Wednesday, March 30, 2011

March 27, 2011

Shout out to Erin Garfield, Brooke Smith, and Caitlin Fischetti, the greatest friends in the whole wide world. Their friendship is like Jimmer Fredette, you just can't hold it back ... unless you are Florida.

We use mormon.org and lds.org videos a lot when we go see less active families these days. One of my favorite videos is about forgiveness. This guy has 3 members of his family killed by a drunk driver and then ends up helping the driver to get over the pain of knowing 3 people are dead because of him so that he can get on with his life. Watch it! My favorite video on Mormon.org that I've seen is of this kid named Paris. That kid just seems so chill, haha. I love it. I guess some people I know knew him at LDS Business College and they say he really is just a super chill guy. All of the missionaries love that vid. haha. Watch it, too!

This week we had our last lesson with Diane and her family before handing them over to the Fernley elders. And we had a lesson with Irma and her family. It was pretty good. She works 2-3 jobs, so it’s kind of hard to schedule. We also contacted a new family, a mom, her 18-year-old son, and her 17-year-old daughter – the Sanchez family. The son talked to the ZLs (zone leaders) the other day and asked to learn more. The whole family is really interested, but they want us to come by when the entire family can be there at the same time (which is good) so we won’t be teaching them until Thursday.

At church yesterday attendance was about the same as it has been. Our new second councilor's niece was there for the second week in a row and told her aunt and uncle that she wants to be baptized. We will start teaching this week. So that’s exciting. We will also be teaching in their house, I think, so the whole family can listen.

Brother Quiros (old 1st councilor) is now our branch mission leader and his wife is a branch missionary as of Sunday. We have a dinner calender that sometimes we pass around and sometimes Brother Quiros passes around, but we get the most dinner appointments from bringing it with us to the homes of less active members. Everyone loves to feed us. In fact, the branch actually gets unhappy if we don’t have dinner every night.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

March 21

MY BROTHER IS FAMOUS!?!? (Follow the link on this apparently very famous blog.) Hahaha, at least in an extremely nerdy way. I love it! That is sooooo funny. Absolutely fantastic. That was such a good call and apparently one that nobody had never actually really thought of before.

We had a pretty busy week again. Thursday, Fernley. Friday, Reno. Saturday, Hawthorne. You would think I’m a ZL (zone leader – over 12-24 missionaries) from the travel I’ve been doing. We had to go to Fernley for some appts as usual on Thursday, though we only ended up getting one in. It was pretty good. We met with Diana and her sister. Diana and Brittany committed to pray about what we've been teaching, so that was good. Then on Friday, we finally got permission to go to Reno to get our car fixed, so we drove up there and got that done. While we were waiting we went to lunch at a nice restaurant where missionaries eat free and then I went out with elder Martin (old AP who Sarah has met) and his greenie. That was weird because they do English work and English people just aren't as nice. We still had a decent time though and I got to see a couple other elders I haven't seen for a little bit, so it was a good time. After we got our car back we went by Ross and I got a new tie for like $6. It is sooo sweet. I’ve already had several offers including 3 skinny ties just for the one. I think I’ll hold on to it for a little longer, but the 3 skinnies is tempting. Finally, on Saturday we went down to Hawthorne for the baptism of one of Elder Bowe's old investigators there. She had asked him to give the talk on the Holy Ghost so we went on down and he did a good job. After wards she took us out to eat, but we weren't very hungry because this lady there named sister Nunnelli had already fed us this HUGE Chinese meal. It was all super good though and I finished everything. I can eat so much again. hahaha. I’m like training for an eating competition the way I get fed sometimes. This area is actually extremely famous in the mission for some of the best food you can get. Fallon SpanAms have one of the most generous branches/wards in Nevada, and they all make really good food. We had amazing Chiles Rellenos a couple days ago at a less actives house. They were so good and the rice was cooked perfectly to compliment them. Oh my goodness. I was so full just because I didn't want to stop eating.

