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.

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.

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.

Tuesday, Feb. 23

Last week was a weird week. Elder Bowe got sick, I pulled out my back again, and we only had one lesson the entire 3 days we went to Fernley. Plus we are both just getting super tired. We did teach the Ugaldes (parents of the family we had dinner with last night – see below – and grandparents of the ultra smart 5 yr old girl...wife member, husband not). It was good. Hermano Ugalde has a lot of questions and doesn't really believe much about the church, but his wife is persistent. We are making progress there.

This week, started off pretty well. We had a great dinner with the Ugalde family last night. It was a super good dinner though and we helped them work through some stuff going on in their lives that has been really hard. Then we went over to a member’s house who asked us to drop by and we found out that he was holding a combined family home evening with another member family...which was super cool because this guy used to be kind of pretty far off the path. So, that was a really good night over all.

On Monday, P-day, we boxed with Hermano Quiros. That was fun. We learned form and worked hard. Then we went and played kickball with the other elders, the sisters, and a bunch of members (mostly the sister’s converts; they've had a baptism almost every weekend since I've been here). That was pretty fun too. While we were there I practiced my Frolf throws with a couple discs elder Bowe had from when he was playing a lot in Tahoe. Oh, we also cleaned and rearranged the apt. It was a way solid day. Library was closed so we couldn't do email, so that gave us a little more time.

Yes, Fallon is where the naval air base is that’s in “Top Gun.” Where we live, we hear planes a decent amount. It’s kind of like where grandma and grandpa are [near Luke Air Force Base in Arizona], except you hear a little this than that. They don’t usually fly very low.

This week we got a call from Laura y Arturo telling us that they were going to have to cancel our lesson this week. On the surface, that’s a low point, but when you realize that somebody actually calling to cancel an appointment means that they are pretty dang interested it starts to become a high point. But this one gets better. She also told us that she has been reading the Book of Mormon and the Restoration pamphlet that we left her and really likes it. She also said they had to cancel because they were going to California to visit her sister...who is a member of the Church, and that they were planning on going to church with her. Hopefully they did. We will probably find out later today, and should have a lesson with them tomorrow.

We also met a new investigator this week. We are not positive but are pretty sure her name is Diana (couldn’t really remember when we left...not good haha). She is about 18 and met with the missionaries a little bit when she was living in Mexico. She has only been in the states for about a year and a half. She told us that she read the book of Mormon a little even! The really funny part was that we started to talk to her in English because that’s what we do with anybody young and she was just saying hhmmhmm hmmhmm, but then said I don’t speak English very well, sorry (which usually means that they aren’t interested). So we switched over and said pues, hablamos epsanol tambien. And she was super excited and invited us right in and immediately said that this house is your house, come whenever you want, and you are always welcome. That was definitely the most welcoming door I have ever knocked on...by far. And it was like our last one of the day. Pretty sweet. We had a good lesson and have another for Tuesday. She shows a lot of promise too.

Ok, back to Fallon. We had a really good lesson with a lady named Irma and her granddaughter named Nestle who we have taught once before. They are pretty easy to teach. They take the gospel for what it is...simple. They know the scriptures a little bit too, and think everything just makes sense...which it does. They show a lot of promise too, but we can only teach them on Saturday nights. Lucky for us, she has off work on...Sundays!!! But this Sunday they had already planned to go to Reno, so hopefully this next Sunday. Funny this is that Nestle is another 10 year old girl. That’s number 3. This is starting to get kind of weird...hahaha. Don’t have any idea why we keep running into that exact age.

Today is packed. I’ve got lunch after this, then we are playing table soccer with the other missionaries, then we are going with an investigator named Oscar to kill some gofers, and then dinner, and then we are playing soccer with a TON of less actives and several potential investigators. Most of them are less active because of soccer. We will see what we can do. Then on Friday night this week we are restarting an old tradition here of Friday night Volleyball for the branch members and anyone else that wants to play. We've gotten a lot of questions about why it stopped from less actives, so obviously we said I don’t know, you want to play Friday? That should be good. Hopefully get active members mingling with less active members. I am excited for that.

My scripture study this week included John 3-4. They are very powerful and say very directly that you HAVE TO BE BAPTIZED. Makes it pretty clear and obvious.

