Dear Family,
Surprise surprise…I am getting transferred! I definitely did not expect that and I am a little sad. This is probably one of my favorite areas. We have appointments all throughout the day every day. There are usually only like 3 or maybe 4 hours of the day in the afternoon where we don’t have any set appointments and during that time we always have things to do or people to contact. It has been awesome. I don’t think I mentioned it last week, but one of the Assistants is going home this transfer, so they had to pick a new assistant. I definitely did not want that to be me. For one, because that is a 100% English area, for 2, they spent so much time in the office doing all these random projects and I would prefer to be out teaching people doing normal missionary work. They just have crazy schedules. So I have been worried about that for the past couple of weeks and I shared with President my thoughts in my last president’s letter. Last night President Saylin asked one of the zone leaders from the other Spanish zone to be the AP…so I am way relieved. He is one of my good friends in the mission, so that makes me really happy too. I am really excited for the next couple of transfers.
There are only a couple zone leader areas with spots open for me to go to, so I think I figured out where I am going. I love playing the guessing game and trying to predict where everyone is going. I think I’ve got it all figured out. I am probably going to be going to League City, which is out near Galveston, which means I’ll get to go on exchanges with the Galveston Elders. That will be awesome. The downside is that the area is an English area. Half the zone is English and half is Spanish, so they have 1 english and 1 spanish zone leader there. I’ll get to go on exchanges to all the Spanish areas, but my area will still be English. I also told president that I want to stay in Spanish for the rest of my mission. Well, this is what he responded:
“I appreciate your sharing your desires with me as to your own transfer
destiny! The good news is that you have lots of mission left to serve! We
will see where the Lord takes you! This I promise you -- you will receive
assignments to go where He wants you to be. I'll tell you, my friend, I am
very confident that there is no better place to be that where the Lord wants
you to be! Hang tight -- good times are coming!”
Basically that translates to, he is aware of my desires, but the lord wants be somewhere else and I will probably get to finish off my mission in a spanish area. I am ok with that.
Well enough of transfers talk. Transfers are always exciting so there is always a lot to say about it. But I do have some stories for this week.
On Tuesday, Bessy and Luis Miguel got baptized! It was an awesome baptism. I baptized Luis Miguel and Elder Cameron baptized Bessy. I have always tried to get members to do the baptisms, but they really wanted us to, so of course we accepted. My favorite part about the baptism was when Bessy bore her testimony right after getting baptized. She is going to be such a strong member. I think one of the most satisfying things on the mission is when you baptize someone and you don’t have any doubt in your mind that they will stay active for the rest of their lives. This was one of those baptisms.
On that same day on Tuesday, we actually got fed breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was awesome. There is a senior missionary couple that lives in our apartment complex and they invited us over for dinner that day, then we had lunch at a member’s home, then our dinner was the baptism “refreshments.” I say “refreshments” because when Hispanics say that, it means a meal. Whenever we have family home evenings they will allllways make a full course meal afterwards as the “refreshment.” So after the baptism we had pupusa’s, which are a delicious El Salvadoran food. It looks almost like a pancake, but it is made out of tortillas, and it is filled with meat and beans and whatever else they choose to fill it with. Pupusas are definitely one of my favorite foods I’ve had out here.
Then last night we put on an investigator fireside. That is where everyone in our zone brings their investigators to a fireside and we have a couple recent converts tell their conversion stories, then have a final speaker who is usually someone who got baptized several years ago, so they can hear testimonies of new converts, then of a convert who has been in the church for a long time. It is always a really good fireside. Bessy was one of our recent convert talks and she did awesome. I was also the one who conducted the meeting. This was my first real meeting I’ve conducted in Spanish. I was definitely nervous, but it turned out alright.
Ok here is an awesome story. So every P-day we go to the same Wal-mart and on the way we always drive past this donut store called Best Donuts. We always joke about the name and talk about how they have the self proclaimed Best Donuts. Well knowing me, of course I suggest we go try out these so called best donuts. When we pull up all the lights are off in the store, so we sit there for a second, then the owner of the shop, an asian guy, asks us if we wanted to buy some donuts. I told him yes of course, because they are the Best Donuts. They were about to close, but he let us in and showed us all the donuts he had left. I asked him if we could get discounts for the donuts since they were about to close. He was like, “Yes….I give you everything for 8 dollar.” There were over 50 donuts there! Of course we bought them! It turned out to be like 15 cents a donut or something. We all stuffed ourselves. I had like 8-9 donuts for lunch that day. Delicious. I do have to admit it made me kind of sick, but I would still do it again.
Next story…so you remember my story about giving the blessing to the guy who got shot in the head? Well the mom of that guy called us up again and wanted us to come back to say a prayer with them or something. When we show up we find out she wanted us to come back and see him because he is now conscious and he is recuperating very well. So we said a prayer of thanks with them. They all want to us to teach them. (None of them are members…the mom is just friends with a member of the church and she is the lady who referred us to go give the blessing). It was pretty awesome.
Well this lady has another friend whose son is also in the same hospital and she wanted us to go give a blessing to him. He has a pretty crazy story too. We don’t have all the details, but he was at some party and he fell/got pushed off the balcony of a 2 story building and landed on his head and he had been in a coma for 5 months. He was in the ICU with all these tubes and things keeping him alive. We had to put on a gown thing, gloves, and a mask in order to go into the room and give him the blessing. It was pretty intense.
We’ve had a lot of good things happen this week too with all our investigators. We’ve found some new people who are pretty awesome. There are going to be a lot of baptisms here next transfer. I am sad that I have to leave, but that is what we do as missionaries. We just go wherever were sent and we work our hardest and do our best wherever we’re put. So I am happy.
Oh, and to answer your questions, no I did not get any Sees candy nor a package from the YM/YW.
The polygraph test sounded pretty intense, but working for the department of defense sounds pretty awesome.
Ok, well next week I will be writing from a brand new area. We’ll see where I go! I love you all and hope you have a good week!
Love,
Chase
Monday, December 14, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Received Mon, Dec 7, 2009
Dear Family,
This has been a COOLD week. On Friday it was around 32 degrees all day and yes it did snow. It snowed for several hours in the afternoon. It was real snow too, not just the slushy snow stuff. It was all melted by the next day, but it was still freezing. I am definitely not a fan of the cold so I bundled up in an attempt to stay warm. Here is what I wore: a normal white T-shirt, then a long sleeve church shirt, then a sweater, then my suit coat, then my trench coat, 2 pairs of socks (including those big thick hiking socks I have), and gloves. Yes I was still cold. It was mostly my face, which meant I had a runny nose all day, but I brought tissues with me so I was fine. The next day was in the upper 40s and the next day was in the 50s. It was cold. Its back to normal now, so I am happy.
On Saturday we had the wedding for Luis and Caty Aquino, and Bessy and Julio. It all went well and they (Luis and Bessy) are getting baptized tomorrow night. Bessy is awesome. After church on Sunday, Bessy came up to us and was like, “I wanted to go up and bear my testimony to day, but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to and Julio said he didn’t think I could.” Well, I think Julio is disfellowshipped right now because he is going through the whole repentance process to come back to church, so the bishop told him he couldn’t say prayers or bear testimony or anything and I guess he thought that meant that non-members couldn’t bear testimony either. We told Bessy she’d have another chance the next month, and that we were going to ask her to bare her testimony after her baptism too. Then last night we had another baptism in our ward and we had invited some other investigators to come and see it, one of which was deciding whether nor not he should be baptized, so afterwards we had Bessy go and bear her testimony to him. And she happily did and invited him to get baptized with her tomorrow. He was a little apprehensive about doing it so soon, but he is going to get baptized on Sunday. She is going to be an amazing member.
We’ve been having success with a lot of other people as well. There are 7-8 people who are preparing for baptism right now, but for whatever reason they don’t feel comfortable choosing a specific date yet. One of them is named Mario. He is a 74 year old man from Mexico. He is our only investigator that we have that lives in a house (as opposed to living in an apartment). He is a big, jolly old man who is always laughing. He has been getting taught for several months, but these last few weeks he has really started to make some good progress. He finally came to church and he even agreed to fast. Hopefully he keeps it up.
This is week 6 (the last week) of the transfer! I’d assume my companion and I would stay together, but you never know. In week 6, President Saylin e-mails all of the zone leaders and asks us to give suggestions and input as to what we think should happen in transfers, so that is always fun to be a little part of it. Next week I’ll have the news as to whats happening next transfer.
This week I went on exchanges with the APs, assistants to the president, in Sugar Land. I finally got to go drive by T-Mac’s house (ask dad if you don’t know who he is!). We got the code to get into the gated community where he lives from a member in a ward in Sugar Land who is dating T-Mac’s neighbor. He lives in a reeeally nice area with mansion houses, as you could imagine. I don’t think he was home though…none of his cars were in the driveway and no lights were on.
I think I may have mentioned that we cover the Medical Center area in my area. That means that whenever people’s investigators, or members go to the hospital and need blessings, we get called up to go and give the blessing. I’ve only had to do 3-4, but they are all pretty intense. This week I had a pretty crazy one. This guy was apparently in his car one night here in Houston and these guys walked up to the car, and pulled him out to try to steal his car. I’m guessing he tried to fight back or something, but they pulled out a gun and he put up his arm and they shot him, I don’t know how many times. But the bullet shattered when it went through his arm then it went into his head, so they’ve been having to do surgery to get all the bullet pieces out of his head. He was in the ICU hooked up to tons of machines and had tubes coming out everywhere. We barely got there in time to give him a blessing before he went into another surgery. That was a pretty crazy story to hear though.
This week for whatever reason, missionaries stopped by our apartment on different occasions and when they walked in they noticed the painting Dad gave me that I have up on the wall, and they would walk up to it and say, “Woooow, who painted that? That is an awesome painting!” I’ve gotten compliments for the painting for pretty much my whole mission. It is a pretty awesome painting. Thank you Dad!
Well I think that’s about all for this week. I am pretty excited for the baptisms tomorrow. Transfers is always exciting too. In my last interview President Saylin mentioned, “You never know how long you’re going to be with your companion.” Mission presidents always throw in little hints. So he was thinking about moving at least one of us…we’ll see.
Oh yeah…congratulations Mom on running 9 miles…that is really impressive. I don’t think I could even do that.
And yes I did get the wedding invitation…I forgot to write that last week. That is the first wedding invitation I have gotten! A lot of these missionaries from Utah have friends back at home getting married left and right. That is way weird to me.
Zak have fun with the braces. “Vale la pena” as we say in Spanish. It might not be fun for a while, but it is worth it. My braces didn’t bother me at all after a while…I was just happy my teeth were getting straight. Zak’s teeth were already pretty straight, so he wont have to have them on for too long will he?
I am glad Dad is somehow finding some good business at work. I definitely know how it feels to work when you are sick. Not fun.
Definitely update me on Christopher’s polygraph test. So…isn’t a polygraph test where they hook you up to a lie detector and ask you a bunch of questions? Is he going to work for the government or something? Or is it just some big company over there?
Michael Vick plays for the Eagles? The Eagles just boosted up to be one of my favorite teams.
Oh yeah, last thing. I think the best thing I could get for Christmas besides those other few things I mentioned would be just some treats/food. I don’t really want anything else. I can’t believe I am hitting my 17 month mark on Wednesday! I just realized that. It is scary how fast time goes by.
Ok that is the end of my list of random thoughts and stories! I hope you have a good week!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
This has been a COOLD week. On Friday it was around 32 degrees all day and yes it did snow. It snowed for several hours in the afternoon. It was real snow too, not just the slushy snow stuff. It was all melted by the next day, but it was still freezing. I am definitely not a fan of the cold so I bundled up in an attempt to stay warm. Here is what I wore: a normal white T-shirt, then a long sleeve church shirt, then a sweater, then my suit coat, then my trench coat, 2 pairs of socks (including those big thick hiking socks I have), and gloves. Yes I was still cold. It was mostly my face, which meant I had a runny nose all day, but I brought tissues with me so I was fine. The next day was in the upper 40s and the next day was in the 50s. It was cold. Its back to normal now, so I am happy.
On Saturday we had the wedding for Luis and Caty Aquino, and Bessy and Julio. It all went well and they (Luis and Bessy) are getting baptized tomorrow night. Bessy is awesome. After church on Sunday, Bessy came up to us and was like, “I wanted to go up and bear my testimony to day, but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to and Julio said he didn’t think I could.” Well, I think Julio is disfellowshipped right now because he is going through the whole repentance process to come back to church, so the bishop told him he couldn’t say prayers or bear testimony or anything and I guess he thought that meant that non-members couldn’t bear testimony either. We told Bessy she’d have another chance the next month, and that we were going to ask her to bare her testimony after her baptism too. Then last night we had another baptism in our ward and we had invited some other investigators to come and see it, one of which was deciding whether nor not he should be baptized, so afterwards we had Bessy go and bear her testimony to him. And she happily did and invited him to get baptized with her tomorrow. He was a little apprehensive about doing it so soon, but he is going to get baptized on Sunday. She is going to be an amazing member.
We’ve been having success with a lot of other people as well. There are 7-8 people who are preparing for baptism right now, but for whatever reason they don’t feel comfortable choosing a specific date yet. One of them is named Mario. He is a 74 year old man from Mexico. He is our only investigator that we have that lives in a house (as opposed to living in an apartment). He is a big, jolly old man who is always laughing. He has been getting taught for several months, but these last few weeks he has really started to make some good progress. He finally came to church and he even agreed to fast. Hopefully he keeps it up.
This is week 6 (the last week) of the transfer! I’d assume my companion and I would stay together, but you never know. In week 6, President Saylin e-mails all of the zone leaders and asks us to give suggestions and input as to what we think should happen in transfers, so that is always fun to be a little part of it. Next week I’ll have the news as to whats happening next transfer.
This week I went on exchanges with the APs, assistants to the president, in Sugar Land. I finally got to go drive by T-Mac’s house (ask dad if you don’t know who he is!). We got the code to get into the gated community where he lives from a member in a ward in Sugar Land who is dating T-Mac’s neighbor. He lives in a reeeally nice area with mansion houses, as you could imagine. I don’t think he was home though…none of his cars were in the driveway and no lights were on.
I think I may have mentioned that we cover the Medical Center area in my area. That means that whenever people’s investigators, or members go to the hospital and need blessings, we get called up to go and give the blessing. I’ve only had to do 3-4, but they are all pretty intense. This week I had a pretty crazy one. This guy was apparently in his car one night here in Houston and these guys walked up to the car, and pulled him out to try to steal his car. I’m guessing he tried to fight back or something, but they pulled out a gun and he put up his arm and they shot him, I don’t know how many times. But the bullet shattered when it went through his arm then it went into his head, so they’ve been having to do surgery to get all the bullet pieces out of his head. He was in the ICU hooked up to tons of machines and had tubes coming out everywhere. We barely got there in time to give him a blessing before he went into another surgery. That was a pretty crazy story to hear though.
