Rewards of the Week

Dear Family and Friends,

This has been a really fun week for us. On Wednesday morning we took a trip with our district president to Linden to pay for damages done to one of the apartments that the Elder were renting. We then visited the missionary couple, Elder and Sister Summers who are serving there. Elder Summers is the Branch President there. He took us down to the river to see the river people who live there. Most of them are not members of the church, but they come and enjoy the meetings the branch has. One of the young men, Troy took us in a canoe across the river to meet a women who is dying of cancer. She also was not a member, but she asked for a Priesthood blessing and we sang some songs to her to comfort her. She then had her son bring us some of the most delicious apple bananas we have ever seen.

It was interesting to see how these people live. They have no electricity so they cook over open fires and they get their water from the river for cleaning. I don't know how they purify it for drinking, but they were healthy looking people and they lived and worked together as complete families. So many of the members in the city of Georgetown consist of single parents trying to raise children alone. It was refreshing to see happy families. Most of the families on the river were Amer-Indians (the Guyanese term for Native Americans) but some were from East Indian descent.

Then on Saturday, we had the baptisms of an entire family and a wedding for a couple who both are returned missionaries. The family had four children, three boys and one girl. They will be a great strength to their new branch. We celebrated with the wedding party by joining them in a luncheon. The Guyanese people love to eat fried rice, fried noodles, curried garbanzo beans, bread made of a pastry like dough and curried chicken. They always have soda pop with their meals. We thought we had chosen a bottle of water to drink, but it turned out to be cream soda. If you notice, there was no fruit or vegetables in the meal. This is typical for the Guyanese people, however, often they have watermelon or cut up pineapple with their meal. Needless to say type 2 diabetes is rampant in Guyana.

One other thing, I used to check the weather often in Idaho, but I hardly ever do anymore. It is always the same. It ranges from 72 to 88 degrees from morning until evening, every single day. We are only 7 degrees north of the equator so winter is going to be very similar to summer. I am told that the winter months of December and January will go to about 68 in the morning to 84 in the afternoon. The only exciting thing that happens is a good shower pretty often and lots of rain during the rainy season. We have never worn a jacket here. It never gets cold.

We miss all of you and think of you often. Ruth Ann told us about the great wedding that Brigham had and Eve told us about Jeremiah's wedding and how much fun that was. Mary lets us know what is happening in Dayton, and Spencer and Barbara let us know about the school events. Feel free to email us at anytime. Gay, thank you for the happy birthday message. We love you all.
Elder and Sister Beutler

P.S. Roxane, to celebrate your birthday we watched the Sound of Music on Friday evening!

Getting packages in Guyana

Dear family and friends,

Here in Guyana, the postal system has taken the joke about how many people it takes to change a light bulb to a whole new level. We have now gone to the post office to receive (the proper term is collect here in Guyana) packages for missionaries from their friends and family. This is the steps that are taken for every package.

1-The post office sends a notice to our office that there is a package for us to collect.
2-We go to the post office and give them the notice.
3-The clerk goes to the back and checks a file that has a paper with our names on it and permission to collect packages for the Elders that are on the list.
4-We wait in a waiting area for at least 15 minutes for someone else to bring the package to a table.
5-We then go back to the window and watch as that person opens the package and looks at all the contents.
6-Then another person is notified in another office who comes out and writes down the contents on a piece of paper.
7-He then goes back into another office and decides how much the contents are worth and determines the customs charges, (which I might add are usually about the value of the items in the package.)
8-Then the person who opened the package tapes it shut and takes it to the delivery window.
9-The person who determines the customs charges gives the paper to a cashier, who charges you customs tax.

10-Finally you go to the delivery area with your receipt for the package and can leave.

The whole process takes at least 45 minutes. I am not exaggerating. The couple who used to do this said that one time they were there for 4 hours waiting because someone had sent the elder some Pepperidge Farm cookies that had been crushed to powder and the security people had to come and test the powder to see if it was lethal.

