We sure miss Ric...

Here is an email he sent today. It's hard not to miss him.

Ahh.. mk lets see if I can mail something off to y'all this week, so this whole month we haven’t had preparation days, we have until 12 o clock then we work normal. So the house is disgusting and my hair is super long, were going for 300 baptisms in the mission this month so it’s the month of sacrifice. The spring has hit and we actually got some rain last night! It was awesome, it doesn’t rain often around this part of the year but when it does, it comes down and we were a long way from home, actually in almost every city there's the centro, the middle of town oh, I guess its called down town for those that speak English. We were there talking to people in the street, in the rain and all the lights turned off it was pretty cool. But we made it back home in one piece. We ran out of gas a couple of days ago, the gas is used for everything… heat the water, cook all that jazz. And we didn’t have money to buy a refill so i've showered one time in the last two days, and it was my head and face. I suppose the rain counts as another too. But don’t worry we just bought another tank a little bit ago. We are all broke its pretty funny during the end of the month, there's no food in the house and were scraping to get by until we get our money for the next month.
We found this golden investigator, It doesn’t happen too often finding someone like here, in every 150 lessons we find someone half as awesome as her. Its makes all the hours in the sun and sore legs worth it. I bought a soccer ball, and a week later I was walking in the street kickin it around and a massive bus passed by and plowed right over it. It exploded and left me looking down at my ball in awe. A family behind us were outwardly laughing, pointing and mocking me. It was $2.10 in dollars brand new so I guess I might be able to move on with my life. And a family just gave me another one as a gift so I was pumped about that. I don’t really know what to talk about now because most things are just normal for me, knockin doors all day, teaching super duper old ladies with no teeth, getting chased by dogs. My comp elder flores is still chuggin along, normally when a elder has a little bit of time left they start “dying” but were working just fine. They just had a weird holiday im not sure what it was about I think of spring, but all the kids were dressed up as animals and there were fireworks flyin around at night. Elder valasquez told me they just make up holidays here so they can get some time off work… sounds good to me, more people that are home to teach. Were pluggin along here, ive got my health and testimony. I wish you the best week ever and take care mis amigitos!
love elder sherman

Note: Since a full-time mission for the LDS church is completely self-supported, we pay a set amount each month to a general missionary fund. Each mission allots a set monthly budget for the missionary. It's a great way to teach them to budget, plus it also means a missionary set to say Japan, doesn't have to pay more each month than a missionary in Mexico.