This week for whatever reason, missionaries stopped by our apartment on different occasions and when they walked in they noticed the painting Dad gave me that I have up on the wall, and they would walk up to it and say, “Woooow, who painted that? That is an awesome painting!” I’ve gotten compliments for the painting for pretty much my whole mission. It is a pretty awesome painting. Thank you Dad!
Well I think that’s about all for this week. I am pretty excited for the baptisms tomorrow. Transfers is always exciting too. In my last interview President Saylin mentioned, “You never know how long you’re going to be with your companion.” Mission presidents always throw in little hints. So he was thinking about moving at least one of us…we’ll see.
Oh yeah…congratulations Mom on running 9 miles…that is really impressive. I don’t think I could even do that.
And yes I did get the wedding invitation…I forgot to write that last week. That is the first wedding invitation I have gotten! A lot of these missionaries from Utah have friends back at home getting married left and right. That is way weird to me.
Zak have fun with the braces. “Vale la pena” as we say in Spanish. It might not be fun for a while, but it is worth it. My braces didn’t bother me at all after a while…I was just happy my teeth were getting straight. Zak’s teeth were already pretty straight, so he wont have to have them on for too long will he?
I am glad Dad is somehow finding some good business at work. I definitely know how it feels to work when you are sick. Not fun.
Definitely update me on Christopher’s polygraph test. So…isn’t a polygraph test where they hook you up to a lie detector and ask you a bunch of questions? Is he going to work for the government or something? Or is it just some big company over there?
Michael Vick plays for the Eagles? The Eagles just boosted up to be one of my favorite teams.
Oh yeah, last thing. I think the best thing I could get for Christmas besides those other few things I mentioned would be just some treats/food. I don’t really want anything else. I can’t believe I am hitting my 17 month mark on Wednesday! I just realized that. It is scary how fast time goes by.
Ok that is the end of my list of random thoughts and stories! I hope you have a good week!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Received Mon, Nov 30, 2009
Dear Family,
Last week I decided I wanted to set a goal to gain some weight. When I came out on my mission I weighed 150 lbs, and I’ve been fluctuating between 145-150. Whenever I get sick I always lose 5+ lbs and it takes forever to get back up to 150. My goal is to hit 160. Well, I learned that you had better be careful what you ask for. On Thursday we had an appointment at about 12, where we went taught a lesson, then they said they had food ready for us. I was happy, because I was hungry of course, and I stuffed myself. I had 5 tostadas and it was delicious. Then at 6 we had our normal dinner appointment. I was honestly still not that hungry because I ate so much at lunch, but I stuffed myself again and ate as much as I possibly could. We had chicken and mashed potatos and salad and some other stuff. Most Hispanic people here have never eaten a turkey and have no idea how to cook one. I don’t think turkey is that great anyway, so no big loss. Well after that we had another appointment. We show up with our lesson prepared and everything and we sit down on the couch waiting for everyone to come in, then we see them bring out a huuuge turkey and drop it on their dinner table. Then they start bringing out all the rest of the food. I guess they decided they wanted to eat with us instead of do a lesson. I thought I was going to die, but we definitely could not reject it. They went out a bought a huge turkey for us and they barely have enough money to pay rent. Then they got some recipe and just tried to cook it the best they could. I think the funniest part was after we said the prayer they were all trying to decide how to serve it, then One of them just stabbed the huge turkey and started forking out random pieces of meat. It was a lot of chaos. We managed to stuff down a little more food. I’ve become a master at making it look like I have more food on my plate than I really do…these little surprise dinners happen all the time. I could hardly walk back to the car that night, but the most disappointing part is that I weighed myself a few days after and I didn’t gain any weight. Oh well, I will have to keep trying. I’ve started to buy whole milk instead of 2% milk too, but that isn’t doing anything either.
This Saturday we are going to have 2 weddings and then on Tuesday 2 baptisms. This is that family who I talked about where, Samuel Aquino just got off his mission and how hes reactivating his 2 brothers and sister and were teaching their boyfriend/girlfriends. Luis Miguel is going to get married to Catalina (who is the member…Samuel’s sister) and Julio (Samuel’s brother) is getting married to Bessi. Luis and Caty have been living together for like 4 years and they have a 2 year old daughter, so they are happy to finally just get married, and Julio and Bessi have been living together for about a year. Then on Tuesday Luis and Bessi are getting baptized. So that is exciting. They are both very happy. Bessi especially was really prepared and she’s going to be a strong member. At our thanksgiving dinner with them we went around and talked about what our goals for the next year were and she said she wanted to keep learning about the gospel and get a strong testimony to endure to the end. What an awesome answer.
I think I have talked about this black Honduran family named the Mejilla’s before. Unfortunately they are probably not going to get baptized. They have this problem where Lucia Mejilla, the wife, is married to some other guy in Honduras, so in order for her to get married to Fernando, the guy she is living with right now, she would have to get a divorce first. It costs tons of money to get a divorce and they literally don’t have enough money to pay for rent. They’ve gotten their power turned off several times. Unfortunately there are a looot of people stuck in this situation. In our ward right now there are like 5-6 people who are active, but not baptized because they don’t have enough money to get their divorce first. That is one of the biggest struggles that we have and there isn’t really any good solution.
Ok, here are 2 more little random observations that I’ve made about this area, so that you can imagine the area. Most of our area is pretty much like a Spanish speaking country. Nearly everyone is Hispanic…most of the signs are written in Spanish and everything. There are these guys who have these little cart things with wheels and they sell “elote” which is corn on the cob. So they push their little carts around yelling ELOOOOOOTE!!! And kids with run out with money to buy some elote. They usually eat their elote with a ton of mayonnaise on it, and some chili powder. I’ve had it before and its pretty gross. They’ll put ketchup and all sorts of other weird stuff on it too.
My next observation is that there is this ghetto restaurant here with the funniest name…its called “Finger Lickin’ Good.” I think it’s a fried chicken place or something…they have tons of fried chicken places around here. It makes me laugh every time we drive past it.
Another thing I’ve noticed here is that everyone starts putting up their Christmas lights and decorations so early. People started putting up their Christmas lights and Christmas trees about a week ago. Most people live in apartments here, so they’ll just put lights all over their windows and stairwells. We don’t have Christmas lights but we do have a little Christmas tree that we put up today. It will be interesting to see what we do for Christmas this year in the mission.
I’ve also thought of 2 more things to add to my Christmas list. First…I mentioned the classical music thing last week…I remember bumpa has a pretty sweet classical music tape or something that he always listens to when he works out…I think you know what I’m talking about. Well I would love to work out to that in the morning as well. I started to do pushups and sit ups in the mornings again, but mormon tabernacle choir just doesn’t really pump you up that much when its early and you're trying to force yourself to exercise. I don’t know if its possible to copy that or anything about it, but that’s just a thought that came to mind.
The other thing is that it is always nice to get new ties. It is easy to get sick of all your ties. Oh yeah, and last week I mentioned I could use a few pairs of black socks, well this morning I had to throw away 2 pairs of my blue socks. I’m getting to that time where a lot of my socks are so used that you can see right through them, then big holes start to form. So it wouldn’t hurt to throw in 1-2 pairs of blue socks too.
Oh yeah…one more question. How is Dad’s work going? The last that I heard was on Mother’s Day when it was going slow like everywhere else. I have heard that the economy is starting to get a little better, but obviously I have no idea, plus I haven’t heard anything about the real estate market.
Well that is all I have for this week. Thank you for all the updates and stories, it was all entertaining and interesting. Its nice to see that some things never change, ie…DotA tournaments, turkey bowl, and random game competitions. And fantasy football. And the delicious Thanksgiving meals (I haven’t seen any better thanksgiving dinners out here than the ones we have at our house). I love you all…have a good week!!
Love,
Chase
Last week I decided I wanted to set a goal to gain some weight. When I came out on my mission I weighed 150 lbs, and I’ve been fluctuating between 145-150. Whenever I get sick I always lose 5+ lbs and it takes forever to get back up to 150. My goal is to hit 160. Well, I learned that you had better be careful what you ask for. On Thursday we had an appointment at about 12, where we went taught a lesson, then they said they had food ready for us. I was happy, because I was hungry of course, and I stuffed myself. I had 5 tostadas and it was delicious. Then at 6 we had our normal dinner appointment. I was honestly still not that hungry because I ate so much at lunch, but I stuffed myself again and ate as much as I possibly could. We had chicken and mashed potatos and salad and some other stuff. Most Hispanic people here have never eaten a turkey and have no idea how to cook one. I don’t think turkey is that great anyway, so no big loss. Well after that we had another appointment. We show up with our lesson prepared and everything and we sit down on the couch waiting for everyone to come in, then we see them bring out a huuuge turkey and drop it on their dinner table. Then they start bringing out all the rest of the food. I guess they decided they wanted to eat with us instead of do a lesson. I thought I was going to die, but we definitely could not reject it. They went out a bought a huge turkey for us and they barely have enough money to pay rent. Then they got some recipe and just tried to cook it the best they could. I think the funniest part was after we said the prayer they were all trying to decide how to serve it, then One of them just stabbed the huge turkey and started forking out random pieces of meat. It was a lot of chaos. We managed to stuff down a little more food. I’ve become a master at making it look like I have more food on my plate than I really do…these little surprise dinners happen all the time. I could hardly walk back to the car that night, but the most disappointing part is that I weighed myself a few days after and I didn’t gain any weight. Oh well, I will have to keep trying. I’ve started to buy whole milk instead of 2% milk too, but that isn’t doing anything either.
This Saturday we are going to have 2 weddings and then on Tuesday 2 baptisms. This is that family who I talked about where, Samuel Aquino just got off his mission and how hes reactivating his 2 brothers and sister and were teaching their boyfriend/girlfriends. Luis Miguel is going to get married to Catalina (who is the member…Samuel’s sister) and Julio (Samuel’s brother) is getting married to Bessi. Luis and Caty have been living together for like 4 years and they have a 2 year old daughter, so they are happy to finally just get married, and Julio and Bessi have been living together for about a year. Then on Tuesday Luis and Bessi are getting baptized. So that is exciting. They are both very happy. Bessi especially was really prepared and she’s going to be a strong member. At our thanksgiving dinner with them we went around and talked about what our goals for the next year were and she said she wanted to keep learning about the gospel and get a strong testimony to endure to the end. What an awesome answer.
I think I have talked about this black Honduran family named the Mejilla’s before. Unfortunately they are probably not going to get baptized. They have this problem where Lucia Mejilla, the wife, is married to some other guy in Honduras, so in order for her to get married to Fernando, the guy she is living with right now, she would have to get a divorce first. It costs tons of money to get a divorce and they literally don’t have enough money to pay for rent. They’ve gotten their power turned off several times. Unfortunately there are a looot of people stuck in this situation. In our ward right now there are like 5-6 people who are active, but not baptized because they don’t have enough money to get their divorce first. That is one of the biggest struggles that we have and there isn’t really any good solution.
Ok, here are 2 more little random observations that I’ve made about this area, so that you can imagine the area. Most of our area is pretty much like a Spanish speaking country. Nearly everyone is Hispanic…most of the signs are written in Spanish and everything. There are these guys who have these little cart things with wheels and they sell “elote” which is corn on the cob. So they push their little carts around yelling ELOOOOOOTE!!! And kids with run out with money to buy some elote. They usually eat their elote with a ton of mayonnaise on it, and some chili powder. I’ve had it before and its pretty gross. They’ll put ketchup and all sorts of other weird stuff on it too.
My next observation is that there is this ghetto restaurant here with the funniest name…its called “Finger Lickin’ Good.” I think it’s a fried chicken place or something…they have tons of fried chicken places around here. It makes me laugh every time we drive past it.
Another thing I’ve noticed here is that everyone starts putting up their Christmas lights and decorations so early. People started putting up their Christmas lights and Christmas trees about a week ago. Most people live in apartments here, so they’ll just put lights all over their windows and stairwells. We don’t have Christmas lights but we do have a little Christmas tree that we put up today. It will be interesting to see what we do for Christmas this year in the mission.
I’ve also thought of 2 more things to add to my Christmas list. First…I mentioned the classical music thing last week…I remember bumpa has a pretty sweet classical music tape or something that he always listens to when he works out…I think you know what I’m talking about. Well I would love to work out to that in the morning as well. I started to do pushups and sit ups in the mornings again, but mormon tabernacle choir just doesn’t really pump you up that much when its early and you're trying to force yourself to exercise. I don’t know if its possible to copy that or anything about it, but that’s just a thought that came to mind.
The other thing is that it is always nice to get new ties. It is easy to get sick of all your ties. Oh yeah, and last week I mentioned I could use a few pairs of black socks, well this morning I had to throw away 2 pairs of my blue socks. I’m getting to that time where a lot of my socks are so used that you can see right through them, then big holes start to form. So it wouldn’t hurt to throw in 1-2 pairs of blue socks too.
Oh yeah…one more question. How is Dad’s work going? The last that I heard was on Mother’s Day when it was going slow like everywhere else. I have heard that the economy is starting to get a little better, but obviously I have no idea, plus I haven’t heard anything about the real estate market.
Well that is all I have for this week. Thank you for all the updates and stories, it was all entertaining and interesting. Its nice to see that some things never change, ie…DotA tournaments, turkey bowl, and random game competitions. And fantasy football. And the delicious Thanksgiving meals (I haven’t seen any better thanksgiving dinners out here than the ones we have at our house). I love you all…have a good week!!
Love,
Chase
Received Mon Nov 23, 2009
Dear Family,
Hmm...not a whole lot happened this week. We had our Zone Conference which was good as always. Then we had our stake correlation meeting afterwards which was okay. It started to turn into a finger pointing match and everyone started to get defensive. These meetings are always interesting.
Our 2 investigators are still set to get baptized on December 6th. They are both living with their boyfriend/girlfriends and we taught them the law of chastity a few weeks ago and challenged them to either separate or get married. Yesterday they told us they finally decided they are going to get married. We have taught them pretty much everything, so they are set for December 6th.
We have this other investigator named Roman. He is awesome. His wife drinks a lot and they recently separated (which is weird...usually its the man who is the drunk). Roman is friends with one of the members, which is how we met him. He lives with a bunch of other guys in an apartment. Well last week we were in the complex and we saw all those guys standing around outside drinking beer and I thought for sure we'd see Roman out there with them. Well Roman was out there and everyone was drinking beer, but Roman was standing out there drinking a coke instead. That is probably one of my favorite mental pictures I have of my whole mission: Roman standing around with all the other guys drinking his coke while everyone else is drinking their beers. Roman is also preparing to get baptized.
Last week Mom mentioned that song that talks about the Word of Wisdom, well we tried it out last week and sang it before teaching one of our word of wisdom lessons. We taught the Word of Wisdom 3-5 times last week. It is always interesting to see people's reactions.