Other than that experience, the week has been a really good one. We had all the office work done by Wednesday afternoon and were able to participate in a zone conference with our new mission president, President Mehr. It was good to meet with the 30 or so Elders and couples in the Guyana area and enjoy their great spirits. We were able to have personal interviews with the President and his wife and they ate dinner with us at our home yesterday, between meetings. We also had a visit from the mission patriarch and his wife. They were available for three days giving many members their patriarchal blessings. Many of the members were in their 30's and 40's and had never been able to have those blessings. As a sidelight, President Mehr's wife is the daughter of the patriarch and she is also a member of the Tabernacle Choir. Today she sang a rendition of the hymn, "Come Thou Font of Every Blessing" It was beautiful!

I continue to play the piano for all the meetings I go to. Today was district conference and there was no one except the visiting authorities who could play the hymns so I did it. I am getting better about doing it without making so many mistakes and more confidence. Blessings from heaven. 

There has been some political trouble in the area of Linden, about 1 1/2 hour drive from here and the couple serving there had to leave three weeks ago and is staying in the mission home right now. We thought that things were getting better, but on Friday night, the branch meeting house was looted and burned to the ground. The building was owned by a man who was an enemy to the people who are causing all the trouble. They were not lashing out at the church, but at the owner of the rented meeting house.

So now the members of the branch are without a meeting house and their branch president, who is the missionary living in the mission office cannot safely return to Linden yet to help them. We prayed for them in all our meetings this weekend and hope that things will cool down soon.

We will close for now. Love to all of you!

Elder and Sister Beutler

Life goes on in Guyana

Dear friends and family,
 It has been good to hear from many of you this week. Mayara, I hope that your Mom is doing alright with her surgery.  Amy, it was really fun to read your letter that Mary copied and put on the email. We were actually in the office with 4 elders when we read it so they all read it with us. They were a little jealous about the steak and potatoes that you ate at the MTC.

We have been trying to visit a few members of the church from different parts of the Georgetown area so that we would know the students who want to use Perpetual education loans and help them apply. We still don't know how to help them very well but it is good to meet them and their families, so we know who we are talking to when they call and ask for help.

We also took it upon ourselves to visit the Elders in one of the apartments because we were told that it was not fit to live in. We found that the electricity didn't work in the bathroom, the shower had to be turned of by opening the bathroom window and turning a knob outside, and there was a hole in the floor of the bedroom where rats came in on occasion. We talked to the landlord about fixing those things and don't intend to pay any rent until he fixes those things. The floor and walls are in okay shape however and so I think that they will be okay to live there after the repairs are done.

Becky, happy birthday on Wednesday. I hope you spend the day doing things you really enjoy. August 1st is a big holiday in Guyana. It is called immancipation day, the day when the black people in Guyana were freed from slavery from the British who lived in Guyana. I went shopping at the grocery store today and they took 7 % off the grocery bill to celebrate and also gave us a free t-shirt because we spent over 50 US dollars (2000 GUY dollars). Speaking of money, the exchange rate is 1 US dollar to 200 GUY dollars. So a quart of milk costs 400 dollars which is 2 dollars US. It takes a little getting used to, figuring out how much you are spending. We usually get 150 US dollars worth of money at the ATM to live on each week. That is 30,000 GYU dollars. That is a lot of bills!

So life goes on and we are learning lots of things. I have been studying my latest book "Microsoft Office 2007 for Dummies" this week and finding out how some of the commands work that I didn't know existed. Fun and games.

We love you all!

Mom and Dad

Reply from Elder Cornish

Elder J. Devn Cornish is in the area presidency for the area which includes the West Indies mission.  Mom and Dad had some email communication with him when they were first learning how to run the Guyana mission office.  In his recent email, Dad accidentally included Elder Cornish's address among the family addresses.  Elder Cornish sent a gracious reply back to him (which was also sent to the entire family.) 

On Saturday, July 28th Elder Cornish wrote:

Dear Elder and Sis Beutler,

You can see how very much you are needed! We love you and are grateful for your services.

Elder J. Devn Cornish

Elder Cornish gave a super talk in a recent general conference which can be read here.  (Don't miss his humorous story about praying to find a quarter so that he could buy a piece of fried chicken.)

Letter From Dad

Saturday, July 28, 2012
Greetings,

I have had kind of a hard time not having time to actually teach the gospel. We ended up training to run the mission office here in Guyana. This is certainly a third world country when it comes to finances. We have to go stand in line to pick up bills, come to the office scan them to Trinadad(the mission head quarters), hand write the checks and go stand in line to pay them. I hope to speed up the process once I take completely over so I have time to work with people.