Last week we went to Reno. Reno was sweet. We went to the temple and did baptisms and I got my jeans at Banana for $35!!! They are great too. That made me happy. We also got our key fob programmed so that works now and then went to Scheels – the coolest place ever! They have everything! From frizbee golf stuff to skis to badmitten to every kind of shoe. Its like Dick’s on steroids. So sweet. We had a chill time.

Went to Fernley a whole bunch. We had some super good lessons, but getting people to come to Fallon is almost impossible, so we will be starting a Spanish-speaking group there in 3 weeks so that our 7-10 investigators there can go to church. We are teaching this new family in Fernley – Laura y Arturo. They are super cool. They live in a very very small trailer, but she keeps it super super clean and nice. I like them a lot and you can feel their spirit pretty well. I think they are going to keep the commitments we give them. A lot of potential with them. Then at the end of the lesson Laura told us that her parents and 7 sister and their families all live in Fernley too and probably would be interested in our message too! Crazy! That might end up being the beginnings of a branch by itself.

We also did some work with less active work members of the Church here in Fallon. We had a sweet Sacrament meeting on Sunday. It started out terrible. Nobody was there that told us they would come to church and nobody was getting up to bear their testimonies, but then one family we had worked with the day before showed up and then another! One part-less-active/part-non-member and the other entirely non-member. There was a pause for 30 more seconds and then somebody got up to bear his testimony and it wasn’t quiet after that at all. AND the testimonies were actually DECENT! Yeaaaaa!

The week before, I spoke in Spanish in sacrament meeting. I heard it was pretty good. I think it went pretty well. I did half of it just straight off my writing and half without any writing at all. It ended up being kind of fun.

First story. Monday was an interesting day after email. We had a fantastic time playing croquet without hoops and did some other things and then went to work in the evening as usual. We got done at about 8:30, so we saw the English elders who were also done and asked if they wanted to go up to this giant lit up cross that is in Fallon to take some pictures and check it out (we had been wanting to hike to it considering that’s not really something you see everywhere). We went up and looked around and took some pictures, some of which I've uploaded, and then walked back to the car. Upon arrival at the car Elder Bowe gets out the keys and goes to turn on the car when he discovers something terrible: while we were on top of the hill, the car key had somehow finagled its way off of the carabiner he had it on. All of the other keys were still on it. Just not the one key we actually needed. So we said a prayer and headed back up to search for the key with flashlights we had. Unfortunately the entire ground was covered in glass, so everything looked like a key. Needless to say we didn’t find it. We had to have the ZLs [zone leaders] come pick us up and bring us back to the appt. The next day we went and looked again for another 2 hours, but didn’t find anything. At this point everyone is getting frustrated that praying didn’t help us find the key. We gave up and called the car missionary, who fortunately loves us, and told him we lost the key. He said seriously? and then told us he was overnighting a new one. Unfortunately the US postal service considers overnight deliveries anything that arrives within 3 days of when it was sent. WOW! That was ridiculous. We finally get the key and go to try it (the car has been at the foot of this hill the whole time) and the car doesn’t start. So we went and got jumper cables and then jumped the car...nothing. Then I realized (having lots of experience with dead batteries) that the headlights could still turn on. No way it’s the battery. So we get out the manual and I tell my comp to look up the safety features for anti theft. Apparently the key has to be specifically programmed to the car to be able to start it. We call the car guy again. He calls the dealer. Dealer tells him that there is possibly a way to program the key that might work. We had to turn the key to the on position for 10 mins, then off for 10 seconds, and then repeat 3 more times. So, while I was taking care of that with Elder Camp, Bowe and Irwin decided to hike up the mountain. As they hiked up just casually talking, Bowe looked down AND what do ya know, the key is right in front of his foot. They run back down and put the key in and the car starts right up. We put the other key in and the car programmed the key because we had just had the right key in. So now we have 2 working keys. Moral of the story: Prayers do get answered...eventually. hahhaha. So we finally have a car again. Needless to say the work was a little slower than normal this week because we had no car. hahahha.

Second story. We were painting a room at this cool family’s house for service when the mom broke a light on accident. Her little 5 year old daughter went and told the dad that the mom broke the light bulb. The mom asked the daughter "why did you have to go tell on me?" and the 5 year old daughter replied "why do you tell on me all of the time? See it would be better if neither of us told on each other." She is 5. Also she speaks perfect Spanish and English. I’m so jealous!

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