In the mail last week I got a bag of chex mix from the Achievement days girls and me and my companion and every other missionary who has been in our apartment have been enjoying it.
This week is just going to be a normal week of missionary work. We are just going to have a normal dinner appointment and everything. Most hispanic people here don't celebrate Thanksgiving really, so it wont be too hard to find people to visit.
OK, now in response to Mom's e-mail. What the heck is a droid phone? I am glad Christopher fixed my computer...I would be very happy if it was still there when I got back. I think that's really strange how the monitor stopped working.
I loved seeing everyone's favorite teams. Those are some good teams. I think all the teams that I like are on there. My favorites in order of how much I like them are: Chargers, Saints, Colts, Steelers
Hmm...I started to make a Christmas list and I was going to bring it today but I forgot. I think all I've really thought of is that I need more pens, those pilot G-2 black and blue pens. And black socks...and other random stuff like tapioca pudding (the kind I always use to make), and beef jerky.
Well that's all I can think of for this week. Oh yeah, I got a padded envelope, so I can send home my memory card this week. There's lots of space left still so you don't need to delete any of the pictures. But do make sure you save them on the computer somewhere. I love you all and hope you have a good week!
Love,
Chase
Hmm...not a whole lot happened this week. We had our Zone Conference which was good as always. Then we had our stake correlation meeting afterwards which was okay. It started to turn into a finger pointing match and everyone started to get defensive. These meetings are always interesting.
Our 2 investigators are still set to get baptized on December 6th. They are both living with their boyfriend/girlfriends and we taught them the law of chastity a few weeks ago and challenged them to either separate or get married. Yesterday they told us they finally decided they are going to get married. We have taught them pretty much everything, so they are set for December 6th.
We have this other investigator named Roman. He is awesome. His wife drinks a lot and they recently separated (which is weird...usually its the man who is the drunk). Roman is friends with one of the members, which is how we met him. He lives with a bunch of other guys in an apartment. Well last week we were in the complex and we saw all those guys standing around outside drinking beer and I thought for sure we'd see Roman out there with them. Well Roman was out there and everyone was drinking beer, but Roman was standing out there drinking a coke instead. That is probably one of my favorite mental pictures I have of my whole mission: Roman standing around with all the other guys drinking his coke while everyone else is drinking their beers. Roman is also preparing to get baptized.
Last week Mom mentioned that song that talks about the Word of Wisdom, well we tried it out last week and sang it before teaching one of our word of wisdom lessons. We taught the Word of Wisdom 3-5 times last week. It is always interesting to see people's reactions.
In the mail last week I got a bag of chex mix from the Achievement days girls and me and my companion and every other missionary who has been in our apartment have been enjoying it.
This week is just going to be a normal week of missionary work. We are just going to have a normal dinner appointment and everything. Most hispanic people here don't celebrate Thanksgiving really, so it wont be too hard to find people to visit.
OK, now in response to Mom's e-mail. What the heck is a droid phone? I am glad Christopher fixed my computer...I would be very happy if it was still there when I got back. I think that's really strange how the monitor stopped working.
I loved seeing everyone's favorite teams. Those are some good teams. I think all the teams that I like are on there. My favorites in order of how much I like them are: Chargers, Saints, Colts, Steelers
Hmm...I started to make a Christmas list and I was going to bring it today but I forgot. I think all I've really thought of is that I need more pens, those pilot G-2 black and blue pens. And black socks...and other random stuff like tapioca pudding (the kind I always use to make), and beef jerky.
Well that's all I can think of for this week. Oh yeah, I got a padded envelope, so I can send home my memory card this week. There's lots of space left still so you don't need to delete any of the pictures. But do make sure you save them on the computer somewhere. I love you all and hope you have a good week!
Love,
Chase
Monday, November 16, 2009
Received Mon Nov 16, 2009
Dear Family,
I do not have a whole bunch to report on this week, so I will start by responding to Mom's e-mail.
Are the Colt's Steven's favorite team? They are definitely an awesome team. Isn't Austin Collie playing for them? I like the Colts, but I'd have to say the Saints are my back-up team.
Wow...I that is crazy that Christopher was in my area last week. Where all those hospitals are at is the very east side of my area, we only go out there when we have to give blessings to people in the hospital. We are always over in the other side of the area in the ghetto.
Good job Zak and dominating the ACT test. One of the good things about that test is that (I believe) it is graded compared to everyone else, like a curve. So if the test is hard, everyone else does bad, and you just have to do better than them and you'll get a high score. 28 is definitely good though...I think I got 27. I think the average score for incoming freshman is either 28 or 29.
I definitely want to do intramural soccer when I get back. Everyone here watches soccer, so it makes me want to play. I have a FC Barcelona jersey and I claimed that team to be my favorite, but then I found out Ronaldino is not on that team anymore, so I don't like it as much, so my backup team is Chivas. I don't know anything about them, but everyone talks about them and they have cool jerseys...I will have to get one before the end of my mission.
I don't ever remember singing In Our Lovely Deseret. That could be useful though because well sing a hymn a lot at the start of our lessons and we always teach about the Word of Wisdom. Its pretty much impossible to find someone who doesn't have a problem with the word of wisdom. Same thing with the law of chastity too. Most people here don't get married, they just start living together, so before they can get baptized they have to either separate or get married.
We have 2 people who are going to get baptized on December 6th, and 1 of them is going to get married and the other one is still deciding what to do. They are awesome investigators. I think I may have explained a few weeks ago how this member named Samuel Aquino was inactive, but then the missionaries found him and reactivated him, then he went on a mission, now hes back and hes bringing his 2 brothers, his sister, and their boyfriend/girlfriends to church. His siblings are members but have been inactive until now and the boyfriend/girlfriends are not members. 2 of them have baptismal dates right now and they are awesome. They've committed to live the Word of Wisdom as well as the law of chastity (that's why they are getting married), which are 2 of the biggest commandments and they have been coming to church for over a month now.
Our other best investigator named Victor, who is from Nicaragua, was supposed to get baptized yesterday, but about a week and a half ago he just disappeared. Its sad, but unfortunately that happens here. People don't have enough money for rent, so they just leave and they don't have phones or any way of contacting us. We just have to pray some other missionaries find them.
Then we have Maritza. She is the one who got sent to jail with her husband after they got drunk throwing a party, celebrating that they came to church. Her husband is not deported and back in Mexico and I'm not sure what his plans are. He doesn't have papers, hence the deportation, and it costs a lot of money to cross the border illegally. Basically the more money you pay, the safer the method you can take to cross the border. It costs several thousand dollars though and that is a ridiculous amount for most people trying to come here. Maritza doesn't want to go back because her kids will have much better lives here, plus it is very dangerous back where they lived. They both had several family members killed by the drug cartels and they were getting hunted down by them when they were back in Mexico. But anyway, Maritza came to church yesterday and she loves it. She was very active in another church until she realized all her tithing just went to the pastor and she realized the church was false, so she stopped going. But she loves our church, so that is good. If she ends up being able to stay here she will definitely get baptized.
Here is my story for the week. So in the mission when you want a haircut you obviously go to the cheapest place you can find. And there are tons of those 5 dollar haircut places in Houston. Well, unfortunately the haircuters there aren't always the best. I actually haven't had a problem until my last haircut. About 5 weeks ago I got a haircut at the place across the street and when I came back and showered I noticed that my hair looked kind of lopsided. She totally didn't cut the front right part of my hair. It was funny, but I wasn't willing to leave it like that so I got some scissors and cut it myself. It actually turned out OK. So last week I stupidly went back to the same place, hoping that the same lady wouldn't be there. Of course she is and this time she did an even worse job. When I came back and showered I went to check my haircut and it was wavy. There were like 3 rows of hair that was longer than everything else so it looked like I had 3 waves going through my hair. I was not willing to try to re-cut everything because I would make it worse, so the next morning I went back and told her to fix it. She barely speaks English (almost all the haircut people are from Vietnam), but she understood well enough and she did fix a lot of it. But there was still one part that was a little longer and I tried to fix it myself...not so much luck this time. I cut it shorter than everything else. It is funny, but its not too bad. Luckily my hair grows fast. Mom will have a lot of repairing to do to my hair when I get back.
Ok, well that's about all for this week. We have our zone conference this Thursday which is always good. After that my companion and I have a correlation meeting with the stake presidency and all the bishops and ward mission leaders, which is usually boring.
Ok, have a good week...I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
I do not have a whole bunch to report on this week, so I will start by responding to Mom's e-mail.
Are the Colt's Steven's favorite team? They are definitely an awesome team. Isn't Austin Collie playing for them? I like the Colts, but I'd have to say the Saints are my back-up team.
Wow...I that is crazy that Christopher was in my area last week. Where all those hospitals are at is the very east side of my area, we only go out there when we have to give blessings to people in the hospital. We are always over in the other side of the area in the ghetto.
Good job Zak and dominating the ACT test. One of the good things about that test is that (I believe) it is graded compared to everyone else, like a curve. So if the test is hard, everyone else does bad, and you just have to do better than them and you'll get a high score. 28 is definitely good though...I think I got 27. I think the average score for incoming freshman is either 28 or 29.
I definitely want to do intramural soccer when I get back. Everyone here watches soccer, so it makes me want to play. I have a FC Barcelona jersey and I claimed that team to be my favorite, but then I found out Ronaldino is not on that team anymore, so I don't like it as much, so my backup team is Chivas. I don't know anything about them, but everyone talks about them and they have cool jerseys...I will have to get one before the end of my mission.
I don't ever remember singing In Our Lovely Deseret. That could be useful though because well sing a hymn a lot at the start of our lessons and we always teach about the Word of Wisdom. Its pretty much impossible to find someone who doesn't have a problem with the word of wisdom. Same thing with the law of chastity too. Most people here don't get married, they just start living together, so before they can get baptized they have to either separate or get married.
We have 2 people who are going to get baptized on December 6th, and 1 of them is going to get married and the other one is still deciding what to do. They are awesome investigators. I think I may have explained a few weeks ago how this member named Samuel Aquino was inactive, but then the missionaries found him and reactivated him, then he went on a mission, now hes back and hes bringing his 2 brothers, his sister, and their boyfriend/girlfriends to church. His siblings are members but have been inactive until now and the boyfriend/girlfriends are not members. 2 of them have baptismal dates right now and they are awesome. They've committed to live the Word of Wisdom as well as the law of chastity (that's why they are getting married), which are 2 of the biggest commandments and they have been coming to church for over a month now.
Our other best investigator named Victor, who is from Nicaragua, was supposed to get baptized yesterday, but about a week and a half ago he just disappeared. Its sad, but unfortunately that happens here. People don't have enough money for rent, so they just leave and they don't have phones or any way of contacting us. We just have to pray some other missionaries find them.
Then we have Maritza. She is the one who got sent to jail with her husband after they got drunk throwing a party, celebrating that they came to church. Her husband is not deported and back in Mexico and I'm not sure what his plans are. He doesn't have papers, hence the deportation, and it costs a lot of money to cross the border illegally. Basically the more money you pay, the safer the method you can take to cross the border. It costs several thousand dollars though and that is a ridiculous amount for most people trying to come here. Maritza doesn't want to go back because her kids will have much better lives here, plus it is very dangerous back where they lived. They both had several family members killed by the drug cartels and they were getting hunted down by them when they were back in Mexico. But anyway, Maritza came to church yesterday and she loves it. She was very active in another church until she realized all her tithing just went to the pastor and she realized the church was false, so she stopped going. But she loves our church, so that is good. If she ends up being able to stay here she will definitely get baptized.
Here is my story for the week. So in the mission when you want a haircut you obviously go to the cheapest place you can find. And there are tons of those 5 dollar haircut places in Houston. Well, unfortunately the haircuters there aren't always the best. I actually haven't had a problem until my last haircut. About 5 weeks ago I got a haircut at the place across the street and when I came back and showered I noticed that my hair looked kind of lopsided. She totally didn't cut the front right part of my hair. It was funny, but I wasn't willing to leave it like that so I got some scissors and cut it myself. It actually turned out OK. So last week I stupidly went back to the same place, hoping that the same lady wouldn't be there. Of course she is and this time she did an even worse job. When I came back and showered I went to check my haircut and it was wavy. There were like 3 rows of hair that was longer than everything else so it looked like I had 3 waves going through my hair. I was not willing to try to re-cut everything because I would make it worse, so the next morning I went back and told her to fix it. She barely speaks English (almost all the haircut people are from Vietnam), but she understood well enough and she did fix a lot of it. But there was still one part that was a little longer and I tried to fix it myself...not so much luck this time. I cut it shorter than everything else. It is funny, but its not too bad. Luckily my hair grows fast. Mom will have a lot of repairing to do to my hair when I get back.
Ok, well that's about all for this week. We have our zone conference this Thursday which is always good. After that my companion and I have a correlation meeting with the stake presidency and all the bishops and ward mission leaders, which is usually boring.
Ok, have a good week...I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
Monday, November 9, 2009
Received Mon Nov 9, 2009
Dear Family,
Happy Birthday Christopher! When I was serving in Richmond, a lot of the members worked for Exxon. They were all attorneys and project managers and stuff like that. Tons of people here work for the gas companies. If you were ever near the Medical Center area with all the huge hospitals or by the Reliant stadium or by Lakewood church, all that stuff is in my area. I would guess you were up north in the other part of the city. I think that’s where those big business offices are.
I got that letter from Mom a few days ago. I always love those things. All the FF stuff was interesting, and no it doesn’t distract me at all. All of the stuff about Heather was interesting as well. I was pretty impressed with the blog post about how she selected her football team. The Seahawks is a respectable choice. Wasn’t Jim Mora the coach for the Falcons before?
It seems like that is a huge epidemic of some sort of sickness going around here. In almost every single household there are people sick. We make sure we use our hand sanitizer all the time.
Congratulations Mom for running 6 miles. That is definitely further than I have ever gone. I don’t like running at all either. I think it is boring, but I do love to listen to music, so whenever I went running I just looked at it as a time to listen to music, that way it was so much more fun.
Here is my story for the week. We are teaching this family from Honduras named the Mejia family. (They are the black ones who speak Spanish). Well they have to move because they don’t have enough money to pay for their current apartment, so they decided to move to an apartment just down the block. So of course we volunteer to help and we got our ward mission leader to come with us and he brought one of the youth. Well when we showed up to help they had done absolutely no preparation for the move. Everything was still a mess, dirty dishes in the kitchen. Her husband was sick too so he was just laying on the couch. We figured we just start taking all the big stuff out like the couches and get started on the move, so we asked where the moving truck was and she was like, ok wait a second. She ran outside and came back in 5 minutes with a shopping cart. She said we should just put everything in there and walk it down to the new apartment. They didn’t have a car or truck or anything. So that is exactly what we did. We picked up the big huge couch and balanced it on the shopping cart and started walking towards the new apartment. Along the way we acquired 3 more shopping carts and we started caravanning back and forth, loading up the shopping carts and pushing them down to the new apartment. We put big huge couches on those things, an entertainment center, but I thought the most hilarious part was when we put a whole oven in one of those shopping carts and pushed it down to the new apartment. As we walked down the sidewalk pushing our shopping carts with couches and whatnot balancing on them, everyone stared at us as they drove past. It was hilarious. At one point it was just me and my companion pushing 2 shopping carts down the street with 2 big huge TV’s (EVERYone here has big huge TV’s here regardless of how poor they are. Even if they don’t have couches they always have to have their big screen TV), and it definitely looked like we were stealing the TV’s. Well after 4 hours we got all of the big stuff and we left. That was probably one of the most ghetto moves I’ve ever seen. It was hilarious. I am glad we were able to help them.
