Monday, November 29, 2010

November 29

Happy birthday, Tim!

Well, Thanksgiving was way good. We had 2 dinners and it turned out that one of our dinners just happened to invite two Hispanics that go to our English class and are interested in the Book of Mormon. It’s always nice to have good members in the clutch. That was way cool; hopefully soon we will be able to start teaching them. That would be cool. We first went to Bishop Darrington’s house, which was way fun. He is such a cool guy, and his family is so funny. I love them. We have such good times with them. Then we went to the Christiansen’s house. They fed us again and we got to hang out with them too. That was also way good. In the morning we went to the Clifton’s house and played some Blokus and stuff with them. That was also super fun. Then after the dinners we went back to the Clifton's and played monops. I Lost ! ( I disgraced my BYU monops friends. I think it was because it was credit card monops though, and I need straight cash money.) It was a way good day.

We have had snow a few times. It makes things look better. Less brown. I like it a lot, but it does get pretty cold. Thank goodness for a car. I definitely need the coat though. I will be posting pictures that show snow.

We set a girl in Schurz with a baptismal date. She has a super strong testimony already. She has been to church several weeks. She will be baptized in 2 Saturdays. We taught her mom the first lesson.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

November 22

My new comp, Elder Siebach, is from Naperville, Illinois. (He's the one on the right, shown here earlier this fall, before his transfer from the south.)

He says there is only one Siebach family in the U.S. He’s not sure how he is related to dad’s old roommate with the same name. He is cool. We like similar music. He’s been to Lollapalooza a few times. Anyone that has done that is chill with me, haha. As a missionary, Christmas music is taking the place of other music.

Carson City was fun. It is always fun to chill with the other spanams. Pres Black talked to us and the APs (assistants to the president) helped us out a little bit.

We set up an appointment with a hispanic family for this week. They are super nice. Hopefully that will go well. We also had a couple other lessons. Most importantly we had a girl in Schurz tell us she wants to be taught. She is a friend of Lilly (who we baptized). And hopefully her mom will sit in on the lessons.

We play in a mission “turkey bowl” on Thanksgiving. It’s zone vs zone touch football. We play that in Reno on Thursday morning; it will be way fun. We should win. Then we go to bishop’s house for thanksgiving 1 and later to the Clifton’s for thanksgiving 2. It should be a good day with lots of food and games and stuff. It’ll be fun.

By the way, here's my crowd, pre-transfer:

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Nevada Las Vegas Mission Blog!

Sister Black is doing a blog: http://nevadalasvegaswestmission.blogspot.com/
Look for me in "North" interviews and conferences and "second transfer."

Thursday, November 18, 2010

November 15 -- Transfer week, but ...


Still in Yerington! The pic is the back of where we live. You can see that we gather the recycling to take it when we go to Fallon; there's no place here to recycle.

I wasn’t transferred this week, but Elder Bush has gone south for the winter. My new comp Elder Seebach will be up here later tomorrow [Tuesday]. I hear Elder Seebach is from Chicago and has been out about 20 months. He used to be comps with Elder Bush and he speaks Spanish very well. Hopefully I can learn more, but we still probably won’t be speaking that much in Yerington.

A lot of people just weren’t really around. This whole weekend was state volleyball which Yerington won for the 4th time in the last 5 years so a lot of people were in Reno to watch that. We were able to meet with Richard for the first time. He is a very cool guy, but he is super, super sick. His legs are super messed up and he has pneumonia. We know so many super sick people, it’s crazy. He wants to get baptized, we just have to find times that he isn’t as sick to teach him. It’s going to be hard, but he will be baptized soon and that should help hopefully. We are also working with more less active part member families. We had 3 full less active families at church yesterday and two of them are also part member families. That was super good. We are going to start teaching some of them soon. So that’s pretty exciting. Bingo with the old ladies is always fun at the hospital. That was a good time. There is this one guy who every time B 4 is called says "and after." Its super funny.

We also said all of Elder Bush’s goodbyes in the last couple of days, which was a little tough because he has been there for 6 months. The people will miss him.

Oh, ya – our bishop, Bishop Darington is super funny. He always does this thing when we come over where he yells "Yo soy chupacabra!" and then takes off his shirt and runs at his grown kids. It is super funny; they are a super funny family.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Nov. 8 -- still from Yerington


A belated pic with the glasses my mom sent for Halloween.

