26 January 2026

 Welcome back to the uniquely excellent weekly email of Elder Battraw! Every day brings change. My phone can't even recognize my fingerprint anymore.

We have been growing ripe with trunkiness this past week. I offer unto you all a modern parable-

Once upon a time, there was a group of missionaries. They all got together one morning and cut a tree down. The end!

This is actually a true story and evidence is available here:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/1ngGPb1awSYj1DL36

I hope you all learned something from that modern parable. Just like with our stubborn trunks and trunkiness, we just gotta get together with our friends and cut it down and out of our lives. If you don't have friends, then no worries, go on a mission and you'll make lots of them. 

Other nice events that happened this week, because pday is not long enough to write then all out in detail-

The End of the World:

Major city in Perú is smitten with plagues and afflictions

Hazardous Hopping:

Elder Battraw nearly gets sent home for injuries while parkouring through river boulders

Movie Moment:

We had a lit movie night last monday with our friends and converts, watched Joseph Smith, Prophet of the Restoration, tears were shed and it was excellent. As well as cookies

Super Sleepover:

The secretaries of the mission visited us and we had a Super Sleepover Party Bash. Would recommend

Crafts and Construction:

I built an amazing new cardboard house for a convert's new baby rabbit, ears included

The Return of Richard:

Richard comes back????? And he kindly invited us for a bite to eat and a sip to drink, which we politely rain-checked him to avoid 1. wasting time and 2. being sacrificed to demons

Anti-Anti:

A man speaks all manner of blashpemies and apostate statements to us, we kindly smile and chuckle

Tree Triumph:

We successfully topple the king of the mountain tree from somebody's backyard, Elder Watkins avoids imminent destruction by the measure of one pinky toe

Practice Makes Perfect:

I practice the wrong song for sacrament meeting only for God to come in and save the day in a miraculous manner 

That's all for this week- don't cry that it's over, be happy that it happened

-Elder Battraw

19 January 2026

Hello to everyone that still has ears to hear, eyes to read, and hearts to still care about what these weekly emails are all about! Another week has passed and now I have the great task of trying to make what I do daily seem entertaining. Here's a quick headliner of the cool things that happened. -Pushups Prowess Saturday I hit 1000 pushups in one day -Bull Brawl We sprint past a bull in our path, nearly get poked -Barf Bus My comp throws up four times on the comby on the way to Cutervo -Animal Attacks We nearly get clapped by the local dog gangs, pass by kittens, bulls, dogs, pigs, and guinea pigs within 5 minutes -Bingo Boys We play the finest game of Bingo this century has seen, only to get robbed by the announcer -Drunk Drama A potentially posessed returning friend comes back drunk and prophesies all manner of blasphemies and witchcrafts- "Experience, requires... SACRIFICE." -Consecrated Convert Maryelis is the Lebron James of missionary work, she has put in more hours visiting and working in the past week than the rest of the branch has in the past month -Crippling Comparison I get called a nerd and "the kid from the Polar Express with the yellow shirt" -Relentless Rain It rains for 5 days non-stop here in Chota But that's all for this week- stay tuned for the next one 😎

12 January 2026

Welcome back to the 40th edition of Battraw: Weekly, where few are called but many are emailed! Where the world keeps spinning and time keeps moving despite our best efforts. And what a cool seven spins around the axis it's been. The pushup goal continues! The goal is 100k for the year of 2026 and so far, it's going well. I've learned that I can't do 100k pushups in a year, and I can't do 275 pushups ever day, but I can do 25 pushups right now and 25 pushups in a couple minutes, over and over again. And those 25 pushups add up pretty quick! Focusing on the things we can do right now is the only thing we have to do. Pretty cool. We went caving last week in a Minecraft ahh cave. As we were entering the Legendary Cave Wizard appeared and demanded 2 soles for safe passage, or the curses and blood of all other stingy travelers lie upon our bones. So I gave him 2 soles because I've played too many video gamed to not pay the mysterious wizard at the start of main quests. It was a cool cave! Lots of rocks. Then we climbed the mountain that lied on top of the Cave of Doom and offered sacrifices to appease the cave spirits. Overall, nice experience and a cool photo shoot. But yeah! This past week has been a grind. But knowing that all I have to do right now is "25 pushups," something small and simple, heck yeah I can do that. My spiritual thought is that we need to build line upon line, precept upon precept and 25 pushups upon 25 pushups. And if we keep that up, we can do pretty much anything we set our minds to. Still doing pushups, Elder Battraw Pushups: 3,840/100,000 Intercontinental Ballistic Missionary:

5 January 2026

"Everybody's happy, it's a great time of year. Merry Christmas. But the real Merry [freaking] Christmas is when you wake up in the New Year when all that noise is gone, and it's just you." Hello and a happy new year to everyone that is staying hard! And a happy new year to this mission, which has never not stayed hard. Unfortunately for hard missions, missionaries are harder. Holidays far away from home feels pretty surreal. I know that on the other half of the world, there's snow and Christmas presents. Over here it's an ordinary day, albeit with more people drinking in the streets. As for updates this past week, not too much has changed at all. I did start a new personal challenge of 100k pushups in this new year, I'm currently at 1.2k. Not much is new this past week! We did have a baptism this past Sunday for Maryelis, she's pretty awesome and wants to also serve a mission. Anywho, I don't have anything else interesting this week, so we're gonna roll the dice again this next week and hope for snake eyes. That's all! -Staying hard, Elder Battraw