Here's my kitchen story…I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this one. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago about how one of the members taught us how to make banana milk and it is delicious. Well, a few weeks ago I started to buy frozen strawberry’s and I always buy that Kern’s juice stuff in a can. Instead of Kerns, I buy a brand called Jumex and its like 33 cents a can and it is delicious. Well we also have a magic bullet, which I love. I throw in some frozen strawberries, a banana, a scoop of ice cream, some strawberry banana juice, and blend it up and it is delicious. I usually have a smoothie with every lunch I make.
Yesterday at church I noticed 2 funny things that happened. The first one was that when we started at 10:30 like we are supposed to, we only had 20 people there. Like always, everyone starts to trickle in as time goes on and by the end of the meeting we had 104 people there. Not even a 5th of the people showed up on time. The next funny part was that the closing prayer was given by an old man who is a recent convert named Fernando. He is from Costa Rica. He has a lot of health problems and he always wears these black sunglasses because the light hurts his eyes. Well I guess he wasn’t satisfied with just giving a prayer, so he gave a prayer/talk. He got up and it sounded like he was praying, but then he started talking about how grateful he was that his daughter was able to come, and he asked her to stand up, so she did and everyone opened their eyes and realized he wasn’t praying. And he went on to talk about some of his experiences he had throughout the week and threw in a story or 2, then he continued on with his prayer and ended. Afterwards everyone was looking around thinking, what happened?? We visit Fernando all the time, so we were surprised at all, but it made me laugh.
One of my favorite people in the ward is named Manfredo. He is from El Salvador. He is 70 years old and he always signs up to go out on exchanges with us. He reminds me of Santa Claus. He is a jolly old man with white hair and he is always laughing. Well on Wednesday the other elders in our district had to use our car to go to transfer meeting, so we went out on our bikes and Manfredo went out biking with us to go visit people. I wish I could have gotten a picture of us riding around with Manfredo. He actually goes out almost every week with the bike Elders too. He is awesome.
In other news, the church started to do something new with all the missions a few months ago. The church had ads for the Book of Mormon and other movies and stuff on the TV, and people call in and order those things, then we get a text message that has all their information. Well they set up a system, where we call this number when we contact the referral and we report whether or not we dropped them or we are still teaching them and all that stuff. Our mission was terrible at it the first couple months. The church spends more money on advertising in different areas depending on what percentage of the referrals the missionaries report. Well this last month we got on top of that and started calling all the missionaries to get the referrals reported and our mission president informed us in a meeting this week that our mission is now #1 in the world for reporting referrals. I thought that was pretty cool.
Unfortunately our best investigator named Victor has kind of disappeared on us. That is one of the struggles with teaching people here. Victor doesn’t have a cell phone or any way of contacting him, so if he gets a new job or moves or anything, we lose him and we just have to keep stopping by his apartment until we get lucky and find him home. He is supposed to get baptized this Sunday, so hopefully we can find him this week. We have taught him everything and he is absolutely golden…he hasn’t run into any problems.
Oh yeah, here is another story. It is funny/ironic/sad. We have been teaching this other family for a week or 2 and they finally came to church last Sunday and they absolutely loved it. We stopped by their apartment a day or 2 after and their son answered the door and said that his parents were in jail. Uh oh! He explained that they threw a big party and had a big barbeque and invited all the neighbors and their friends to come over and they invited them all to come to church with them the next week. Well, like every party here, everyone started drinking and the parents got drunk and started fighting with one of their older kids. (Yes they were drinking to celebrate coming to church). They ended up calling the cops to try to get their son in trouble, but when the cops came they arrested them instead. The wife luckily has a work visa which expired the day after they got arrested, but the husband is here illegally and is now going to get deported. That’s definitely a problem when your investigators get deported. We don’t know whats going to happen with the rest of the family, but they're probably going to have to go to Mexico because they don’t have any money to pay for anything. Unfortunately its not very unusual to have this kind of stuff happen.
G-Man: I miss you too. I like to play with army mans too sometimes. You had a cool Halloween costume. If I was going to dress up for Halloween I would be Leonardo.
OK, that is all for this week. I love you all and hope you have a good week!!
Love,
Chase
Happy Birthday Christopher! When I was serving in Richmond, a lot of the members worked for Exxon. They were all attorneys and project managers and stuff like that. Tons of people here work for the gas companies. If you were ever near the Medical Center area with all the huge hospitals or by the Reliant stadium or by Lakewood church, all that stuff is in my area. I would guess you were up north in the other part of the city. I think that’s where those big business offices are.
I got that letter from Mom a few days ago. I always love those things. All the FF stuff was interesting, and no it doesn’t distract me at all. All of the stuff about Heather was interesting as well. I was pretty impressed with the blog post about how she selected her football team. The Seahawks is a respectable choice. Wasn’t Jim Mora the coach for the Falcons before?
It seems like that is a huge epidemic of some sort of sickness going around here. In almost every single household there are people sick. We make sure we use our hand sanitizer all the time.
Congratulations Mom for running 6 miles. That is definitely further than I have ever gone. I don’t like running at all either. I think it is boring, but I do love to listen to music, so whenever I went running I just looked at it as a time to listen to music, that way it was so much more fun.
Here is my story for the week. We are teaching this family from Honduras named the Mejia family. (They are the black ones who speak Spanish). Well they have to move because they don’t have enough money to pay for their current apartment, so they decided to move to an apartment just down the block. So of course we volunteer to help and we got our ward mission leader to come with us and he brought one of the youth. Well when we showed up to help they had done absolutely no preparation for the move. Everything was still a mess, dirty dishes in the kitchen. Her husband was sick too so he was just laying on the couch. We figured we just start taking all the big stuff out like the couches and get started on the move, so we asked where the moving truck was and she was like, ok wait a second. She ran outside and came back in 5 minutes with a shopping cart. She said we should just put everything in there and walk it down to the new apartment. They didn’t have a car or truck or anything. So that is exactly what we did. We picked up the big huge couch and balanced it on the shopping cart and started walking towards the new apartment. Along the way we acquired 3 more shopping carts and we started caravanning back and forth, loading up the shopping carts and pushing them down to the new apartment. We put big huge couches on those things, an entertainment center, but I thought the most hilarious part was when we put a whole oven in one of those shopping carts and pushed it down to the new apartment. As we walked down the sidewalk pushing our shopping carts with couches and whatnot balancing on them, everyone stared at us as they drove past. It was hilarious. At one point it was just me and my companion pushing 2 shopping carts down the street with 2 big huge TV’s (EVERYone here has big huge TV’s here regardless of how poor they are. Even if they don’t have couches they always have to have their big screen TV), and it definitely looked like we were stealing the TV’s. Well after 4 hours we got all of the big stuff and we left. That was probably one of the most ghetto moves I’ve ever seen. It was hilarious. I am glad we were able to help them.
Here's my kitchen story…I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this one. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago about how one of the members taught us how to make banana milk and it is delicious. Well, a few weeks ago I started to buy frozen strawberry’s and I always buy that Kern’s juice stuff in a can. Instead of Kerns, I buy a brand called Jumex and its like 33 cents a can and it is delicious. Well we also have a magic bullet, which I love. I throw in some frozen strawberries, a banana, a scoop of ice cream, some strawberry banana juice, and blend it up and it is delicious. I usually have a smoothie with every lunch I make.
Yesterday at church I noticed 2 funny things that happened. The first one was that when we started at 10:30 like we are supposed to, we only had 20 people there. Like always, everyone starts to trickle in as time goes on and by the end of the meeting we had 104 people there. Not even a 5th of the people showed up on time. The next funny part was that the closing prayer was given by an old man who is a recent convert named Fernando. He is from Costa Rica. He has a lot of health problems and he always wears these black sunglasses because the light hurts his eyes. Well I guess he wasn’t satisfied with just giving a prayer, so he gave a prayer/talk. He got up and it sounded like he was praying, but then he started talking about how grateful he was that his daughter was able to come, and he asked her to stand up, so she did and everyone opened their eyes and realized he wasn’t praying. And he went on to talk about some of his experiences he had throughout the week and threw in a story or 2, then he continued on with his prayer and ended. Afterwards everyone was looking around thinking, what happened?? We visit Fernando all the time, so we were surprised at all, but it made me laugh.
One of my favorite people in the ward is named Manfredo. He is from El Salvador. He is 70 years old and he always signs up to go out on exchanges with us. He reminds me of Santa Claus. He is a jolly old man with white hair and he is always laughing. Well on Wednesday the other elders in our district had to use our car to go to transfer meeting, so we went out on our bikes and Manfredo went out biking with us to go visit people. I wish I could have gotten a picture of us riding around with Manfredo. He actually goes out almost every week with the bike Elders too. He is awesome.
In other news, the church started to do something new with all the missions a few months ago. The church had ads for the Book of Mormon and other movies and stuff on the TV, and people call in and order those things, then we get a text message that has all their information. Well they set up a system, where we call this number when we contact the referral and we report whether or not we dropped them or we are still teaching them and all that stuff. Our mission was terrible at it the first couple months. The church spends more money on advertising in different areas depending on what percentage of the referrals the missionaries report. Well this last month we got on top of that and started calling all the missionaries to get the referrals reported and our mission president informed us in a meeting this week that our mission is now #1 in the world for reporting referrals. I thought that was pretty cool.
Unfortunately our best investigator named Victor has kind of disappeared on us. That is one of the struggles with teaching people here. Victor doesn’t have a cell phone or any way of contacting him, so if he gets a new job or moves or anything, we lose him and we just have to keep stopping by his apartment until we get lucky and find him home. He is supposed to get baptized this Sunday, so hopefully we can find him this week. We have taught him everything and he is absolutely golden…he hasn’t run into any problems.
Oh yeah, here is another story. It is funny/ironic/sad. We have been teaching this other family for a week or 2 and they finally came to church last Sunday and they absolutely loved it. We stopped by their apartment a day or 2 after and their son answered the door and said that his parents were in jail. Uh oh! He explained that they threw a big party and had a big barbeque and invited all the neighbors and their friends to come over and they invited them all to come to church with them the next week. Well, like every party here, everyone started drinking and the parents got drunk and started fighting with one of their older kids. (Yes they were drinking to celebrate coming to church). They ended up calling the cops to try to get their son in trouble, but when the cops came they arrested them instead. The wife luckily has a work visa which expired the day after they got arrested, but the husband is here illegally and is now going to get deported. That’s definitely a problem when your investigators get deported. We don’t know whats going to happen with the rest of the family, but they're probably going to have to go to Mexico because they don’t have any money to pay for anything. Unfortunately its not very unusual to have this kind of stuff happen.
G-Man: I miss you too. I like to play with army mans too sometimes. You had a cool Halloween costume. If I was going to dress up for Halloween I would be Leonardo.
OK, that is all for this week. I love you all and hope you have a good week!!
Love,
Chase
Monday, November 2, 2009
Received Mon Nov 2 2009
Dear Family,
We got our transfer information this morning! Neither me nor my companion is getting transferred. Our district leader and 1 of the sisters in our district are getting transferred. Our district leader was a really cool guy…he is one of my good friends in the mission, so it is sad to see him go, but we expected it. I’m glad nothing changed in my companionship though.
I actually have some pretty good stories this week. I’ll start off with Halloween, since Mom asked about that. No, not very many people at all went trick or treating. I don’t think any parents feel safe walking around with their kids in these apartment complexes. We drove through a nice part of our area, called Bellaire, which is like a city within Houston, and there were a lot of people trick or treating there. But, the eventful thing for that night was that we went to the Lakewood Church (Joel Osteen’s church). We went on exchanges with one of our members earlier in the week and we started talking about Lakewood and he talked about how he use to go to Lakewood before he joined our church, then when he found out both of us wanted to go there sometime he offered to take us on Saturday night. That was quite an experience. We got there a little late because we were finishing up at an appointment. The building is huuuge. It actually reminded me of the Marriot Center at BYU…it was actually almost the exact same size. But anyway…when we got there there was a band playing on the stage and the music was blasting. There are 3 big jumbotron screens to watch the people on the stage and it had the words to the songs. The music was actually really good. It was a pretty legit concert, with music blasting, fog coming down from the ceiling, people dancing around and everything. After that, Victoria Olsteen came up and talked about how they had just visited Kenya and they played a little movie thing showing their visit there. After that she talked about families and told everyone to stand up if they wanted her to say a prayer and dedicate their families. Then she started praying. Oh yeah, and the whole time there was someone playing background music on the piano. When they pray all the people who are really into it raise their arms into the air and if they really like it they stand up too. After that there was more music, then Joel came up and he started his sermon. He started by quoting Psalms 47:1 that mentions a “shout of praise.” His whole sermon was on how we just need to shout (literally) praises to God to overcome trials and be more faithful. He used the example of how the army walked around the walls of Jericho 6 times, but then on the 7th time they all shouted a praise, and that’s what tore the walls of Jericho down. Then he told everyone to get up and to shout. So everyone did, and we did that a couple more times throughout his whole sermon. People would yell out some Hallelujah’s and Amen’s throughout if they liked it. It was all so interesting. Then at the end on the way out, one of the Usher guys asked us if we would like to meat Joel. (All the workers there knew we were missionaries from the LDS Church). We said ok, so he took us to the other side and he let us go in first and we all had to stand in a line side by side…there were probably 40 other people there. They gave us these little book things. Then Victoria and Joel came in and they signed our little books and the Usher guys took pictures for us.
All in all, I thought it was an awesome experience to see other people’s opinions of church. Now I know what some people are expecting when we invite them to come to church. Brother Ramos, the member who took us, explained it pretty well. He said the church is a church about nothing. Joel Osteen is a great motivational speaker and seems like a really nice guy, but you don’t really learn anything. You don’t learn the gospel. Now I understand why so many people don’t understand why people come to church every week. Going there makes you feel good and everything, but its more like a show and you don’t make covenants or learn about the scriptures or gospel. Well…that is probably a lot more than you all wanted to hear, but I thought it was all fascinating. I left out a lot of details and thoughts, but I’ll just have to tell that experience in person.