Well my favorite thing of the week was yesterday [Sunday Nov. 7]. We had an afternoon family home evening with two families. Sarah lived with the other family all through high school and got baptized, but hasn’t been active for a very long time. Her husband Dustin is not a member. They have 3 kids, though not all together. The oldest is 8. Both are great families. We had a lunch, followed by watching the restoration, a discussion, and then we all played Cranium. It was super fun, and of course my team won. Good times. That game is the best.

The members of the Church here really like us and we like them a lot too. There are a lot of super funny members here. Only a few are good missionaries, but some are starting to work on it. It’s hard in this town because a lot of them have tried the same people so many times before, but they are getting a lot better. We got a ton more investigators this week! 5 new ones. We did have 3 investigators at church, which is super good. One investigator that we thought was a member called us and wants to be taught and baptized. We have our first lesson with him today. He is more active than most members. His family are all members but apparently not him. Nobody ever told us. We'll set him with a date today. Probably soon since he doesn’t have to worry about the church attendance requirement. Overall it was a really solid week. Did some good stuff. The work is just starting to warm up a bit here.

Leadership training was way good. We are going to have one almost every month until may because we are going over the new additions to preach my gospel before they start teaching the missionaries in the MTC. There are 8 new sections of chapter 10 being added that will help in missionaries becoming better teachers. The new manual will be out in May. President Black was trained on it my first week in the field at a mission pres conference in Texas. Its point is really to get missionaries completely ready to teach the moment that they leave the MTC and to teach right. It was way sweet. Sister Black also gave a great talk about loving people and how we need to do that. I combined that with some advice from Tim who told me to be honest at all times with everyone, but especially myself, so what I’ve come up with is that I need to always be trying to find ways to love people but to never tell myself that I do when I don’t. That is super important because you can’t change for the better if you don’t believe that you need to be changed, which everyone always needs to be. It is super good advice, and I’m working on that.

Service is going well. We play bingo with the people in the hospital which is fun and we help them out. Most of them can’t read their cards, so we help them with that and putting their pieces on. It’s pretty fun and they really appreciate our being there. The library is going really well. We straighten out their books for them and do other odds and ends. They really like us and the things we do are a big help to them.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Nov 1 (finally!)


Things went pretty well this week. We finally got in contact with Fidel again this week and got to visit him at his new house. He is such a funny guy. His family is great. His little kid Sammy is super funny. We ended up getting them to go to the trunk or treat/ward party and they had a great time! Brother Fraud is his boss at the dairy farm and he immediately saw Fidel and showed him around and introduced him to people. Fidel isn’t really someone that cares that he doesn’t really speak English that much. He still talks to everyone. After the party he told us that the kids really like us and he does too, and we set up an appointment to teach the whole family tonight.

We had 3 referrals at the ward party, which was great. Sister Clifton here is a great missionary. She knows tons of people and is always finding people for us to teach. She hasn’t had a lot until just recently because she was in Salt Lake for 5 months at the hospital there with her daughter who almost died about 5 times. It was crazy, but now she’s back and can do everything again but walk and can almost do that again. True miracle. For everyday that you’re on the ventilator that she was on you are supposed to lose use of your body parts for a week or something like that...she was on it for 50 days..., but she can already move everything again and her upper body is in perfect strength. The doctors were all blown away. They all thought she would be dead or at least not able to do anything like walk again, but she still might to be able to play college volleyball in a couple years which she had a scholarship for. Don’t really know what happened. Her body just freaked out with some crazy virus. Completely randomly. But anyways, Sister Clifton has another couple referrals for us in addition to the 3 that we met on Friday; 2 of them were at church on Sunday in addition to the activity. We are excited to teach them. We also have set up to start giving service 4 days a week. We will do 2 days for 1 hour at the library and 3 days for 1 hour at the hospital.

This is how transfers work in my mission. On the Saturday before transfers there are 3 sets of calls. 1st in the morning you are called if you are going to be a trainer. 2nd in the afternoon you get a call if you are going from south to north or north to south. 3rd you get a call at night if you are staying or getting transferred within the north/south. They then call again later to tell you where you are going and who your new companion will be. If you are going south then you get all packed up and go to Fallon on Monday, stay overnight there and then leave in the morning while your companion waits for his new companion to get up here. They meet back at one of the buildings in Fallon at about 4 and then drive back to Yerington/ wherever. It’s crazy.