goo hotel with a beautiful swimming pool  The area south of Lima is much warmer than Lima and the sun shines all day.  It was wonderful to see the sun again.  The town is very small and the people are poor but were very friendly.  The Church is growing quite fast in this are.  There were over 190 people at the regional conference we attended in Nazca.  Met some great people.  Still very hard to communicate with them.  They speak poorer English than we do Spanish.  Let me know if anyone has some questions about what we have mentioned in this blog today.  The roads are not good but are better right after tolls are collected.  We went through 3 to 4 toll booths on the way to Nazca.  There are also some beach resorts along the way that are used by the very rich.  This part of the Country is a desert where very little grows if it weren't for the groundwater they use for their crops there would be almost nothing there.  Some has suggested that when the Nazca lived there the climate had to have been different, more rainfall  Thinking of all of you and enjoying are experience.