Next…so we have this apartment complex called Jefferson House where we have tons of investigators and everyone always sees us there and we always find more and more people to teach. Well, in the morning we stopped by one of our investigators and asked how she was doing. She was sitting on the couch and said her stomach was really hurting. We asked if she had taken any pills to help, and she said yes but it didn’t take away any of the pain. She said she was just going to wait for her husband to get home at 5. So we left. A couple hours later we were back in that same complex teaching someone else in their apartment when we hear a banging on the door. They open it and we hear screaming and crying. It was Lucia Mejia, our investigator we visited in the morning. She could barely stand. Apparently she knew the people we were teaching. They sat her down in a chair and she just kept screaming and crying and breathing hard. Then all the sudden she stopped and her whole body just went limp and it went dead quiet. That definitely scared me. The people ran and grabbed some rubbing alcohol and held it in front of her mouth and nose and that brought her back to consciousness. Meanwhile the neighbor was calling 911, but she could speak English, so my companion talked to them. Then we ran to the front of the complex, found out what the code was to open the gate and opened it when the ambulance got there. Then they took her to the hospital. A day later we stop by and shes back on the couch again at her normal spot with the front door wide open as usual. Apparently she had a uterus infection…awkward! She is taking some pills and she feels better now, but that was a pretty traumatic experience.
What else….we had a pretty interesting dinner this week. It was a big huge pot with a soup, filled with full sized, unpeeled, untouched shrimp (antennas, eyes, little crawly legs, shells, and all), octopus meat, squid meat, and imitation crab meat. I didn’t really know exactly how to eat it. At another dinner a few weeks ago they plopped a full size untouched fish on my plate, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that either. They ate the whole thing. They ate the skin, the brains, the fins, everything. So now with this shrimp I didn’t know if they were going to eat the whole shrimp or what. Luckily they expected us to crack them open and eat the meat on the inside. They would eat the brains and all…I couldn’t make myself do that. The octopus was actually pretty good and the squid wasn’t bad either. After that meal we reeked like fish food though. We went on exchanges with a member and when we got into the car he said we stunk. It was pretty funny.
I also went on exchanges this week with a companionship who’s having a tough time. It is a brand new missionary and his trainer who doesn’t know what to do. The new missionary had a hard couple of first days. He is scared of black people and his area is in the middle of the black ghetto, so he is scared out of his mind. He also is really fiery…he wants to whip that ward into shape, and he has good intentions, but he is offending a lot of people (members mostly) when he tells them they need to repent and change all these things in their lives. The trainer isn’t really confident either and he doesn’t know how to handle any of it. So we had a really good exchange with them...they were both really happy at the end of it. It turns out that new missionary is getting transferred and he is probably going to go out to the country somewhere where he can be more comfortable.
Hmm…I cant think of anything else. We knew about day light savings time because President Saylin texted us and told us to tell everyone in our zones.
We did have our primary program a couple weeks ago…it was awesome. I loved hearing all the songs in Spanish.
Ok, I am about out of time…I love you all!
Love,
Chase
We got our transfer information this morning! Neither me nor my companion is getting transferred. Our district leader and 1 of the sisters in our district are getting transferred. Our district leader was a really cool guy…he is one of my good friends in the mission, so it is sad to see him go, but we expected it. I’m glad nothing changed in my companionship though.
I actually have some pretty good stories this week. I’ll start off with Halloween, since Mom asked about that. No, not very many people at all went trick or treating. I don’t think any parents feel safe walking around with their kids in these apartment complexes. We drove through a nice part of our area, called Bellaire, which is like a city within Houston, and there were a lot of people trick or treating there. But, the eventful thing for that night was that we went to the Lakewood Church (Joel Osteen’s church). We went on exchanges with one of our members earlier in the week and we started talking about Lakewood and he talked about how he use to go to Lakewood before he joined our church, then when he found out both of us wanted to go there sometime he offered to take us on Saturday night. That was quite an experience. We got there a little late because we were finishing up at an appointment. The building is huuuge. It actually reminded me of the Marriot Center at BYU…it was actually almost the exact same size. But anyway…when we got there there was a band playing on the stage and the music was blasting. There are 3 big jumbotron screens to watch the people on the stage and it had the words to the songs. The music was actually really good. It was a pretty legit concert, with music blasting, fog coming down from the ceiling, people dancing around and everything. After that, Victoria Olsteen came up and talked about how they had just visited Kenya and they played a little movie thing showing their visit there. After that she talked about families and told everyone to stand up if they wanted her to say a prayer and dedicate their families. Then she started praying. Oh yeah, and the whole time there was someone playing background music on the piano. When they pray all the people who are really into it raise their arms into the air and if they really like it they stand up too. After that there was more music, then Joel came up and he started his sermon. He started by quoting Psalms 47:1 that mentions a “shout of praise.” His whole sermon was on how we just need to shout (literally) praises to God to overcome trials and be more faithful. He used the example of how the army walked around the walls of Jericho 6 times, but then on the 7th time they all shouted a praise, and that’s what tore the walls of Jericho down. Then he told everyone to get up and to shout. So everyone did, and we did that a couple more times throughout his whole sermon. People would yell out some Hallelujah’s and Amen’s throughout if they liked it. It was all so interesting. Then at the end on the way out, one of the Usher guys asked us if we would like to meat Joel. (All the workers there knew we were missionaries from the LDS Church). We said ok, so he took us to the other side and he let us go in first and we all had to stand in a line side by side…there were probably 40 other people there. They gave us these little book things. Then Victoria and Joel came in and they signed our little books and the Usher guys took pictures for us.
All in all, I thought it was an awesome experience to see other people’s opinions of church. Now I know what some people are expecting when we invite them to come to church. Brother Ramos, the member who took us, explained it pretty well. He said the church is a church about nothing. Joel Osteen is a great motivational speaker and seems like a really nice guy, but you don’t really learn anything. You don’t learn the gospel. Now I understand why so many people don’t understand why people come to church every week. Going there makes you feel good and everything, but its more like a show and you don’t make covenants or learn about the scriptures or gospel. Well…that is probably a lot more than you all wanted to hear, but I thought it was all fascinating. I left out a lot of details and thoughts, but I’ll just have to tell that experience in person.
Next…so we have this apartment complex called Jefferson House where we have tons of investigators and everyone always sees us there and we always find more and more people to teach. Well, in the morning we stopped by one of our investigators and asked how she was doing. She was sitting on the couch and said her stomach was really hurting. We asked if she had taken any pills to help, and she said yes but it didn’t take away any of the pain. She said she was just going to wait for her husband to get home at 5. So we left. A couple hours later we were back in that same complex teaching someone else in their apartment when we hear a banging on the door. They open it and we hear screaming and crying. It was Lucia Mejia, our investigator we visited in the morning. She could barely stand. Apparently she knew the people we were teaching. They sat her down in a chair and she just kept screaming and crying and breathing hard. Then all the sudden she stopped and her whole body just went limp and it went dead quiet. That definitely scared me. The people ran and grabbed some rubbing alcohol and held it in front of her mouth and nose and that brought her back to consciousness. Meanwhile the neighbor was calling 911, but she could speak English, so my companion talked to them. Then we ran to the front of the complex, found out what the code was to open the gate and opened it when the ambulance got there. Then they took her to the hospital. A day later we stop by and shes back on the couch again at her normal spot with the front door wide open as usual. Apparently she had a uterus infection…awkward! She is taking some pills and she feels better now, but that was a pretty traumatic experience.
What else….we had a pretty interesting dinner this week. It was a big huge pot with a soup, filled with full sized, unpeeled, untouched shrimp (antennas, eyes, little crawly legs, shells, and all), octopus meat, squid meat, and imitation crab meat. I didn’t really know exactly how to eat it. At another dinner a few weeks ago they plopped a full size untouched fish on my plate, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that either. They ate the whole thing. They ate the skin, the brains, the fins, everything. So now with this shrimp I didn’t know if they were going to eat the whole shrimp or what. Luckily they expected us to crack them open and eat the meat on the inside. They would eat the brains and all…I couldn’t make myself do that. The octopus was actually pretty good and the squid wasn’t bad either. After that meal we reeked like fish food though. We went on exchanges with a member and when we got into the car he said we stunk. It was pretty funny.
I also went on exchanges this week with a companionship who’s having a tough time. It is a brand new missionary and his trainer who doesn’t know what to do. The new missionary had a hard couple of first days. He is scared of black people and his area is in the middle of the black ghetto, so he is scared out of his mind. He also is really fiery…he wants to whip that ward into shape, and he has good intentions, but he is offending a lot of people (members mostly) when he tells them they need to repent and change all these things in their lives. The trainer isn’t really confident either and he doesn’t know how to handle any of it. So we had a really good exchange with them...they were both really happy at the end of it. It turns out that new missionary is getting transferred and he is probably going to go out to the country somewhere where he can be more comfortable.
Hmm…I cant think of anything else. We knew about day light savings time because President Saylin texted us and told us to tell everyone in our zones.
We did have our primary program a couple weeks ago…it was awesome. I loved hearing all the songs in Spanish.
Ok, I am about out of time…I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Received Mon, Oct 26, 2009
Dear Family,
Well this week I don’t have a ton of stuff written down, but luckily Mom has provided me with a nice long list of questions/things to talk about.
First off, I am glad everyone is enjoying my iPod…I definitely had some good music on there. I think I have a workout playlist on there too that has crazier music to keep me entertained when I use to always go running. I don’t think I ever mentioned that the music rules got a lot stricter in the mission a month or 2 ago. We are now only allowed to listen to Mormon Tabernacle Choir, classical music, and EFY music. Usually we listen to motab in the morning, EFY in the car, and classical music on P-days and other times were in the apartment. I actually like classical music…it is the best workout music we have. Between my companion and I we have EFY CD’s 1999 to 2009. There are surprisingly a lot of really good songs on the newest EFY CD’s but I am definitely getting sick of hearing the same stuff over and over and over and over again. I just tell myself that I am going to really love and appreciate normal music when I can listen to it again.
Halloween: We haven’t gotten any direction yet. I’m sure we’ll just have a normal day. To be honest I doubt very many people are going to go out trick or treating around here. If I was a parent I definitely wouldn’t want my kids walking around at night time in this area. I will have to report next week what happens though.
I’m pretty sure I know Elder Barrow’s grandpa. He is a crazy old man named Wiley Barrow. He is in one of the 3 Sugar Land wards. I did service with him during the hurricane. With him, we patched up peoples roofs. They told us to be really careful if we were going to be on roofs and to try to stay away from steep roofs and 2 story houses. Well all the houses he took us to were really tall 2 story houses and they were all really steep. It was probably my most fun day of service though.
ACT: The second time taking the ACT is always better. I don’t remember where I got it from…but I got a practice test and I took that a week before I took the real thing. I think they had it in the office at the high school or something. All the counselors there are absolutely oblivious to the ACT, but I think they do have a stack of practice tests you can take. I also did like all of the practice questions they have online. That helped me out a lot.
Dads talk: I actually shared the same story about Captain Moroni 2-3 times this week. The wars chapters of the Book of Mormon are my favorite part of the whole thing and Captain Moroni is my favorite one to read about.
AHS Soccer: Quinn that is too bad about not making it onto the team, but its also no big deal. The same thing happened to me and Christopher. I will tell you one thing though, I wish that I had tried out for the track team as well. I would have loved to do the 100m dash and the long jump and maybe the high jump. If you like to do any of that stuff I would definitely do that…it would be fun.
Swine Flu: We haven’t gotten any direction on the swine flu as far as the vaccine, but at our last zone conference the Saylin’s bought a ton of those little hand sanitizer bottles and have them to us and told us to use them all throughout the day. They’ve told us to be careful and wash our hands a lot. A couple weeks ago when I got sick I don’t know what it was but I had all the symptoms of the swine flu. So maybe I already got it, I don’t know. I survived and I’m fine now, so I’m not worried about it. I actually worked every day I was sick too.
Yes I got the 1001 pitfalls book and I read it every morning as I eat my cereal and during lunch too. It is a good book. I also found this picture dictionary we have in our apartment. It takes a scene like a grocery store and it has definitions of allll the things you can find in a grocery store. So its like you study the vocab by topic which I have been loving too.
I actually just got an e-mail from Tony today. He got to Argentina a few weeks ago (he had a little Visa delay). His companion is from Buenos Aires and has a thick Argentine accent, so he can barely understand him. He says everyone talks fast and with that accent so they are hard to understand, but he says its getting better every day.
Ok I am just about out of time. This week has been a good one though. We had 10 people at church yesterday. We are teaching a bunch of really good people are I don’t doubt are going to get baptized in the near future. This is our last week of the transfer so we will get the transfer call next week. There is not much of a chance either of us will get transferred and I definitely hope we both stay. Its pretty certain that I’m going to kill him off, as we say in the mission. Hes only got like 2 transfers left…he goes home January 23 or something.
Oh yeah, and about that thing we need to send to the Burtons, I am planning on writing that little paragraph today and I’ll just send it in the mail, then Mom maybe you could type it up and e-mail it to Sister Burton along with those 2 pictures. I’ll probably just send you the letter that she sent to me that has all her information and a description of what exactly it is.
Ok, have a good week! I love you all!
Chase
Well this week I don’t have a ton of stuff written down, but luckily Mom has provided me with a nice long list of questions/things to talk about.
First off, I am glad everyone is enjoying my iPod…I definitely had some good music on there. I think I have a workout playlist on there too that has crazier music to keep me entertained when I use to always go running. I don’t think I ever mentioned that the music rules got a lot stricter in the mission a month or 2 ago. We are now only allowed to listen to Mormon Tabernacle Choir, classical music, and EFY music. Usually we listen to motab in the morning, EFY in the car, and classical music on P-days and other times were in the apartment. I actually like classical music…it is the best workout music we have. Between my companion and I we have EFY CD’s 1999 to 2009. There are surprisingly a lot of really good songs on the newest EFY CD’s but I am definitely getting sick of hearing the same stuff over and over and over and over again. I just tell myself that I am going to really love and appreciate normal music when I can listen to it again.
Halloween: We haven’t gotten any direction yet. I’m sure we’ll just have a normal day. To be honest I doubt very many people are going to go out trick or treating around here. If I was a parent I definitely wouldn’t want my kids walking around at night time in this area. I will have to report next week what happens though.
I’m pretty sure I know Elder Barrow’s grandpa. He is a crazy old man named Wiley Barrow. He is in one of the 3 Sugar Land wards. I did service with him during the hurricane. With him, we patched up peoples roofs. They told us to be really careful if we were going to be on roofs and to try to stay away from steep roofs and 2 story houses. Well all the houses he took us to were really tall 2 story houses and they were all really steep. It was probably my most fun day of service though.
ACT: The second time taking the ACT is always better. I don’t remember where I got it from…but I got a practice test and I took that a week before I took the real thing. I think they had it in the office at the high school or something. All the counselors there are absolutely oblivious to the ACT, but I think they do have a stack of practice tests you can take. I also did like all of the practice questions they have online. That helped me out a lot.
