Friday, September 24, 2010

September 20

This week not a whole ton happened overall. There is one lady that we are teaching who we think could possibly do really well. Her name is Brandi and we taught her again this week. She started out really down when we first met her, but is doing much better now. She’s a great lady and I think that she wants to be better. It’s kind of fun teaching her. Oh, there is one member here who has never really been active since he was a teenager and even then it was only because he had to, He is now about 70 or somewhere around there. His wife died a couple years ago and since then has started to remember his childhood in the church a little bit. Now he is reading the Book of Mormon and each Sunday that he’s in town we go to his house and answer all of his questions about that he has written down about passages he has read throughout the week. They are super interesting questions and it’s actually really fun to do. He’s a really cool guy too. Super relaxed and easy to talk to. This week he told us that it’s definitely not made up, so he’s making a lot of progress. That's been a pretty good time.

So, I finally got a wedding invitation from Tim and Ashley today, which personally I think was intended to arrive here after the wedding to make sure that I couldn't go. Oh well. It looks good though and I like the picture for sure. Mostly because Tim is not clean shaven.

Let's see....other things that have happened this week. We helped a lady get a table and chairs from the thrift store and into her house. She’s actually from South Central Missouri. I don’t remember what town. Just that its east of Branson. Her husband just got home from the hospital and we talked to him for a bit about the church. He’s an Episcopalian pastor, but very open to all religions. That was pretty interesting too. Let’s see, we also had another lesson with the Soto family. I think they’re really doing well, but it’s hard to tell sometimes. It was good though. We went over Ether 12 and talked about how you need to have a trial of your faith before you can get something. So in other words you gotta give a little bit before you are given. I think we'll do some service for them soon. They need some firewood for the winter, so we'll probably help them cut some up or something.

Oh ya! I forgot. this week we had one of the worst nights ever. At 2 am our carbon monoxide alarm went off with a screech that was absolutely unbearable. It was so loud! We got kind of worried, so we opened up windows and turned fans on and stuff to make sure we were good before we realized it was the battery. The thing was just messing up. It took is so long to realize it was the battery because it was plugged in. Which doesn't make any sense at all. But the battery light was on, so whatever. Anyway, we went back to sleep by 2:30. Then our window couldn't hold itself up after about 3:10, so it crashed down super loud and woke us up yet again. So, all in all we lost a couple hours sleep that night and just felt terrible the next day and really the day after that too. It was just not a good week for sleep until like last night.

I did get the package. It was like Christmas before Halloween. Such a great package. Elder Bush took one bite of the cookies and said, “Thats a cookie.” The cookies went fast. They were super good. I like the sweaters a lot. They are exactly what I needed.

Here are a couple of pics from Yerington: onions:

and apartment:


And my MTC district:

Monday, September 13, 2010

September 13

Highlights of my week:

We contacted a Salt Lake referral out in Wellington on Saturday. It was a 70-year-old man and his 91-year-old mother who had spent the last month living with their Mormon relatives in Utah and Idaho – I guess his cousin and her nephew. He is the one who sculpted the statues of Jesse Knight at the MTC and at one of the high schools in Salt Lake. Crazy the random people you meet. They seem pretty promising, especially the Mom. She is very sincere, and they both want to start coming to church. It might be a while though because they are out of town a ton. Hopefully they make it sometime this month or early next month but their schedule is crazy. They would be very good too.

But anyway, Fidel (another one of our investigators) invited us to his daughter’s quinceaƱera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincinera) on Saturday, so we got some way good food there. Oh, and they also gave us a little pepper which I knew was going to be hot, but which we were obligated to take a bite out of. Just a small one, but everyone was looking at us so I figured it’d be kind of bad. I had no Idea. It was sooooooooooooo hot. My mouth was so on fire I couldn’t even understand how on fire it was. That was ridiculous! Thank goodness that they had some horchata (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horchata) there to calm the mouth until we got home and were able to subdue the pain with milk and bread, though it still burned a little after that.

Since he served in El Salvador, Tim asked what we do during the day here in America. Things are definitely slower during the day. Albino is almost always home, so we see him up a couple times a week. We also go to the hospital here in town a couple times a week to visit a member and her roommate who is kind of an investigator and whose grandson is a less active member. Sister Soto works at the hospital so we try to catch her too so we can set up times to visit their family. Other than that there are a lot of member visits and less active visits. There are a lot of old people here, so that helps, The ward is very cool. They are back and forth on feeding us, but this month is way good. Not quite like in Reno who I hear have people cross out each others’ names on the dinner calendar for a spot, but we do well still.

We also had zone meeting last Tuesday (meeting not conference because President Black doesn’t come, just us and the zone leaders). There are about 25 of us in the zone overall. It was pretty fun to meet all of the other missionaries around. Way better than our 4-person district meetings. We talked about Zion a little bit and made good solid Lord of the Rings references to teach it. It was fun. We talked about how in Zion the people are of one heart and of one mind (
http://scriptures.lds.org/en/moses/7/18#18) and they are the pure in heart (http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/97/21#21). It was very good. They referenced a part in the Two Towers where Legalas is talking to Aragorn (yes I can easily name everybody in Lord of the Rings off the top of my head in case you were wondering) and says that they are all going to die and that the battle for Healms Deep is pointless. Everybody stops and stares and we used that to talk about when one person is negative it really brings down the whole group. Definitely fun.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Labor Day 2010

Today everybody is just out and about. It’s really nice outside. This week the weather was very moody (temperature wise, it doesn’t rain in Nevada). It was very cool and very hot, but today is perfect. About 75. It’s beautiful...weather, not landscape, haha.

It’s extremely rural and slightly green. We like it overall. It is also like the #1 onion growing area in the world (or something like that, I could see that being an exaggeration, but there are a lot of onions). That’s what Perry Farms grows. There’s also a lot of cabbage grown here and some corn, but not much. There are a decent amount of ranches around and a dairy farm, and those are all the major employers. A member of our church actually owns the dairy farm. The area is really weird, because there is water but only in very specific places so there will be nice houses with very green front and back yards, but if you look out their windows across the street you just see desert. It’s pretty goofy.

We moved to an apartment this week – actually in town, which is nice. It’s taken a while to get everything set up right, but now it’s all perfect. We have a small couch, two desks, lamps, bunk beds, and all of our kitchen needs, so life’s pretty good. It’s an interesting place, but we cleaned a ton and kept rearranging until now we are very satisfied.

We have about 4 individuals and 1 family that we are teaching. They have lots of questions, except for the one that we would baptize if he could ever come to church without getting fired and deported. Hopefully we can get over some ruts this week. We also should be starting to teach a new investigator this week whose daughter just got diagnosed with Leukemia like a couple days before we showed up at her door. She said she needed us.

We do not actually teach the English class anymore. We turned it over to one of the members, but we still teach a Spanish class and we still usually go by the English class to try and get appointments with those who are there. It’s still kind of our best option, but people keep taking down our signs for it, which is disappointing, but we just put up new ones.

Things are going well with my companion. We have BYU in common, so usually we swap BYU stories and stuff. It’s fun overall, and he has a really good mission attitude. We usually spend about two transfers [12 weeks] with a companion. He will probably leave after two and I’ll probably be here for one more after that and then get transferred out after Christmas but before New Years. It’s all subject to change though. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we both got transferred and this got made an English area again after our 2 transfers here.

Once a week we get together with other missionaries. It’s good times. We have zone conference in Fallon tomorrow. Junior comps never are the designated drivers here, and I still don’t even have my official driving privilege yet. I hear that it’ll probly be a few weeks still.