26 February 2018

So yes, we are now officially a Facebook mission. We have the training, and the capacity. The funny thing was, my phone troubles continued. It works, but for whatever reason, my phone had not been given permission to use Facebook yet, so I got to spend some time with the lovely folks at customer support to get it working. Still, it is to be used for missionary work, so I won't be responding to anyone's posts, unless they're a comment on one of mine. And even then, I am going to be limiting that. So my Monday email is still going to be the big way I communicate. Yup, we're moving up in the technology world. Though in terms of the work, not much got done this week. Monday we had interviews, which took 3 hours longer than they should have (President James loves to talk), Tuesday was our P Day, and Wednesday we had another Zone Conference to train us on how to use Facebook. Really, it's all common sense. They gave us time for Q&A, which is what really took up a ton of time. Never let people who haven't touched a smartphone in two years ask questions about them. It'll go on forever, and drive you crazy. So all we had to work was Thursday through Sunday, and those were mostly a lot of knocking. Saturday was when it got really interesting. So, we had Stake Conference, the adult session. Now, the member who usually translates wasn't there, so we had to. At first we thought that we had weaseled out successfully, but then someone from our branch showed up five minutes late and so we had to do it. I was really nervous because I tried to translate from Spanish to English before on the headsets, and couldn't do it. Not a word. I put on the headset and it all turned to gibberish. And I thought that it would be even harder from English to Spanish. However, I put on the headset, and it was actually really easy. So much nicer than the other way around. So that was pretty cool. Aside from that, pretty slow week. We spent about three hours knocking doors yesterday, and no one wanted to listen to us. But hopefully we'll have more success coming up here soon. 
Well, we won a pie for having one of the two cleanest apartments in Fayetteville Zone. That was pretty great. We weren't expecting it, but I won't complain.

This is how you can tell that you have a bunch of missionaries in one place. All of them in pull-through parking, and they're (almost) all Toyota Corollas with bike racks. Well, I guess we have a lot of Chevy Malibus too. But this is 6 Corollas and one Nissan Altima. It get's easy to tell who the missionaries are by the car.

(Feeling like Chancellor Palpatine in Revenge of the SIth here...)

You have to love signs out here in the South. If you can't read it because it's both sideways and blurry, it's a fire department sign that says, "Honk if you love Jesus. Text and drive to meet him."
#JustMissionaryMemes

20 February 2018

No, no actual deaths. However, we did attend a dying missionary's funeral. That's the last district meeting that a missionary has before going home. This week we had Elder Kimber (a zone leader) and a senior couple who are going home. So, it was actually a triple funeral. And because of it, a pretty fun district meeting.

 

No, I don't know why this one is upside down. I fixed the other, but was too lazy to fix this one. This is Elder Kimber dying.
 

Elder and Sister Brown dying.
 

And the required district picture. A strange group of people. Basically, district meeting was the only big thing that happened this week. Right afterwords, we had exchanges with the zone leaders, which is why they were at our district meeting in the first place. That was pretty fun. We found a tiny fire hydrant in a trailer park, where we also found some really promising people. We have some appointments with them coming up tomorrow, as well as with our best investigator tonight. Hopefully things will pan out and we'll start to really get work rolling out here. 
​And this one is sideways, again I don't know why. The computer is being weird today. I tried to take a picture of the zone leader taking a selfie with it because it was funny, but it didn't save. And the last bit of news is that I'm in and out of the hospital with even more frequency than before the mission, and my family knows that was pretty often. Usually around once a year, but it's been slowing down. Mostly it was just crazy allergic reactions to something or another that we could never figure out. But out here, it's not for my own illness, it's people in our branch. One sister has been in and out of the hospital for about a week now, and they have no idea what's causing her problems. We ended up going to visit her on Wednesday and on Sunday, in what were for her two separate visits to the same hospital. We're really hoping that they find out what's wrong and that she gets better. The frequency that I've been to that hospital is enough where I get recognized by the desk staff. But yes, other than this it's been a fairly normal week, other than it being in the 80's for a couple of days. That was weird. And then two days later it was back in the 40's, and we're on the rise again.  We're having transfers next week now that I think about it, and so I'm probably getting moved again. So far I'm in my 4th transfer in my 4th area with my 5th companion. The way this works is a little weird. Now, new missionaries ALWAYS stay in their first area for two transfers because of training. But that didn't happen for me because my trainer and I had that lovely little bike accident. And so I went to area #2 with companions #2 and #3. Normally, the recently trained missionary stays in that same area for transfer #3 so that they get the experience of taking over an area fully. But my old area got shut down due to lack of Spanish speaking Elders (5 went home that transfer, a huge loss when you only have 20 total.) and so I got moved to another area. And then that area was getting switched to Sisters, so we got double transferred out. And now here I am, one week away from possibly getting moved again. Honestly, I'm kind of hoping that I get moved again just to keep the streak going. You never know, though. If I don't get moved, that'll mean that I don't have to pack! Which would be awesome! And I get to stay with people I've been working with! Even Better! I'll find out Saturday night, but y'all have to wait till Monday! Bye!