Dads talk: I actually shared the same story about Captain Moroni 2-3 times this week. The wars chapters of the Book of Mormon are my favorite part of the whole thing and Captain Moroni is my favorite one to read about.
AHS Soccer: Quinn that is too bad about not making it onto the team, but its also no big deal. The same thing happened to me and Christopher. I will tell you one thing though, I wish that I had tried out for the track team as well. I would have loved to do the 100m dash and the long jump and maybe the high jump. If you like to do any of that stuff I would definitely do that…it would be fun.
Swine Flu: We haven’t gotten any direction on the swine flu as far as the vaccine, but at our last zone conference the Saylin’s bought a ton of those little hand sanitizer bottles and have them to us and told us to use them all throughout the day. They’ve told us to be careful and wash our hands a lot. A couple weeks ago when I got sick I don’t know what it was but I had all the symptoms of the swine flu. So maybe I already got it, I don’t know. I survived and I’m fine now, so I’m not worried about it. I actually worked every day I was sick too.
Yes I got the 1001 pitfalls book and I read it every morning as I eat my cereal and during lunch too. It is a good book. I also found this picture dictionary we have in our apartment. It takes a scene like a grocery store and it has definitions of allll the things you can find in a grocery store. So its like you study the vocab by topic which I have been loving too.
I actually just got an e-mail from Tony today. He got to Argentina a few weeks ago (he had a little Visa delay). His companion is from Buenos Aires and has a thick Argentine accent, so he can barely understand him. He says everyone talks fast and with that accent so they are hard to understand, but he says its getting better every day.
Ok I am just about out of time. This week has been a good one though. We had 10 people at church yesterday. We are teaching a bunch of really good people are I don’t doubt are going to get baptized in the near future. This is our last week of the transfer so we will get the transfer call next week. There is not much of a chance either of us will get transferred and I definitely hope we both stay. Its pretty certain that I’m going to kill him off, as we say in the mission. Hes only got like 2 transfers left…he goes home January 23 or something.
Oh yeah, and about that thing we need to send to the Burtons, I am planning on writing that little paragraph today and I’ll just send it in the mail, then Mom maybe you could type it up and e-mail it to Sister Burton along with those 2 pictures. I’ll probably just send you the letter that she sent to me that has all her information and a description of what exactly it is.
Ok, have a good week! I love you all!
Chase
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Received Mon Oct 19, 2009
Dear Family,
I think I will start this week’s letter by responding to Mom’s letter. First question: What is everyone’s record for fantasy football? Next comment…I thought that missionaries could always e-mail in the MTC. I e-mailed the whole time I was there. We either had 30 or 45 minutes to e-mail…I think it was 30. Out in the field we get 45 minutes. I remember when I tried out for the soccer team the first year it was when there were a whole bunch of fires and the air quality was really bad, so that was not a very fun time either. The coaches are pretty stupid…I don’t think they gave us many water breaks either.
That is awesome that Zak got to do the Missionary for a day thing. I did that as well and I had a good time. I thought it was all interesting. I went to La Canada where everyone was rich.
Ok…this has been a good week. Yesterday we had 7 people at church and they all had really good experiences. We also had a baptism yesterday. The baptism went well for the most part, but Abev, the kid getting baptized, was really nervous. He didn’t really know how to act being the center of attention. He kept hiding before the baptismal service, then he had to get a drink, then he got really hungry and needed a snack. It all went well though. I did have one funny/embarrassing experience. Before the baptismal service the mom of the kid getting baptized was carrying in a big cake with a bunch of cupcakes and it was all decorated and it looked good. So I said…wow…how beautiful! (in Spanish of course). Then she turned around with a big smile and was like…really?? Thank you elder!!! Then I said it yeah…it looks good. Then she was like, Me?? Then I realized she thought I was talking about her the whole time. So I said…Oh NO, no, no, I was talking about the cake. Haha….it was embarrassing, but hilarious at the same time. I’ve learned to never be embarrassed on my mission and just laugh at stuff like that.
Lets see…last week I mentioned we have a bunch of people with baptismal dates. I think I talked about a few of them, but I’ll tell a little more. One of them is named Victor; he is awesome. He is from Nicaragua and he has been here for only about 3 months. He’s like 46 years old and he has a family back in Nicaragua who he sends all his money to. He’s probably one of the most humble and genuinely nicest guys I’ve ever met. Well, about the second time we stopped by, when he opened the door we noticed he had a shirt of something wrapped around his elbow and when he sat down he was obviously in a lot of pain. When we asked what happened he was pretty distressed. He works at night, so the night before he was returning home from work at like 1 or 2 in the morning and when he was crossing the street to his apartment complex these 3 guys jumped out of a car and jumped him. They hit him in the arm with a baseball bat or something and stole everything he had. He managed to stumble away and run back to his apartment. But now he has no form of identification at all or anything. He cant go to the hospital either. He started to cry when he told us all of this stuff. These situations are always hard to know what to do. We said a prayer with him with helped a lot then we made a sling out of an old shirt he had. Then we started talking about the gospel to get his mind off everything and it turns out he is an amazing person and he is very prepared for the gospel. So that’s when we extended a baptismal invitation for November 15 and he accepted. He came to church yesterday and had a great time. I love him because he’s one of the most real people I’ve met here. It seems like everyone hides behind a big act or a mask or something. One of the most important steps for an investigator to take when were teaching them is to get them to take off that mask they hide behind and really open up and be real. After that is when everything takes off and they really start to progress and their lives change. We have 4-5 investigators who are at that point, and we love teaching them. I will tell you about some more of them next week.
We had our zone conference this week too. My companion and I were asked to do a role play in front of everyone to show them how they should teach this new principle that we learned. (Role playing is when 2 missionaries act like they are investigators and 2 other missionaries teach them). That was pretty nerve wracking. We were in front of half the mission, so we had to make sure it was pretty much perfect. Fortunately it went really well and we had an excellent zone conference. President Saylin has done some pretty remarkable things in the mission. Everyone is so much more obedient, even though we were already a pretty obedient mission. When he got here we had like 80 investigators with a baptismal date in the mission, now we have over 150. It has been cool to watch all of this stuff happen.
Ok, I haven’t shared any food stories recently. One of my new favorite things is Banana Milk. A member in our ward taught us how to make it. All you do is throw a banana in a blender, put in some milk and some sugar, then blend it up. I don’t really like bananas very much, but when its in the form of banana milk it is delicious. I usually make some banana milk to drink with my lunch. For lunch I have a new favorite thing. I’ve discovered at our walmart here a bag of chopped up chicken…fajita chicken or something. Its already cooked and seasoned so all you have to do it heat it up. With that I’ve been making chicken quesadillas, which I love. My secret ingredient is masterpiece bbq sauce. It is delicious.
The other new thing that I’ve found that I like are plums. The purple ones. I bought red ones last week and they were disgusting. I’ve bought apples a couple times in my mission, but I never like them that much. So one day I bought a couple plums and I loved them. Plums are just like apples, but they are juicier and they taste better.
Oh yeah...and I forgot to write up that little summary about how my mission is going (for that Christmas present for my BYU bishop)..I need to make sure I do that next week, then you can e-mail all that stuff to Mrs. Burton.
Well…everything is still going great. We have tons of people to teach. On Saturday we had more to do than we had time. We were late to everything and in a rush from the morning all the way until we went to sleep at night. If I had to choose a problem to have, I’d definitely take having too much to do over having nothing to do. Ok, I love you all!! Have a good week!!
Love,
Chase
PS. Mom thank you for buying that book…I’ve wondered since the start of my mission if there was a book out there like that and now I finally found it. I am excited.
I think I will start this week’s letter by responding to Mom’s letter. First question: What is everyone’s record for fantasy football? Next comment…I thought that missionaries could always e-mail in the MTC. I e-mailed the whole time I was there. We either had 30 or 45 minutes to e-mail…I think it was 30. Out in the field we get 45 minutes. I remember when I tried out for the soccer team the first year it was when there were a whole bunch of fires and the air quality was really bad, so that was not a very fun time either. The coaches are pretty stupid…I don’t think they gave us many water breaks either.
That is awesome that Zak got to do the Missionary for a day thing. I did that as well and I had a good time. I thought it was all interesting. I went to La Canada where everyone was rich.
Ok…this has been a good week. Yesterday we had 7 people at church and they all had really good experiences. We also had a baptism yesterday. The baptism went well for the most part, but Abev, the kid getting baptized, was really nervous. He didn’t really know how to act being the center of attention. He kept hiding before the baptismal service, then he had to get a drink, then he got really hungry and needed a snack. It all went well though. I did have one funny/embarrassing experience. Before the baptismal service the mom of the kid getting baptized was carrying in a big cake with a bunch of cupcakes and it was all decorated and it looked good. So I said…wow…how beautiful! (in Spanish of course). Then she turned around with a big smile and was like…really?? Thank you elder!!! Then I said it yeah…it looks good. Then she was like, Me?? Then I realized she thought I was talking about her the whole time. So I said…Oh NO, no, no, I was talking about the cake. Haha….it was embarrassing, but hilarious at the same time. I’ve learned to never be embarrassed on my mission and just laugh at stuff like that.
Lets see…last week I mentioned we have a bunch of people with baptismal dates. I think I talked about a few of them, but I’ll tell a little more. One of them is named Victor; he is awesome. He is from Nicaragua and he has been here for only about 3 months. He’s like 46 years old and he has a family back in Nicaragua who he sends all his money to. He’s probably one of the most humble and genuinely nicest guys I’ve ever met. Well, about the second time we stopped by, when he opened the door we noticed he had a shirt of something wrapped around his elbow and when he sat down he was obviously in a lot of pain. When we asked what happened he was pretty distressed. He works at night, so the night before he was returning home from work at like 1 or 2 in the morning and when he was crossing the street to his apartment complex these 3 guys jumped out of a car and jumped him. They hit him in the arm with a baseball bat or something and stole everything he had. He managed to stumble away and run back to his apartment. But now he has no form of identification at all or anything. He cant go to the hospital either. He started to cry when he told us all of this stuff. These situations are always hard to know what to do. We said a prayer with him with helped a lot then we made a sling out of an old shirt he had. Then we started talking about the gospel to get his mind off everything and it turns out he is an amazing person and he is very prepared for the gospel. So that’s when we extended a baptismal invitation for November 15 and he accepted. He came to church yesterday and had a great time. I love him because he’s one of the most real people I’ve met here. It seems like everyone hides behind a big act or a mask or something. One of the most important steps for an investigator to take when were teaching them is to get them to take off that mask they hide behind and really open up and be real. After that is when everything takes off and they really start to progress and their lives change. We have 4-5 investigators who are at that point, and we love teaching them. I will tell you about some more of them next week.
We had our zone conference this week too. My companion and I were asked to do a role play in front of everyone to show them how they should teach this new principle that we learned. (Role playing is when 2 missionaries act like they are investigators and 2 other missionaries teach them). That was pretty nerve wracking. We were in front of half the mission, so we had to make sure it was pretty much perfect. Fortunately it went really well and we had an excellent zone conference. President Saylin has done some pretty remarkable things in the mission. Everyone is so much more obedient, even though we were already a pretty obedient mission. When he got here we had like 80 investigators with a baptismal date in the mission, now we have over 150. It has been cool to watch all of this stuff happen.
Ok, I haven’t shared any food stories recently. One of my new favorite things is Banana Milk. A member in our ward taught us how to make it. All you do is throw a banana in a blender, put in some milk and some sugar, then blend it up. I don’t really like bananas very much, but when its in the form of banana milk it is delicious. I usually make some banana milk to drink with my lunch. For lunch I have a new favorite thing. I’ve discovered at our walmart here a bag of chopped up chicken…fajita chicken or something. Its already cooked and seasoned so all you have to do it heat it up. With that I’ve been making chicken quesadillas, which I love. My secret ingredient is masterpiece bbq sauce. It is delicious.
The other new thing that I’ve found that I like are plums. The purple ones. I bought red ones last week and they were disgusting. I’ve bought apples a couple times in my mission, but I never like them that much. So one day I bought a couple plums and I loved them. Plums are just like apples, but they are juicier and they taste better.
Oh yeah...and I forgot to write up that little summary about how my mission is going (for that Christmas present for my BYU bishop)..I need to make sure I do that next week, then you can e-mail all that stuff to Mrs. Burton.
Well…everything is still going great. We have tons of people to teach. On Saturday we had more to do than we had time. We were late to everything and in a rush from the morning all the way until we went to sleep at night. If I had to choose a problem to have, I’d definitely take having too much to do over having nothing to do. Ok, I love you all!! Have a good week!!
Love,
Chase
PS. Mom thank you for buying that book…I’ve wondered since the start of my mission if there was a book out there like that and now I finally found it. I am excited.
Received Mon Oct 12, 2009
Dear Family,
This week all the computers in our library were full except for the computers in the kids section, so me and my companion are here sitting on little tiny chairs and my legs can barely fit under the table…it is probably a funny sight.
That was an exciting e-mail! Congratulations to Steven…I thought that was a creative/cool engagement story. My question is, how did you do it? Did you somehow figure out how to edit a movie, and insert a little movie of yourself, and just time it perfectly so that it would all work out? And how did you choose the Mount Timpanogus temple?
The Griffin story made me laugh as usual. When I was in primary I wondered why my name was part of the 13th article of faith too.
Fantasy Football: I think it is funny how random all our fantasy football seasons have been…you never know who is going to have the best team. So what is everyone’s record right now?
I am excited for Christopher that he gets to come to Houston for an interview. I’m sure he wont get to see much of the city, but I bet it will still be fun. I don’t think I could ever live in a big city. It seems like there's cars whizzing by all around you and there are freeways going everywhere and the people drive crazy here. We hear/see car accidents all the time and people jaywalk all over the place and they get hit pretty frequently too…it is pretty crazy here. This is definitely my favorite place to be when it comes to being a missionary though.
Ok, now on to my list of things to write about. First, I got a letter from someone in my BYU ward…well their parents (the Burtons) actually and they are putting together a Christmas gift for our bishop there. They want all the missionaries to send them 2 pictures from their mission. 1 unique picture that shows something unique about their mission, and 1 picture that depicts missionary work. Well unfortunately I accidentally washed my flash drive, so I don’t have any pictures on there to look at, but (hopefully) all of my pictures are on Mom’s computer. I was thinking that for the 1 unique picture, I could send that one picture of me and Elder Pedersen standing on the seawall with the ocean in the background. Then for the other picture I could send a picture of me with the Dors (the black family from Haiti) when they were all dressed in white right before their baptism. Those are the only 2 pictures I can think of. I forgot to bring the Burton’s e-mail address, so I will try to bring it next week, but Mom if you could e-mail those pictures next week, that would be great. You can also look through my pictures and see if you can find any better ones to share. The Burtons also said they will send whatever they are making to all the parents too if you ask for it. I assume you do want one, so when you e-mail it you can just ask for it. I think I also have to write up a little summary of my mission too or something…I’ll figure that out later. Maybe I’ll just mail that home and you can type it up.