I have had to learn more computer skills because I don’t have Cole or Sherry [Dad's secretary and school computer expert, respectively] to guide me. I am learning slow but sure. We also are in the Perpetual Education area with the young adults. That also requires all computer use.

It’s good to be in the full time service of our Lord Jesus Christ. I just hope, Sister Beutler and I can become more productive than we are now.

God Bless you,

Elder Beutler

These past 2 weeks we have been dealing with legal issues concerning the missionaries.  In Guyana, missionaries who are not native can only obtain a visa for 3 months.  Then they have to leave the country for a day or two and when they enter again they have their visa stamped for another 3 months.  When we arrived we only had ours stamped for one month.  So, in looking at the visas of the missionaries, including ourselves, we found that there were eight of them who needed to leave because their visas had expired.  Even though none of the couples visas had expired, they were due to expire in two weeks so 14 of us had to renew our visas.  This is time consuming and expensive because we went to Suriname, the dutch speaking country to the east of us.  We had to travel on a ferry to cross the wide river separating the two countries and then stay in a hotel overnight and return the next day. 

 

To further complicate things,  one of the elders was from Madagascar.  The Suriname embassy took three days deciding whether or not to allow him to get a Suriname visa so that he coud leave the country.  His name is Elder Andriamanantena and his country is Madagascar.  Most people here just laugh when he tells them where he is from and what his name is.  Apparantly there is a movie named Madagascar that they are familiar with.

 

Anyway,  We were told that there was no way he would be able to reenter Guyana but we took him anyway and had a prayer in our hearts that it would work out.  After we arrived in Suriname we visited th Guyana Consulate and they granted him a 6 month visa with the help of 80 US dollars.  We were truly blessed.  So all the elders are legal again and we are all safely back home again.

 

It was really fun to visit Suriname. They are more European in the building of their cities and they take pride in keeping things clean.  Our neighborhood here in Guyana is nice and clean but much of the city of Georgetown has a big problem with littering the streets. 

 

I started teaching a family of three girls and one boy how to play the piano this week.  I spent an hour in their home, teaching them the first lesson in the basic keyboard course that the church publishes.  They were given a keyboard by some missionaries a few years ago and none of them had learned to play it.  It was really fun.  The boy is named Aaron and he is only seven.  When I taught him, all the girls gathered around and wanted to help him hit the keys. The three year old girl  wanted to learn too, but she was too young. 

 

We are thinking of you and are prayers are with you and your families.  Amy, we will be thinking of you this weekend as you give your farewell talk and leave for the MTC on Wednesday.  What an adventure you will be having in the next six weeks.  

Love from Elder and Sister Beutler

Dear family, 

We have been in the Carribean for 2 weeks now and are beginning to learn our responsibilities here.  We were trained to do the perpetual education fund and the employment center. We are also supposed to help with the young single adults.  Since we arrived, however, we have been learning the mission office duties for the country of Guyana.  The couple we are replacing there have been on their mission for 2 years and 3 months.  They are actually native to Guyana, the first native Guyana couple to serve a senior mission, Elder and Sister Benn.  He was called to be the district president a few months ago, so he has been doing the mission and the district for several months. 

As you can imagine, with our less than perfect computer skills, this has been a little overwhelming to be responsible for so many things which all require good computer skills.  The up side of it is that the Guyana area is not that large in church membership yet.  There are only 26 young people in the whole country who are doing PEF so far, and we have many people who can help.  There is an area committee called to help carry out the responsibilities on making sure that the young people get their loans and pay them back.

Yesterday, we received an email from Sister Rees, who is the Carribean area music chairman.  She wanted to know about the music skills in the Guyana area.  She asked us to find out what branches need keyboards and who can play.  If the other branches are anything like ours, we are really hurting.  We have one keyboard in the chapel and no one to play it.  The music director turns on some pre-recorded hymns for prelude, and then turns it off and leads the opening, sacrament, and closing hymns with no accompaniment for those.  I feel like that is something that we could really help with.  The music directors both did a good job of leading the music and I am sure that there are other young people who would have the ability to learn to play. 

It seems that couple missions are all about learning what the Lord wants you to do and teaching what you are good at. 

We love you all and appreciate our wonderful family. 

 Love from Elder and Sister Beutler