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.

August 15, 2011

Yes, I am now a District Leader. District Leaders basically have 2 responsibilities: 1. Collect stats Sunday night and add them up. 2. Give District meetings a couple times a month. Then you have to do a couple more things that nobody else has to/wants to do. I also have to go to leadership training meetings. You can see me at one on Sister Black’s blog. My district is me and Elder Kakau, the English elders we live with (Peters and Altamirano), and the other two missionaries in our ward (Andrews and Sandoval). There are 4 districts in the zone. This district is kind of complicated for how much area it covers because 2 of the companionships are spanMs. So if you count that then we cover our whole zone, and about half of red rock. My district is bigger than my zone, hahaha.

We did make it bowling last week. Actually I didn’t do too bad. I got a 136 and a 139. The 139 was a total choke though. I bowled a 3 on the last frame, hahaha. That’s ok. I think we might go again today. It’s pretty cheap and super fun. $3 for shoe rental but only $1.50 a game. Pretty legit.

Teaching, we had a pretty solid week. We made some good progress with some those we’re teaching. We figured out that Celia hasn't gotten an answer yet because she hasn't asked if the things we are teaching are true or not. We told her you can’t get an answer to a question that you don’t ask, but then she told us that God would tell her when it was the right time to ask. I thought that was pretty unlikely, so I asked her what she normally does when she has a question to ask her father in heaven....she said she asks him....so I asked her, is this really any different? She’s planning on asking now (we think, haha) and is committed to follow the answer she gets, so we're excited for her. We talked to her about how faith is not passive waiting, its active waiting, or it requires action. Its not really faith to sit there and believe that my Father in Heaven will help me get a good grade on a test if I didn't study for it, that’s just hopeful wishing, which isn't going to get you anywhere. Now if I studied hard, I'm entitled to a little help when I ask for it. At least to cut the nerves. So we talked about some of that stuff. It was fun as it always is over there. We also taught Fabi and Humberto for the first time, which was good. Elder Kakau just killed it. He was prompted by the spirit to say some things that I never would have thought of that were fantastic and out of nowhere. Afterward I was like, “Dude, you just take a lesson any time you are going like that cuz that was sick!”

This week Maria called us out of the blue (haven't heard from or been able to contact her for a while now). She called to see if we could come by and to see how we were doing. Turns out she was pretty sick with the flu for a while, which is still a little dangerous for her because she isnt super far off from being cleared of cancer. She still has a hard time when she gets sick, but she is doing great now. She came to church on Sunday with her two little grandkids which was awesome. They got to stay all 3 hours and she really like it. Hopefully we will be setting her with a date very soon now that she’s back on track! Exciting time. I learned that sometimes you just need to keep trying with people even when you can’t get ahold of them. You never know what’s going on or how important showing them that you really do care can be.

Still catching up: August 8, 2011

This week was pretty solid overall. We had a pretty solid amount more lessons this week than we have been having over the last couple. Our district is doing pretty well right now. The English elders we live with (Altamirano and Peters) have 6 baptisms set for this month so far. We are hoping to pull off a couple, but it’s going to be tough. We had a lesson with one of the Marias last night and committed her to pray about being baptized this month specifically, so we are hoping that she will finally be baptized on the 27th after 2 years of investigating, but we'll see. Hopefully she gets her answer and listens to it. We also had a great lesson with Celia this week. We taught her about the plan of salvation because she had a lot of questions about it. It’s cool because the plan of salvation answers most questions anybody has. Everything else in reality is contained inside it.

We also got a couple of new investigators this week. A couple named Blanca and Jose Luis, who were an MTC referral, and Mari, who is a member referral. Blanca and Jose Luis are very active in their church but also very interested in learning more about ours. We are going to take a member couple around their age over to the lesson we have with them on Tuesday night. Mari used to take the lessons back in Colorado and her sister got baptized back there, but then she and her family moved here and lost touch with the missionaries. Fortunately one of her best friends has got to be one of the best member missionaries in all of Las Vegas, so we are now teaching her in her friend’s house, which is fantastic. Oh, and the house is also waaay nice. It’s in the Red Rock Country Club neighborhood, which is like a super, super nice neighborhood. There are gates inside of gates. Some of the houses are unbelievable. Hers isn’t massive, but it’s a pretty good size and its super, super nice. Plus it’s just her. Pretty weird for us. Not used to being in a place that nice. Mari is excited to be starting to take the lessons again, so we are pumped for her too. We also picked up a couple more potential investigators just by going to church Wednesday night and hanging out with the youth playing soccer a little bit. A lot of the guys have chick friends and girl friends who aren't members of our church who come and watch and hang out with some of the members, so we just went and hung and talked to a couple of them. Two are super interested and would like us to teach them. That is how youth activities can work. We just talked to them and chilled a little bit and then we started in about what we do as missionaries and then talked about the church. It was sweet. Our youth are the key to so much missionary work because they have such good programs. We already have 4 recent convert young women in the 4 months. Their all super strong too, which means they help with more missionary work. It’s legit. The girls actually want to go out and teach with the missionaries. Pretty cool. It’s good to see youth getting involved. We have a lot of guys who are around missionary age too, so the ward is starting to work on them a little harder. It’s a good time to be in this ward overall. That’s about the week overall.

We are going to go bowling today, which should be pretty dang fun. More next week!