October 10

By far the best experience of the week was our lesson with M. where we set her with a baptismal date. We brought Hermano V. (1st councilor in the ward’s bishopric) with us for the lesson and he testified right to her soul. M. really felt that what we were teaching about the restoration was true and was super excited when I committed her to be baptized on the 22nd. She asked, "So soon?" which is usually kind of a bad sign, but she was saying it as in, "I can get baptized so soon?!?" haha, it was incredible. She has had so major trials in her life, and the gospel has already been a major comfort for her! It’s awesome to see how much its helping her, haha! After our first visit she read through Chapter 10 of 1st Nephi. She is fantastic. The spirit was just so strong in that lesson too. She came to church this Sunday in Spanish. We will be inviting her to a family home evening we are having at a member’s house tonight, which should be great! She really wants to go to a FHE, so it should be great.

I’ve written before about you ward’s “young men’s (YM) president – the program for teenage boys). He is just extremely involved in everything the YM do. He is kind of a kid at heart, so they all love him and respect him a lot. He picks a large group of them up every morning and drives them to seminary, picks them up for firesides (like the stake missionary prep fireside), talks to them all the time about missions, etc. He is really just helping them get the testimonies they need to make the decision to go on a mission. Calling him was probably one of the best callings that has ever been made in this ward. Well, he and our new ward mission leader. Everything is changing with them. Our youth are getting much stronger (the young women’s pres was already great) and we finally have a strong missionary program starting. We are trying to set up some time to get some of the YM out with us, but it’s hard with their schedules and our schedules because they all have school and soccer.

Mom asked if I’ve tried any new Hispanic foods lately. I did try pambazo’s, which are basically large wet sandwiches they make in Mexico City. They are pretty solid.

Yep, it’s transfers next week. We'll get calls on Saturday (Oct. 15). That'll make it a nervous week. I always get nervous when I think I might be getting transferred. I have no idea if I’m going or not, but it looks pretty good that I will be moving. Check back after Tuesday!

October 4 (sorry for the delay)

Conference weekend was pretty sick. On Saturday we spent the whole day at an investigator’s house for breakfast, then the morning session, then play some pool and eat some lunch, and then for the afternoon. That was pretty legit. The lady’s name is M. (her husband didn’t really watch but he chilled with us) and she is Peruvian and loves Pres Uchtdorf (this is her 2nd conference as an investigator...kind of an eternagator as they call them here). So she loved Saturday morning because they talked about Peru and Uchtdorf talked. The really cool part though is that most of her family in Peru used to be pretty anti-Mormon and this time 2 of her brothers and her mom watched conference and loved it! M’s on is a member who is going to University of Utah, so the grandparents wanted a feel for his religion and everything. Pretty sick, not going to lie.

Then we did priesthood session at the church, of course, which was sick...mostly because Elder Holland’s talk as always was super powerful. After priesthood session on Saturday, we went home to get some dinner because we hadn’t eaten since like 1, so we were hungry. When we got home I got this unshakeable feeling that we needed to go by the house of the family from the wedding a couple weeks ago, so me and Elder Kakau just left dinner for later. We got there, and the whole family was there and told us to come in! We had a nice chat with the father of the bride about our purpose of missionaries, and now the whole family is interested and not just the couple who were married. Unfortunately we aren’t sure when we will meet with them, because the wife will almost for sure give birth in the next couple days. We will be in contact with them though. The husband of the couple is very interested in the "other book" we have. So were excited for that too.

On Sunday we went to our Young Men’s Presidents house for both sessions with our priests who are in mission preparation class. We got to watch both sessions with all of them, which was great. Breakfast and lunch there too, and hang out with the YM in between for a bit. They are all so much more likely to serve missions now than they were before our new YM pres got here and started pushing them hard and getting us involved with them a little more. They are going to make great missionaries. A couple don’t even have super active parents, but they are doing super well now. Ya, pretty fun weekend overall.

Also, ya, its cooling down a bit. Lower 90s here aren’t bad at all, and those are our highs these days. Some days in the 80s. Not like home where 90s suck and 80s are sketchy, here 90s are decent and 80s are suuuper nice. So glad the 100s are over. They got pretty harsh some days. Of course now they’ll probably transfer me up north for the winter, haha. There is a strong chance I go to Carson City actually, but not much of other options in the north. Maybe they’ll let me stay another couple and do 9 months here. That’d be sick cuz we finally have people that are good investigators! hhaa.