Ok…I have a couple more things written down. I went on 2 exchanges this last week. 1 of the exchanges I went to an area called Fresno, which covers part of Sugar Land and all that surrounding area. It is pretty difficult to find Hispanics there, but they have this one random part of their area that is away from everything else and it looks like the country side and there are a lot of Hispanics there. So we spent a lot of time there. It is pretty ghetto there though. Apparently there are problems with a lot of gangs there. There was graffiti all over EVERYthing. I guess the night before they went on a little rampage and graffitied all the road signs, walls, and some trailer homes (most people there live in trailers). The craziest part was when we were talking to one of their investigators and his older brother walked by and the investigator told us he was going to go fight someone down the street or something. He went to this one house where some pretty hardcore gangsters live. After talking to the investigator for a couple minutes we road back down the street and when we past the house with the hardcore gangsters we saw a couple of them outside getting ready to go to the fight or something and one of them was walking around with this big rifle and I didn’t stare over there long enough to see what other weapons they had, but it was pretty crazy. That is the first time I’ve actually seen a gun on my mission. I’ve heard several gunshots but I’ve never seen people holding guns. So that was my adventure there.
Then I went on exchanges with Elder Pedersen in another part of Houston. It was a good exchange. It definitely felt weird at first because the last time we were together he was pretty much training me. But we had a good exchange. He only has like 3 months on his mission now. I was happy to see that he had changed a couple things for the better and he is doing amazing things in the area hes at.
We are going to be having a baptism this Sunday! There is this one family who has been coming to church for a long time, but the parents cant get baptized because they are not married and they are living together. The husband still is technically married to someone down in Mexico, so they have to save up enough money to pay for the divorce, then get married to the lady he’s living with now. Unfortunately a lot of people are caught in this situation…they just don’t have enough money to pay for it all. There are 4 kids and 2 of them are old enough to get baptized. The younger of the 2 got baptized like 2 months ago, and the older one has been resisting it for whatever reason. Well it turns out he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to “pass” the baptismal interview and he thought it was a test. We explained about that and we actually gave him all the baptismal interview questions. We had some good lessons with him, then after general conference he came up to me and said, hey I think I’m finally ready to get baptized, can I do it on Sunday? Haha…that’s what every missionary wants to hear. So he is going to be baptized on this upcoming Sunday.
We have been having a ton of success lately. We currently have 8 people with baptismal dates. We have seen a lot of miracles…it is exciting. We have several more who we are going to be extending dates too as well. At the start of this transfer, we had 11 baptismal dates in the zone. Our zone has 10 companionships. Now we have something like 36 baptismal dates in the zone. It’s been awesome to watch happen. Whenever a companionship gets a baptismal date they call us and tell us about it, so that we can hear the stories and also write it on a whiteboard and keep track of it. Its always fun to hear those stories. Missionaries have been putting the trainings into action and obviously have been seeing a lot of success.
Ok well I’m almost out of time, so I have to wrap it up. Next week I’ll have to write about how we extended a couple of our baptismal dates. I do have 1 other request though. There is a book called 1001 Pitfall in Spanish and one of the missionaries had it when I was on exchanges, so I studied out of it one day and it is a good book. It talks about all the really frequent mistakes people make when speaking Spanish. Most missionaries make tons of these little mistakes and I always notice the little things and I always wonder what the correct way to say things is. On the back of the book it said it was like 11 bucks or something, so I was wondering if I could get an early Christmas present and get this book. It is called Barron’s 1001 Pitfalls in Spanish. The one I was looking at said 3rd edition, but I don’t know if that makes a difference. I only want the book if it is cheap though. So if you can find it somewhere for cheap, I would absolutely love to have this book. It will answer the little questions about Spanish I’ve had over my whole mission.
Ok that is all for this week. This is a pretty long one. I hope you have a great week! I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
This week all the computers in our library were full except for the computers in the kids section, so me and my companion are here sitting on little tiny chairs and my legs can barely fit under the table…it is probably a funny sight.
That was an exciting e-mail! Congratulations to Steven…I thought that was a creative/cool engagement story. My question is, how did you do it? Did you somehow figure out how to edit a movie, and insert a little movie of yourself, and just time it perfectly so that it would all work out? And how did you choose the Mount Timpanogus temple?
The Griffin story made me laugh as usual. When I was in primary I wondered why my name was part of the 13th article of faith too.
Fantasy Football: I think it is funny how random all our fantasy football seasons have been…you never know who is going to have the best team. So what is everyone’s record right now?
I am excited for Christopher that he gets to come to Houston for an interview. I’m sure he wont get to see much of the city, but I bet it will still be fun. I don’t think I could ever live in a big city. It seems like there's cars whizzing by all around you and there are freeways going everywhere and the people drive crazy here. We hear/see car accidents all the time and people jaywalk all over the place and they get hit pretty frequently too…it is pretty crazy here. This is definitely my favorite place to be when it comes to being a missionary though.
Ok, now on to my list of things to write about. First, I got a letter from someone in my BYU ward…well their parents (the Burtons) actually and they are putting together a Christmas gift for our bishop there. They want all the missionaries to send them 2 pictures from their mission. 1 unique picture that shows something unique about their mission, and 1 picture that depicts missionary work. Well unfortunately I accidentally washed my flash drive, so I don’t have any pictures on there to look at, but (hopefully) all of my pictures are on Mom’s computer. I was thinking that for the 1 unique picture, I could send that one picture of me and Elder Pedersen standing on the seawall with the ocean in the background. Then for the other picture I could send a picture of me with the Dors (the black family from Haiti) when they were all dressed in white right before their baptism. Those are the only 2 pictures I can think of. I forgot to bring the Burton’s e-mail address, so I will try to bring it next week, but Mom if you could e-mail those pictures next week, that would be great. You can also look through my pictures and see if you can find any better ones to share. The Burtons also said they will send whatever they are making to all the parents too if you ask for it. I assume you do want one, so when you e-mail it you can just ask for it. I think I also have to write up a little summary of my mission too or something…I’ll figure that out later. Maybe I’ll just mail that home and you can type it up.
Ok…I have a couple more things written down. I went on 2 exchanges this last week. 1 of the exchanges I went to an area called Fresno, which covers part of Sugar Land and all that surrounding area. It is pretty difficult to find Hispanics there, but they have this one random part of their area that is away from everything else and it looks like the country side and there are a lot of Hispanics there. So we spent a lot of time there. It is pretty ghetto there though. Apparently there are problems with a lot of gangs there. There was graffiti all over EVERYthing. I guess the night before they went on a little rampage and graffitied all the road signs, walls, and some trailer homes (most people there live in trailers). The craziest part was when we were talking to one of their investigators and his older brother walked by and the investigator told us he was going to go fight someone down the street or something. He went to this one house where some pretty hardcore gangsters live. After talking to the investigator for a couple minutes we road back down the street and when we past the house with the hardcore gangsters we saw a couple of them outside getting ready to go to the fight or something and one of them was walking around with this big rifle and I didn’t stare over there long enough to see what other weapons they had, but it was pretty crazy. That is the first time I’ve actually seen a gun on my mission. I’ve heard several gunshots but I’ve never seen people holding guns. So that was my adventure there.
Then I went on exchanges with Elder Pedersen in another part of Houston. It was a good exchange. It definitely felt weird at first because the last time we were together he was pretty much training me. But we had a good exchange. He only has like 3 months on his mission now. I was happy to see that he had changed a couple things for the better and he is doing amazing things in the area hes at.
We are going to be having a baptism this Sunday! There is this one family who has been coming to church for a long time, but the parents cant get baptized because they are not married and they are living together. The husband still is technically married to someone down in Mexico, so they have to save up enough money to pay for the divorce, then get married to the lady he’s living with now. Unfortunately a lot of people are caught in this situation…they just don’t have enough money to pay for it all. There are 4 kids and 2 of them are old enough to get baptized. The younger of the 2 got baptized like 2 months ago, and the older one has been resisting it for whatever reason. Well it turns out he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to “pass” the baptismal interview and he thought it was a test. We explained about that and we actually gave him all the baptismal interview questions. We had some good lessons with him, then after general conference he came up to me and said, hey I think I’m finally ready to get baptized, can I do it on Sunday? Haha…that’s what every missionary wants to hear. So he is going to be baptized on this upcoming Sunday.
We have been having a ton of success lately. We currently have 8 people with baptismal dates. We have seen a lot of miracles…it is exciting. We have several more who we are going to be extending dates too as well. At the start of this transfer, we had 11 baptismal dates in the zone. Our zone has 10 companionships. Now we have something like 36 baptismal dates in the zone. It’s been awesome to watch happen. Whenever a companionship gets a baptismal date they call us and tell us about it, so that we can hear the stories and also write it on a whiteboard and keep track of it. Its always fun to hear those stories. Missionaries have been putting the trainings into action and obviously have been seeing a lot of success.
Ok well I’m almost out of time, so I have to wrap it up. Next week I’ll have to write about how we extended a couple of our baptismal dates. I do have 1 other request though. There is a book called 1001 Pitfall in Spanish and one of the missionaries had it when I was on exchanges, so I studied out of it one day and it is a good book. It talks about all the really frequent mistakes people make when speaking Spanish. Most missionaries make tons of these little mistakes and I always notice the little things and I always wonder what the correct way to say things is. On the back of the book it said it was like 11 bucks or something, so I was wondering if I could get an early Christmas present and get this book. It is called Barron’s 1001 Pitfalls in Spanish. The one I was looking at said 3rd edition, but I don’t know if that makes a difference. I only want the book if it is cheap though. So if you can find it somewhere for cheap, I would absolutely love to have this book. It will answer the little questions about Spanish I’ve had over my whole mission.
Ok that is all for this week. This is a pretty long one. I hope you have a great week! I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
Monday, October 5, 2009
Received Mon Oct 5, 2009
Dear Family,
Yes Mom, I did get the cookies, they did not melt, and they were delicious. They were all gone in 2-3 days. Thank you for sending them...I loved them. My companion also thought they were amazing.
Congratulations Christopher! I bet that is a relief to have all that under your belt now. I think that would be awesome if Christopher came to Houston for an interview, just to see how everything is. It would definitely be an experience. As much as I love Houston, I don’t think I would ever live here by my own free will. At least not in actual Houston. As a missionary I absolutely love it though.
Unfortunately I got sick this week…I’m not sure what it was, but I think it’s allergies. At the beginning of the week I got a really bad headache and I started to get a sore throat and an upset stomach. Then I didn’t get any sleep at all the next night and was just exhausted the next couple days. On Friday I finally talked to our missionary doctor guy and he told me to buy Zyrtec, so I did and it has helped a looot. I still have a cough and a stuffy nose sometimes, but at least I don’t feel exhausted all the time. I also apparently got poison oak all over my arms when I chopped down that forest last week and its been spreading all over my arms. I usually just tell people I have leprosy. I think finally it stopped spreading and its slowly starting to heal and go away. It is not fun though. It itches like crazy and it spreads like wildfire.
I thought all of conference was good. I always like to try to figure out what the overall theme of conference is going to be. Since being on my mission I’ve noticed that each conference has some overlying theme. This conference it seemed to me that the theme was love. That was a good topic because there is less and less love in the world. People don’t really know what real love feels like. Being on a mission and getting to know so many people has really shown me how lucky I am to have a solid family where we actually love each other. There are sooo many broken families here and I’d say at least 60% of the couples living together here are not married. There are so many children being born in unestablished families. If you have a strong family, life is soooo much easier and people are forgetting that. I loved President Uchtdorf’s talk, and when he said “Let us be known has a people who love God, and who love our neighbors as ourselves.” I get the feeling that the world around us is going to keep degenerating, but that is no excuse for us to lower our standards or change our way of living. I think that is why so many of the talks have been based off simple, but important principles.
Just being on a mission here has really helped me see how big of a blessing the gospel is. All these little things like, going to college, being able to speak English, having a decent place to live, are all blessings I didn’t realize were that big or that uncommon.
Despite being sick, we actually had a really good week. We have 4 people with baptismal dates now. We had a really cool experience with a recent convert too, his name is Anibal. He agreed to come out teaching with us one night, so we picked him up and went to go to our appointment. We had the apartment number, but apparently there were 4 different buildings/sections, A B C D, so we ran to every single building, knocking on every apartment number 218 and stopped and talked to people quickly between apartments. Of course they were in the very last one we checked, so we got there kind of late, but so did the people we had the appointment with, so it all worked out well. We didn’t have much time, so we talked to them about the Book of Mormon and I’m not even sure what else, but Anibal bore his testimony about how all of this has blessed his life and the people we were teaching loved it. Afterwards when we got into the car to go back, Anibal told us that he loved going out and teaching people about the gospel and that it made him feel so good. That little experience changed him totally. It was a good night.
We also found these 2 other people named Jocelyn and Alejandra Rodriguez. Alejandra is 9 and she is Jocelyn’s daughter. Jocelyn is in her mid 20’s and they all live in an apartment with Jocelyn’s boyfriend named Mario. We found them because we had an appointment with their neighbors, but they weren't home, and the door to the Rodriguez’s apartment was open so we stuck our heads in and asked if we could share our message with them. We had a good lesson and Jocelyn and Alejandra both accepted the invitation to prepare themselves to get baptized. Last night we had another lesson with them..it was a really memorable one. When we came to the door they were on their way out to go wash clothes at a nearby Laundromat, so we asked if we could drive to the Laundromat and just teach them there. They said OK, so we went and had a lesson sitting on the curb outside the Laundromat. We had a really good lesson and they opened up and told us everything…all their concerns and their whole stories and everything. I’ll spare the details, but like most people we’ve talked to here, they have had tough lives and they are not in a good situation right now. They know that the gospel is the way to fix everything and they are excited to get baptized. The cool part about the whole lesson was that we had this good experience in a huge parking lot in the middle of a huge busy city.
Ok, well that’s about it for this week….I cant think of any other good stories to write about for this week. I am finally almost done unpacking…I just have a couple more things to put away. Ok, have a good week!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Yes Mom, I did get the cookies, they did not melt, and they were delicious. They were all gone in 2-3 days. Thank you for sending them...I loved them. My companion also thought they were amazing.
Congratulations Christopher! I bet that is a relief to have all that under your belt now. I think that would be awesome if Christopher came to Houston for an interview, just to see how everything is. It would definitely be an experience. As much as I love Houston, I don’t think I would ever live here by my own free will. At least not in actual Houston. As a missionary I absolutely love it though.