It was a pretty fun week and I’m really happy that we are both staying here this transfer. One of our roommates is going ZL so his companion is staying which will end up putting him at 7.5 months in this area. Loooong time. Though not as long as Elder Feldmen (one of my MTC comps) will have been in his area. He hasn’t even moved yet. He has been in Reno for over 7 already and is working on almost 9 by the end of this transfer. Ridiculous.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

March 14

We are teaching a family in Fernley that has a 19 yr old daughter who is really interested. The rest of the family is too, but are very Catholic. On Tuesday we went by and taught them, and ended up teaching a lesson, teaching some English, learning a ton more Spanish, learning things not to say and Spanish, and discovering that...OH NO...my Spanish is pretty Mexican. Dang. I didn't really want Mexican Spanish, but that’s the vast majority of people that I talk to, so its hard not to pick that up.

I feel like I can speak/understand Spanish decently enough. I still have to say "manday?” a lot. I have no idea how to spell it, but its phonetic so, I guess that will do. It’s harder if they are from DF because they speak really fast and kind of slurred. Like a New Yorker, but in Spanish. My favorite Spanish so far is Peruvian. It’s pretty sweet. I’m not really a fan of castellano...good thing Dad doesn’t do the sh on the ll's. That is so hard to understand. Still possible, but hard. I still have tons on tons of words to learn, but we are getting somewhere. I’m learning a lot of computer words.

Last Sunday church at the branch was pretty good. We didn’t have quite as many people there, but still a really good number. We also had a few investigators there, so that’s a good thing. Church really flew by. It was pretty good.

Right now I’m trying to set up my scriptures so that I can more easily find things I need to without memorizing everything. I'll take a picture and send it next week. This week has mostly been focused on prophets and why we need them. One of my old favorites is still the best. Amos 3:7. It’s pretty simple.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

March 7, 2011

This week was kind of crazy. I went on splits one day with one of the English-speaking elders and we went to Gabbs (middle of nowhere) to do some work. That was interesting. Talk about isolation. Its 1 hour 30 mins from Fallon and it’s the first "city" you get to, or first anything for that matter. With Elder Bowe, however, we found 2 new families in Fernley. I think one of the families has decent odds of praying, and that’s really all we can ask for. The other family are old investigators from about 2 years ago when Fernley had their own SpanAms. They are pretty cool and should be watching The Restoration this weekend. We have an appt. Tuesday with them. Most of the week was less active work. We had some really good lessons though. We mostly read from the Book of Mormon on visits and tell the people that being offended is not an excuse to not go to church. Apparently it’s working out, because at church this Sunday we had......around 50 people!!! That was great. We also had very few visitors and 2 branch prez members were sick and not there, so yes, that means we had a lot of less actives there! That was pretty fun. There were some good lessons too. Plus it was Fast Sunday which is like the lowest attended Sunday usually. Pretty chill. We did have a few investigators there too, though, they are only kind of ours. We are kind of sharing them with the sisters right now because the daughter likes English better and would rather talk to girls. So we haven't taught them very much ourselves. They talk a lot, haha. It was still good though.

Today we played racquetball and wallyball with people from Yerington and all of the missionaries. It was a good time. Wallyball always gets good. We had a really good time.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

February 28 (finally!)

Today we went to the base with a reactivating member who all the missionaries (except us) work with a lot. He took us bowling and got us lunch. It was pretty sweet. He is a nice guy and loves the missionaries. Plus he's just a bachelor in the military, so he likes to do whatever he can for missionaries too. My dad asked if everyone on base looks like Tom Cruise. Hahahaha. The base is pretty quiet right now because they don’t have any training groups in, but apparently one is coming next month. They will bring about 1000 people for the training group and staff, so Fallon will get busier. It’s a pretty nice base. Lots of dormitories all named after towns in Nevada. It really puts into perspective how few cities Nevada has, when you look and some of the names on buildings are "Elko" and "Hawthorne."

We did have some good lessons with less active members of the Church this week. It was cool that Nabor, who I worked with in Yerington made it to church this week, which might be a little attributed to the work we are doing with one member here who is his friend, who works in Yerington. I got to talk to Nabor for a while about how his life is going and everything. It was pretty cool.

My dad asked how we work with mormon.org. A lot of the time we just either work on our profiles or look for good videos to show people, but that’s kind of hard when the computers can’t play them...hahha. Besides, most people we tract into don't have computers, so that doesn't really help either, haha. It’s more of an English area thing, but it’s still important. It makes it easier for people to share the gospel. The truly coolest part about mormon.org is that if somebody has a certain issue, they (or the missionaries who are teaching them) can search for that issue on mormon.org and find somebody who had an extremely similar circumstance and overcame it.