Sept. 26

This week our focus is going to be on teaching our new investigators and setting up times to watch conference with as many investigators as we can...preferably in member homes. We’re pretty excited about it. We will probably just do Sunday afternoon in the church so we can get to as many of our investigators as possible. Especially since nobody goes to the church anymore for conference, since they can watch on BYUTV.

This week was finding week. We picked up a great new family (the one who had the wedding) and we will be teaching them tomorrow night again. They are such a great family and will be perfect for the ward. The wife will be having her baby any day, so it’s a perfect time in their life to find the church, especially with the message of eternal families. We actually just talked to them about what we teach and a little bit of our purpose, but they are just so great that it made it a super spiritual experience.

We also got a really good referral of a lady whose super excited to meet the missionaries and has already gone to church on her own and everything. She is supposed to be calling us today! That’s exciting. We also found a pretty good area to tract in our area finally. Not fantastic, but pretty good. We picked up a couple potentials in there. We'll see what comes from that this week. We are also picking up an old investigator again named V. He’s been to church a lot, but never wanted to commit to anything, but he says he’s more ready now, so we will be teaching him tomorrow too! Should be good! We were all over the place this week. Oh ya, we are also helping a less active come back and her non-member husband is asking a lot of questions, which is fun.

Sept. 19

The most exciting part of the week was Saturday. It was a super fun day. In the morning we got a call telling us that there was going to be a wedding of non-members from our area at the church, so we ran over there and the couple and several members of the wife’s family were there, so we ended up taking pictures for them outside the church and everything. They were all super fun and great people. It was such a good time. Then the Dad of the bride told us that he felt something different in the building as he was looking at all of the paintings. He kept pointing out all of the paintings of Christ in the building and in the bishop's office and they all loved them, which was super cool. The couple was unbelievably excited to be getting married, it was awesome! You could just feel something great from the family. Just fantastic people! Then after that the other missionaries in the ward had a baptism of a 9 year old girl, and the baptism went great! The spirit was super strong and there were a few investigators there (though none of them ours :( ). It was great though. It went really well. Then that night we had a ward party. It was a Noche Latina celebrating the individual heritage of the members and the independence of several of the countries. It was probably the best party we have had. Tons of people were there, tons of non-members, tons of food, tons of culture. It was so chill! I’m posting pics, so you can see some of what it was like! We had so much fun and met a lot of new people! Waaay good. Other than those, we had some good lessons this week, but I'd say the highlight was our lesson with L. We taught her about the Book of Mormon again and the importance of reading it because she didn’t get a chance to read it last week. We also read the first chapter with her and got her into the story line so that this week she can really read and feel the spirit of that Book for the next time we meet. I’m excited for her. She has a lot of support from friends and her boyfriend. Also, J. is gone. The bishop bought him a bus ticket to LA where he can go to the Argentine embassy and got organized to get back to Argentina where he has family and a small retirement. Hopefully he goes back to the church down there!

September 12

My dad asked about missionaries and bikes here. The 2 we live with are on bikes, but the other 2 in our district are the other spanAms, so they have a car. In all of Vegas? I don’t know. Most of the English missionaries that aren’t zone leaders are on bike in Vegas. So most of the missionaries in my zone (see the pic) are on bikes. If you’re in Vegas, watch for them and ask if they know me!

I was actually sick this week, so I didn’t really have much on the teaching front, haha. But I’m all good now, so you don’t have to worry! We did teach J. a couple more times this week. We read some of the Book of Mormon with him and we taught him lesson 2. They were good lessons, but his physical needs are greater at the moment than the spiritual, so that’s all we can really think about. The ward is working on that though.

Each week I spend an hour on mormon.org. I usually tweek my profile a bit (so check it out again!), watch the videos, check out the Spanish videos (not as many as in English), and look to see if there’s any new good videos on lds youth, cuz some of those are in Spanish.

Sept. 6, 2011

Transfers this week, but I’m still here in Flamingo Ward, thank goodness. Probably my last 6 weeks here, though, because this will put me around 6 months in this area. It’s flown by so far. I can’t believe I’ve already been here over 4 months. Crazy. I’m still with Elder Kakau too, so it’s nice having a companion for more than one transfer again. We are happy and excited to keep going in this area, despite all of our frustrations.


We helped with two moves which took out the majority of those two days. Both recent converts, so helping them was pretty fun. I haven’t moved two people in one week since Yerington. It felt pretty good, but I was dead, haha.

