We grow our Branch

While at Zamora we baptized a young couple who were the brother and sister-in-law of the branch president of a neighboring branch in Uruapman (about three hours away.) I also got my very first green missionary the second month while I was at Zamora. Elder Flores came straight from Mexico City to Zamora to start his mission. He hadn't met the mission president and neither had I yet. He just showed up one day on the bus and anounced that he would be my new companion. My old companion was transferred back to Guadalajara. He was great to work with because he was so excited to serve a mission. But he didn't have much a clue what a missionary dressed like. We had to buy him his first white shirts. Plus he had a large bushy mustash on his face. I was pretty sure that it had to go and he agreed with out any fussing on his part. He loved small children and spoke perfect spanish.

Together we decided to grow Zamora. We tried tracting but the people we too nice. We got in every home and got fed at every place. They weren't very interested in the gospel but we sweet and nice and loved to listen and talk to us. We would tract in the morning and only get to three of four houses before we were too full to eat any more food and needed to do something else with our time.

We visited a splinter group from the Catholic church but they only invited us back twice because they were too "Born Again" and didn't like to hear about repentance or the need to keep comandments. Plus they lived way out of town and we would have to walk several hours one way to just get to their meeting place.

Then one Sunday out of the blue showed up a sister and her three children. They were visiting from Chicago, USA where she was a maid. She wanted her oldest two children baptized. She said that the elders back in Chicago wouldn't baptize them because they were all wetbacks. She was from a little place about a half and hour from Zamora. How she ever found us I don't know for sure except one of the people we contacted must have told her where we lived. We gladly baptized her two older children and wished her the best of luck getting back to the States. Before she left she introduced us to her brothers and sisters and parents. This was the break we were looking for. Before I left from my mission about a year later. I returned to Zamora as the Zone leader in charge of the work there to see that the branch in Zamora had grown to over thirty people. Most of the new converts were relatives of this good sister from Chicago.

Today Zamoa has a thriving stake located there. In fact it has been a stake for over then years. One of the members of the stake president was one of the small children who attended our first branch meetings.