We have been in our mission over one month already. Where has the time gone? This photo shows our office staff that have been a great help to us. As you can see, they are mostly Latins. We have only eighteen missionaries from the USA right now. Starting on the left our senior assistant is from Santiago, Chile, the next two missionaries are from Argentina, the next one is from Santiago, Chile. Our other assistant is our one and only American from Evanston, Wyoming. On the far right, we have one from Peru. These six young men have been outstanding missionaries, and they make our lives a whole lot simpler.

This is our street where we live. Our apartment building is behind the large tree on the left. Bogota is a beautiful city of brick buildings, and all the bricks seems to be the same color. We are up on a hill side and you can see the many trees. Our apartment is four blocks from the mission office. We walk there and back almost every day.

Once we leave Bogota, it is like we are in another world. The high rise buildings are non existent, and the homes are far apart. Our drive to the town of Duitama takes four hours, but it is a beautiful ride with beautiful scenery.

This photo shows some of the beautiful scenery. Everywhere we look we see rolling green hills. We could have used up all of our memory on our camera taking photos of the scenery.

Colombia has many new fruits that we have grown to love. At the top of the plate the yellow fruit is called Pitahaya. This fruit is really tasty. You cut it in half and use a spoon to eat it. Going to the left is the tomato de arbul (means a tree tomato). This is good but not our favorite. At the bottom the green fruit is a maracuya. It was tasty and good to eat with a spoon. On the right is a granadia. This is our favorite. We were first introduced to this fruit in Peru, by our son Jay. This was his discription. It looks like an orange, but has a hard shell like a hard boiled egg. You hit it on something and peel some of the shell away. In Jay's words, "the fruit looks like snot, and you just suck it out." If you want to be sophisicated, you would cut it in half and use a spoon to eat it.

Getting to know Colombia

Lulo is one of our new found fruit. It looks like an orange, but inside it is full of little black seeds. It is quite acidy, so it is not good to just eat fresh, but it makes a delicious juice drink. We can't get enough of it. When we got here in Bogota we had three juicers, so making juice was an easy task. It has been nice having a grocery store just two blocks away. I can run to the store and get a carton of milk or a few Lulos.

This is a short update of how we started on this wonderful, once in a lifetime experience of being called to be Mission President and companion to the Colombia, Bogota North Mission. On September 23, 2008, we received a phone call from Elder Dallin H. Oaks. He invited us to have a get aquainted interview with him. In November we received a phone call from President Dieter F. Uchtdorf asking for us to have an interview with him. He extended to us our call. We had to wait until February to know where we would serve. We were very excited to serve in a Spanish speaking mission.

These are our four oldest grandchildren. They sure look like great missionaries. They are pointing where they think they will be called to serve some day.

We were set apart by Elder D. Todd Christofferson from the twelve apostles, and Elder James B. Martino from the Severnties. We were very pleased to have our children and four of our older grandsons with us. It was a special day for us. We were given our name tags and we were ready to go.

We arrived in Bogota on June 29, 2009. President and Sister Carmargo met us at the airport with a bouquet of fresh flowers. I guess this was called the changing of the guards.

We arrived to a beautiful condo here in Bogota. We were amazed at how big and nice the apartment is. We are on the top floor of an eight story building. We are located just four blocks from the mission office. We enjoy our walk to and from the office, and enjoy the pleasant temperature that averages a temperature in Bogota at 64 degrees year round. It is a beautiful city, and our first impression was how green it is.