One lady we are going to work with a little more is Mili who is the mom of a member in an English ward named Saul. This last week we went to visit with her and spent most of our time talking about how her son is doing (she just dropped him off at University of Utah last week for the first time) and how she’s doing. I told her Mom went through pretty much the same thing when all of us left and all of us were (maybe not Sarah) were kind of like Saul and didn’t call as much as we should have, haha. We ended up making her cry a little bit because we talked about a food that Saul loves, and I told her that she is definitely like my mom, so that must mean she’s a good mom, haha! We had a good chat and talked a little about their trip to Temple Square too. At the end of the lesson I was missing college for sure! haha, but I was happy we could help her out a bit with missing Saul. We are going over for a BBQ/lesson/Spanish lesson for us this Saturday, which should be fun. She is Peruvian and is a teacher at a dual language elementary school (she teaches the Spanish half for her kids).

We also taught a 77 yr old Argentinian man named Jorge who is actually homeless. Teaching him was pretty humbling. He is a great guy, but just can’t get a job and ran out of money. He even has his legal residency, but only has been given food stamps and a bus pass, so he can’t afford a place to live. He worked as a painter, but now has medical issues that make that an impossibility for him, and he only speaks so much English, so that hinders him from getting other jobs. It’s tough, but we are going to be helping him however we possibly can. Hopefully the members we will be bringing with us to the next lessons will be able to help him get on his feet, though his real goal is to make it back to Argentina. We'll see what we can do!

August 29, 2011

Sorry to miss last week. We went paintballing and ran out of time to write.

Today I got to go to Elder Bowe’s ward so I could hang out with him for a while before he goes home next week. We played soccer in the culture hall for a while, which was way fun, and then we went and played tennis, but it got too hot, so we couldn’t really play that much which was sad because one of the guys there got second in state doubles in Oregon when he was in high school. It was still fun though. It’s just so dry and hot that it’s next to impossible to stay on the courts for very long. In Missouri you are always worried about not drinking enough water and you can play for a long time without going to get a drink, but here you can’t play for more than 5 minutes without going and getting a drink, and you don’t even really need it that bad cuz you don’t sweat that much. It’s just so different. Weird. We had a super good time today though.

Our ward still has its English class, and it’s much bigger now. We aren’t the teachers but we assist usually both Wednesday and Thursday, but sometimes on Wednesday we go in to soccer and talk to all the non-member and less active youth there. We have an English class of around 20 and they call us whenever they have questions, so that’s going well. We're teaching the Gospel to one of the students, and it’s really nice seeing your investigators a few times during the week.

This week’s training in our district meeting was on teaching about the Atonement. There are 3 parts to it. 1. The power over death we receive because of Christ; 2. The ability we have to become clean from sin through Christ; and 3. The personal knowledge Christ has of all of us because he suffered through it . The training was pretty good. A good time

We have a new family we just started teaching. They were a referral from English-speaking elders who were park contacting, and ran into the dad (Luis) and he promised that if they got him a Book of Mormon in Spanish, he'd read it. Luis comes to our English classes as well. Cool guy. Pretty chill. We taught him this week about what the Book of Mormon is. He and his wife have 6 kids, all at home, the oldest is 18 and the youngest is 9. We've only talked to the parents so far and mostly only Luis, but I think we will be able to teach the whole family soon. At our lesson Luis told us about the commitment he had made with the other missionaries to read the Book of Mormon and told us he planned on keeping that commitment. That was way cool to hear. He is excited to learn more, and I really think he feels something that he is looking for.

Let’s see … what have I been cooking? Well, this week I made a pasta with queso fresco, that I sauteed in olive oil with some 100% organic all white meat basil pesto sausage I got from Trader Joe's a little while ago (thanks Tim). That was way solid. I also tried a dish of rice with sausage and vegetables but where I simmer it in some milk with some spices, and that turned out pretty dang good too. This month though i need to try and make papa de la huancaina. We'll see how it turns out. I learned how to take the heat down a bit, so I'll make a mild version. For breakfast Ive just made some omelets and stuff. I’ll probably make a meal for my apartment before Elder Peters goes home.
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As for what we eat when we are invited to Church members’ homes … I don’t think I had talked about Mole yet. Mole negro is way good. It’s kind of a shredded chicken with a thick sauce that is a mix of chile and chocolate, It’s very solid and has given me a better appreciation for Iron Chef, if that’s possible. Now I want to learn to cook sweet with spicy. That’d be awesome. Let’s see, what else...Oh, I don’t think of talked about ceviche. It’s awesome. Mom needs to get some. She'd probably really like it, so take Mom to get some ceviche, Dad. My favorite mexican food is officially sopes, which are sooo good. I love them and am just waiting for the day I get them again.