A week ago on Saturday I went on a field trip with many of the senior missionaries. Unfortunately, Rick had meetings with our Mission President and all the District Presidents in the North Mission and was unable to join us. We took a bus to Santa Lucia to see Monument 21, a carved stone which now lies in the middle of a sugarcane field. Mayan tradition holds that the Maya descended from seven tribes. Likewise, there were seven tribes in the Book of Mormon...Nephites, Jacobites, Josephites, and Zoramites; and also Lamanites, Lemuelites, and Ishmaelites. This stone is believed to tell the story of the birth of seven tribes--a figure of a non-Mayan man stands in the middle with an umbilical cord wrapped around his leg. On the lower right portion of the stone in a figure representing a womb are seven glyphs, divided by gushing water into two groups, three on one side and four on the other. One of the glyphs on the right is a flint knife, significant to some scholars because the name Zoram in Hebrew means "flint." The Temple President and his wife were our guides. He served here as a young missionary in the early 60s, has been a CES instructor, and Area President in Mexico, so has really had a life-time interest in this area.
