Well there are obvious differences between Las Vegas and Fallon: stoplights, traffic, people, buildings, places to shop, etc. Hahaha. Other than that the biggest difference between Fallon and here is switching to a ward from a branch. You don’t get nearly as close to members in a ward like here as you do in a branch like in Fallon, but there are so many more legit investigators here. People here are a lot more educated. In Fallon, there weren't many people that could read aloud in Spanish better than me, but here everyone can. We actually go to houses instead of trailers, even pretty nice houses. Almost everyone here has a base in English. People are more active here too. The people I work with are still Hispanic, so they are super nice, but they aren’t quite as hospitable over all as they were in the small towns. They still are, just not to the extreme like in Fallon. However, the people here also have more personality, which is fun. Joking around in Spanish is a good time. I’m not really good enough to initiate much of it, but I can hang with it and play my part pretty decently. It’s fun. I like it up here.
We don’t work as tightly with the ward here as we did with the branch in Fallon. Part of that is that there are actually some home teachers, but we don’t do much less active work anyway because we don’t have time. On the other hand, families here get us to work with their families like crazy, which is great! It’s also weird being around so many people who are bilingual. They come from Nicaragua, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Argentina, El Salvador, and a couple other countries, I think, but those ones for sure.
This Sunday, Andriette asked me to confirm her. I was super scared, because it was obviously going to be in Spanish in front of the whole ward and I’ve never even done that in English. I prayed a lot for help and repeated the beginning over and over in my head. I guess I did what I was supposed to because she was super happy and I was told I did a good job. I didn't really know what to say, so I just talked. Fortunately you don’t speak your words when confirming somebody a member, you are speaking whatever the Spirit has you speak, so I just trusted that whatever was coming out of my mouth would work, and it did. It felt really good to know that the Lord was there to help me with that. That was just one of the 4 confirmations we had yesterday, which is fun for the ward to see. It was a pretty spiritual 20-30 minutes. They had to cancel the last speaker because they had so many. He is our Gospel Principles (Sunday School class) teacher and a super funny guy. He is incredible. Used to be in a couple stake presidencies back in Nicaragua. They passed him the note that said they wouldn't have time for him to speak, he read it, smiled, gave a fist pump, and got up and walked off the stand with a huge smile on his face. It was super funny. His granddaughter and daughter are 2 of our investigators. His granddaughter Karen is getting baptized this Saturday. I’m sure he will speak at it, so it will be good. The spirit was also super strong at all of the baptisms this weekend.