12 February 2018

Well, this week people started keeping their return appointments! Yay! That's the worst part about Spanish work, almost no one keeps their appointments. But we actually started having people who are progressing. It only took us four weeks of work to get someone to start working, but we have a few solid people now. Two of them have families, and so that's even better. We missed one of the appointments one day as we saw him driving away to work. He waved, and he is still responding to our texts so we think that it'll be fine with him, we set another appointment for Tuesday. Funny story with him: we invited him to church and then realized that we forgot to tell him the address. So we texted him the address and reinvited him. He then texted us back a while later telling us that sorry, he wouldn't be able to come because it was too far to drive. At least without a license. Yup, Spanish work is interesting. So we told him that it's not a problem because we can just get him a ride. But the too far part is understandable, he lives about 45 minutes from the building. More of the joy of a stateside Spanish mission. And yesterday I found out something interesting about my Spanish skills. Although I'm doing pretty well (everyone is shocked to find out I've only been speaking it for 6 months, and I'm told I'm doing a lot better than the people I came out with.) I found out that I can't translate for the life of me. In our branch, we do an over-the-pulpit translation. I'm fine with that, that is easy. But if they pull out the headsets, I can't do anything. Just absolutely cripples me. I can't speak a word. So it got passed off to my companion. Who, though he says my Spanish is way better than his, can pull it off. He says he just kind of makes up his own talk about the same subject as the speaker. I can't do that either, so he is the official headset translator. I can do over the pulpit, but not headsets. It's just too much to do at once.

This morning we mostly hung out with our branch president. We used his home gym which is pretty nice, and played a lot of horseshoes. And his wife made some awesome smoothies. Their blender is incredible. The smoothest smoothies you've ever had. Fantastic. 

Anyways, this has been a pretty boring week. We were out in that one trailer park again and the same dog found us again. It's really great to have him around because he's super nice, but a lot of the other dogs aren't. They'll growl and bark and all that, but "our" dog will run at them and defend us. It's pretty great. We have our own personal bodyguard every time we go there. 
​Sorry the picture is so blurry he got excited. But yes, he's our guardian dog.

5 February 2018

By way of explanation of the title, trailer parks don't have the best roads. So bad, in fact, that we can go no more than a few miles an hour on them. And if it rains, forget it. They're just about impassable. As are all of the driveways leading up to the trailers. In fact, just a few days ago, we got stuck. There were a whole bunch of little connecting roads to this main road that we had to turn onto to make it to our appointment, but they were all flooded. So, we were trying to turn down one of them that looked clear and all of a sudden there was a huge puddle that covered the entire road. (This was at night and so it was dark too.) We thought it would be alright to go through, but we only made it halfway across before the wheels started spinning. My companion was driving, and we both opened the doors to see how bad it was. I had water going up to about five feet off to my right. So my companion got out and I slid over to the driver's seat. He started pulling on the bike rack and some random guy came up and started helping. I had to turn off all of the car's electronic safeties because they were limiting tire spin, but we got out after a minute or two. So now our bike rack is kind of bent. Which is okay because the mission was going to replace it this transfer anyways and we've not been able to use bikes because it's such a huge area anyways and I don't have my helmet. Once I get one, I'll be able to use it again to help get around a little better though. The person who helped us ran off right after so we couldn't talk to him any more. I would call him one of the three Nephites, but he was smoking so... Anyways, we made it to appointment, we just had to go on foot. It turned out she didn't have a man home so we couldn't go in, but we were able to talk to her a little bit more. We're visiting her again on Thursday with a member, so hopefully that'll pan out. We went back to another trailer park for a return appointment who wasn't there, but we did have that same dog come up to us and follow us a bit again. We were about to leave when he found us, but he had learned from our escape last time and was determined to not let us leave. When we got in the car he came up to me and stuck his head in the car so I couldn't shut the door. I had to push him away and get going pretty quick. It's too bad we're not allowed to have pets out here, otherwise I'd just let him hop in the back and take him. Clearly he doesn't have anyone caring for him right now, and no collar. It makes me sad sometimes.

The coolest moment that we had this week was during tracting. We knocked on someone's door but as soon as we mentioned Jesus Christ, she said "Oh, we don't believe in that kind of thing," and shut the door. This really confused us, because she was wearing a cross. Later, as we were walking down the street, she walked up to us again. She apologized for being rude and said that she's always shut out people like us because she always felt bad for not knowing about this kind of thing. She started to ask us some really great questions about the purpose of life and what will happen after this life. We could answer all of her questions, and she said that it really helped her. She wasn't familiar with God and had never even seen a Bible before (which is really surprising in the South) and had only heard what people had said before she'd closed her door. Then, she asked us what made us so different from other churches, so we were able to share the Restoration with her. She loved it and invited us back! It's amazing how much the Spirit can open the hearts of people who previously wouldn't be willing to listen to us at all to then let us come back. The only downside is that she wasn't Spanish and so we had to refer her to the English missionaries, but hopefully she'll progress. 

That's all, folks!