Volcano Tajumulco-the HIGHEST point in Central America

Elder Gavarette and me on the hike.

Dear Family,

Yesterday we climbed to the highest point in all of Central America! It was incredible!

Our zone got the chance yesterday to climb the Volcano Tajumulco, the highest volcano or mountain in all of Central America! We had to wake up at 3 a.m. to head out to the volcano and we started our ascent at about 5 a.m. 

There was a pickup truck that took the sister missionaries up a good ways and we went up a little part in the bus we came in. 

Luckily, we had been able to find some super cheap clothes for the cold (because in Mazate nobody buys that stuff because it is stinking hot) because it was pretty cold in the morning.

 As we went up we realized it was going to be a lot harder than we thought. The views we saw were just so incredible, I don´t think my camera really could capture how incredible it was.

One of the funnier parts of this whole experience was that this little black dog that we found at the start of the climb started to guide us up the volcano and pretty much stuck with us the whole way. We kind of fed it and gave it water as we went up so it wouldn´t die and it was super faithful. I gave it the name of Encarnación (from Nacho Libre), just because it sounds kind of silly, but the name stuck.

Luckily I had thought to bring sunscreen because we were a lot closer to the sun and there was no clouds to protect us from the sun. We eventually made it to the very last ascent where we kind of rested for a while. About an hour later everyone was together and we started the final climb. It was super fun! At about 12 p.m. we made it to the top (and of course Encarnación made it as well)!  It took us a few minutes to find the actual crater of the volcano but we found it and it was amazing! It isn´t active and you can actually climb down into the crater (which we didn´t do because of time limits). 

The clouds had come in by then and we were above the clouds. It was unforgettable!

By the time we were back in San Marcos everyone had burnt and exhausted faces but it was so, so worth it!

We also had some other awesome moments this past week. M.´s older sister was baptized on Saturday. M. was very happy to see her sister also enter the waters of baptism and take those first important steps in the gospel.

 I also got to go to La Máquina during the week to help out the Elders there with an interview and boy, did we walk a lot there. La Máquina is just a ton of dirt roads and it is super spread out (and hot). It would be a good area for bikes, maybe someday.

I have also really enjoyed being creative with our zone meetings. This past week I talked to them about giving our investigators hamburgers instead of tamales. Tamales just have a little piece of meat in the middle surrounded by a ton of dough that you have to eat. In turn, hamburgers have meat in every single bite. The meat of our message to the world is that we can all be clean from our sins through Christ if we repent, are baptized, and keep the commandments. I explained that we need to always be mentioning the meat of our message in every single lesson and always giving hamburgers to our investigators and not tamales which just have a tiny bit of meat at the very end.

We hope to see more miracles in our area this week and to see some more baptisms as well. I have just seen the Lord´s hand in this work so much here and I can´t wait to see more in the coming months!

Love,

Elder Jensen

More pictures from our hike: