Well here we are after one week of service in the Guatemala City Temple. Here is a picture of the temple from the street near our apartment.
And another shot from the front of the temple.
It's hard to get a shot without power lines and transformers in the way, but the temple is really beautiful. We've had a good week learning our duties and the procedures in this temple. We're also trying hard to understand the language and learn to communicate!
Here are some pictures of the outside of our apartment building. Security is very tight as you can see from the fences and locked gates everywhere. We have to go through three locked doors to get into our apartment!!
This is the front of the building. You can see the locked, metal gate covered over with wrought iron gates in front of it.
Inside the gate is this beautiful courtyard and another wrought iron gate in front of a wooden door. Inside that door is the hallway to our apartment door.
Our door is the one on the left. We have two other missionary couples on our floor, the one on the end and the one on the right, and another couple in an apartment upstairs. The temple president lives in the building next to ours, and the rest of the missionaries live across the street in the temple complex. Since we have to cross the street, the temple security staff is always in view of us when we leave our apartment.
Inside our apartment, between the kitchen and the living room, we have a small patio that is open to the air but inaccessible from the outside.
The glass door opens out from our hallway.
This is the back door opening off our bedroom. There is an enclosed courtyard that is kept beautiful by the temple gardeners.
The gate on the left opens into the backyard of the president's residence. The next door opens into the bedroom of the Murri's who live in the apartment at the end of our hall. The stairway goes to the roof and the Thompson's apartment upstairs. And the door on the right goes into the Murri's living room. The Barlows, who live across the hall from us, don't have a door into the courtyard so have to go through one of our apartments to get to the back courtyard.
That's the Angel Moroni on the temple from our back courtyard.
The tree on the left is a mandarin orange tree and has little green oranges on it. The door in the back corner opens into the back of the building behind us where the lawnmower and other equipment is kept and where the maintenance crew can get in to care for the yard. The front of the building is a Church Distribution Center where we can get temple clothing, church books, etc. at really good prices.
This barbecue center is on the back wall of the courtyard and provides a place where we can barbecue any time we want or have group barbecues with all the missionaries. It's a beautiful place to live and, as you can see, very secure!