Unfortunately I got sick this week…I’m not sure what it was, but I think it’s allergies. At the beginning of the week I got a really bad headache and I started to get a sore throat and an upset stomach. Then I didn’t get any sleep at all the next night and was just exhausted the next couple days. On Friday I finally talked to our missionary doctor guy and he told me to buy Zyrtec, so I did and it has helped a looot. I still have a cough and a stuffy nose sometimes, but at least I don’t feel exhausted all the time. I also apparently got poison oak all over my arms when I chopped down that forest last week and its been spreading all over my arms. I usually just tell people I have leprosy. I think finally it stopped spreading and its slowly starting to heal and go away. It is not fun though. It itches like crazy and it spreads like wildfire.
I thought all of conference was good. I always like to try to figure out what the overall theme of conference is going to be. Since being on my mission I’ve noticed that each conference has some overlying theme. This conference it seemed to me that the theme was love. That was a good topic because there is less and less love in the world. People don’t really know what real love feels like. Being on a mission and getting to know so many people has really shown me how lucky I am to have a solid family where we actually love each other. There are sooo many broken families here and I’d say at least 60% of the couples living together here are not married. There are so many children being born in unestablished families. If you have a strong family, life is soooo much easier and people are forgetting that. I loved President Uchtdorf’s talk, and when he said “Let us be known has a people who love God, and who love our neighbors as ourselves.” I get the feeling that the world around us is going to keep degenerating, but that is no excuse for us to lower our standards or change our way of living. I think that is why so many of the talks have been based off simple, but important principles.
Just being on a mission here has really helped me see how big of a blessing the gospel is. All these little things like, going to college, being able to speak English, having a decent place to live, are all blessings I didn’t realize were that big or that uncommon.
Despite being sick, we actually had a really good week. We have 4 people with baptismal dates now. We had a really cool experience with a recent convert too, his name is Anibal. He agreed to come out teaching with us one night, so we picked him up and went to go to our appointment. We had the apartment number, but apparently there were 4 different buildings/sections, A B C D, so we ran to every single building, knocking on every apartment number 218 and stopped and talked to people quickly between apartments. Of course they were in the very last one we checked, so we got there kind of late, but so did the people we had the appointment with, so it all worked out well. We didn’t have much time, so we talked to them about the Book of Mormon and I’m not even sure what else, but Anibal bore his testimony about how all of this has blessed his life and the people we were teaching loved it. Afterwards when we got into the car to go back, Anibal told us that he loved going out and teaching people about the gospel and that it made him feel so good. That little experience changed him totally. It was a good night.
We also found these 2 other people named Jocelyn and Alejandra Rodriguez. Alejandra is 9 and she is Jocelyn’s daughter. Jocelyn is in her mid 20’s and they all live in an apartment with Jocelyn’s boyfriend named Mario. We found them because we had an appointment with their neighbors, but they weren't home, and the door to the Rodriguez’s apartment was open so we stuck our heads in and asked if we could share our message with them. We had a good lesson and Jocelyn and Alejandra both accepted the invitation to prepare themselves to get baptized. Last night we had another lesson with them..it was a really memorable one. When we came to the door they were on their way out to go wash clothes at a nearby Laundromat, so we asked if we could drive to the Laundromat and just teach them there. They said OK, so we went and had a lesson sitting on the curb outside the Laundromat. We had a really good lesson and they opened up and told us everything…all their concerns and their whole stories and everything. I’ll spare the details, but like most people we’ve talked to here, they have had tough lives and they are not in a good situation right now. They know that the gospel is the way to fix everything and they are excited to get baptized. The cool part about the whole lesson was that we had this good experience in a huge parking lot in the middle of a huge busy city.
Ok, well that’s about it for this week….I cant think of any other good stories to write about for this week. I am finally almost done unpacking…I just have a couple more things to put away. Ok, have a good week!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Friday, October 2, 2009
Received Mon Sept 28, 2009
Dear Family,
Ok….where do I start. My new area is called Houston 2, named after the Spanish ward we are serving in. It is located in inner-city Houston..Yessss…exactly what I was hoping for. There is a highway called Beltloop 8 or something that makes a big circle/square around Houston. We are inside that circle just south west of the very center of the city. In our area we have Rice University and also the Reliant Stadium (where the Texans play). I love this area already. There are tons and tons of people walking out on the streets and at least half of them are Hispanic. It is so much fun to have Hispanics all around you all the time to talk to. Sometimes we take 30-45 minutes walking from our car in a parking lot into an apartment complex because we talk to so many people. There are TONS and TONS of apartment complexes all over the place, which means there are tons of people. A lot of the apartment complexes in Houston are kind of naturally segregated, where certain complexes are full of Hispanics and others are full of African American people. So we obviously go to the Hispanic ones and just talk to everyone.
Our ward (notice it is a ward, not a branch) is called Houston 2, or Barrio Dos. This is my first time I’ve ever gone to a Spanish ward, rather than a branch. I loved it. Everything is still exactly the same (the singing, starting late, ect), but there is just a lot more people. Our sacrament attendance is usually around 130. We also have 3 sets of missionaries in our ward. In our zone we have 4 different wards, each have 2-3 companionships in them, and we have 4 districts, each assigned to a ward.
My companion is Elder Cameron. He is from Utah somewhere, I forgot where. He’s been out about 21 months, and he has 3 transfers left, so I will probably kill him off, as we say in the mission (I’ll be his last companion in the mission). He is an awesome missionary and I was excited when I found out I was going to be with him. I’ve already learned a ton. We are going to have a good time together.
These last few days have probably been the busiest of my whole mission. I got here on Wednesday after transfer meeting and I haven’t had a chance to unpack yet. On Wednesday we had appointments until night time and I was exhausted when we got back so I didn’t unpack. On Thursday we literally had meetings all day long. We had a Zone Leader Council starting at 9am and it didn’t end til 4:30. In that meeting all the zone leaders in the mission (there are 12 of us) have a meeting in Sugar Land and we have a big meeting with President Saylin and the assistants and we talk about the direction of our mission and what things we need to do to improve and what we need to teach to our zones. President Saylin had a meeting in Dallas 2 weeks ago with Elder M. Russell Ballard and Elder Claudio R.M. Costa, so we talked about a lot of things he learned there. It was a pretty intense meeting. We had it in the high council room in the stake center in Sugar Land. When we got out of that meeting we rushed as fast as we could to dinner (Sugar Land is about 30 min from our area), then we ate, then we got picked up to go to a stake correlation meeting. The stake president, high counselor over missionary work, all the bishops in the stake and all the ward mission leaders in the stake go to this meeting and they give reports on how the missionary work is going in each of their wards. Me and my companion are there to answer any questions they have about the investigators and also to represent the missionaries and relay any information over to our zone. Our mission president usually comes with us to that too. That meeting was pretty intense too. That meeting went until almost 9, then we went back to our apartment and that was the end of our day.
The next day we had a district meeting, then I went on exchanges with an elder in an area called Missouri City. It was pretty fun. We did service that day for a member. They have a big back yard and half of it is overgrown by these big huge weeds and bamboo looking trees. So we all got machete’s and just started hacking down the huge forest. It was so much fun. They were pretty good, sharp machetes, so if I swung as hard as I could, I could chop down like 4 trees as the same time. It was so cool. We did that for like 3 ½ hours. Now my arms are all sore and my forearms are hurting just typing, but it was worth it. The Elder I was with was also have some problems with his companion and it was almost the same thing that was going on with my last companion, so I knew exactly how to help him. He felt way better by the end of our transfer…so I felt really good about that. I think that’s one of my favorite parts about missionary work…just helping other people and seeing how big of an impact you can make in someone’s life. A day or 2 ago we found out that a brand new Elder who just got here on Wednesday was having a really difficult time. Their area is also pretty ghetto and he was freaked out by everything. It was a huge culture shock for him. He was pretty miserable, just fearing for his life from morning til night. President Saylin talked to him, then asked us to give him a visit as well. We did and it helped him a lot. President Saylin also got them a car, because their area was a bike area. You could just tell by his countenance that he felt 100% better after President had that talk with him and he helped reassure him, so he feels much better now.
Hmm…what else have I missed. We are speaking Spanish a lot because there are Hispanics everywhere. My companion and I speak Spanish to each other pretty frequently too. Elder Cameron’s Spanish is really good.
I have met everyone in my district and in my zone. On Friday’s for our district meetings almost our whole zone meets together in the same building for the first part of district meeting, then we split off into our districts for the last part, so I get to see everyone pretty much every week. 4 wards also meet in the building where we have church, so I see missionaries there too. We have a pretty cool zone and I’m happy to be here, but the only part that’s kind of weird for me is that all of our district leaders have way more time than me in the mission. One of our district leaders is actually Elder Pedersen, who pretty much trained me. Pretty much everyone in the zone are good missionaries though, so it will be good.
Oh yeah, we have an awesome apartment. Its huge and everything in it is really nice. We have surround sound speakers in our apartment with a sweet sound system. We each have huge closets and nice beds and the bathroom is huge too. We even have a little type writer in there that we can use if we want to write letters. I bet its more of a hassle to use that thing, but its still cool. I’m definitely happy with our apartment. Our car is also really nice…it’s a new 2009 Chevy Malibu. I have to admit that I am happy to be in a car area. It is cooling down a lot, but you would still be drenched in sweat every day if you had to bike everywhere. I only need to shower once a day now, so that’s nice.
Ok I think I covered everything. Have a good rest of the trip and enjoy playing Mom’s DS, because I will have to shatter those records upon my return. Have a good week, I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
Ok….where do I start. My new area is called Houston 2, named after the Spanish ward we are serving in. It is located in inner-city Houston..Yessss…exactly what I was hoping for. There is a highway called Beltloop 8 or something that makes a big circle/square around Houston. We are inside that circle just south west of the very center of the city. In our area we have Rice University and also the Reliant Stadium (where the Texans play). I love this area already. There are tons and tons of people walking out on the streets and at least half of them are Hispanic. It is so much fun to have Hispanics all around you all the time to talk to. Sometimes we take 30-45 minutes walking from our car in a parking lot into an apartment complex because we talk to so many people. There are TONS and TONS of apartment complexes all over the place, which means there are tons of people. A lot of the apartment complexes in Houston are kind of naturally segregated, where certain complexes are full of Hispanics and others are full of African American people. So we obviously go to the Hispanic ones and just talk to everyone.
Our ward (notice it is a ward, not a branch) is called Houston 2, or Barrio Dos. This is my first time I’ve ever gone to a Spanish ward, rather than a branch. I loved it. Everything is still exactly the same (the singing, starting late, ect), but there is just a lot more people. Our sacrament attendance is usually around 130. We also have 3 sets of missionaries in our ward. In our zone we have 4 different wards, each have 2-3 companionships in them, and we have 4 districts, each assigned to a ward.
My companion is Elder Cameron. He is from Utah somewhere, I forgot where. He’s been out about 21 months, and he has 3 transfers left, so I will probably kill him off, as we say in the mission (I’ll be his last companion in the mission). He is an awesome missionary and I was excited when I found out I was going to be with him. I’ve already learned a ton. We are going to have a good time together.
These last few days have probably been the busiest of my whole mission. I got here on Wednesday after transfer meeting and I haven’t had a chance to unpack yet. On Wednesday we had appointments until night time and I was exhausted when we got back so I didn’t unpack. On Thursday we literally had meetings all day long. We had a Zone Leader Council starting at 9am and it didn’t end til 4:30. In that meeting all the zone leaders in the mission (there are 12 of us) have a meeting in Sugar Land and we have a big meeting with President Saylin and the assistants and we talk about the direction of our mission and what things we need to do to improve and what we need to teach to our zones. President Saylin had a meeting in Dallas 2 weeks ago with Elder M. Russell Ballard and Elder Claudio R.M. Costa, so we talked about a lot of things he learned there. It was a pretty intense meeting. We had it in the high council room in the stake center in Sugar Land. When we got out of that meeting we rushed as fast as we could to dinner (Sugar Land is about 30 min from our area), then we ate, then we got picked up to go to a stake correlation meeting. The stake president, high counselor over missionary work, all the bishops in the stake and all the ward mission leaders in the stake go to this meeting and they give reports on how the missionary work is going in each of their wards. Me and my companion are there to answer any questions they have about the investigators and also to represent the missionaries and relay any information over to our zone. Our mission president usually comes with us to that too. That meeting was pretty intense too. That meeting went until almost 9, then we went back to our apartment and that was the end of our day.
The next day we had a district meeting, then I went on exchanges with an elder in an area called Missouri City. It was pretty fun. We did service that day for a member. They have a big back yard and half of it is overgrown by these big huge weeds and bamboo looking trees. So we all got machete’s and just started hacking down the huge forest. It was so much fun. They were pretty good, sharp machetes, so if I swung as hard as I could, I could chop down like 4 trees as the same time. It was so cool. We did that for like 3 ½ hours. Now my arms are all sore and my forearms are hurting just typing, but it was worth it. The Elder I was with was also have some problems with his companion and it was almost the same thing that was going on with my last companion, so I knew exactly how to help him. He felt way better by the end of our transfer…so I felt really good about that. I think that’s one of my favorite parts about missionary work…just helping other people and seeing how big of an impact you can make in someone’s life. A day or 2 ago we found out that a brand new Elder who just got here on Wednesday was having a really difficult time. Their area is also pretty ghetto and he was freaked out by everything. It was a huge culture shock for him. He was pretty miserable, just fearing for his life from morning til night. President Saylin talked to him, then asked us to give him a visit as well. We did and it helped him a lot. President Saylin also got them a car, because their area was a bike area. You could just tell by his countenance that he felt 100% better after President had that talk with him and he helped reassure him, so he feels much better now.
Hmm…what else have I missed. We are speaking Spanish a lot because there are Hispanics everywhere. My companion and I speak Spanish to each other pretty frequently too. Elder Cameron’s Spanish is really good.
I have met everyone in my district and in my zone. On Friday’s for our district meetings almost our whole zone meets together in the same building for the first part of district meeting, then we split off into our districts for the last part, so I get to see everyone pretty much every week. 4 wards also meet in the building where we have church, so I see missionaries there too. We have a pretty cool zone and I’m happy to be here, but the only part that’s kind of weird for me is that all of our district leaders have way more time than me in the mission. One of our district leaders is actually Elder Pedersen, who pretty much trained me. Pretty much everyone in the zone are good missionaries though, so it will be good.
Oh yeah, we have an awesome apartment. Its huge and everything in it is really nice. We have surround sound speakers in our apartment with a sweet sound system. We each have huge closets and nice beds and the bathroom is huge too. We even have a little type writer in there that we can use if we want to write letters. I bet its more of a hassle to use that thing, but its still cool. I’m definitely happy with our apartment. Our car is also really nice…it’s a new 2009 Chevy Malibu. I have to admit that I am happy to be in a car area. It is cooling down a lot, but you would still be drenched in sweat every day if you had to bike everywhere. I only need to shower once a day now, so that’s nice.
Ok I think I covered everything. Have a good rest of the trip and enjoy playing Mom’s DS, because I will have to shatter those records upon my return. Have a good week, I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
Received Sept 21, 2009
Dear Family,
This has been a pretty interesting week for me.
I’ll start off with a story. On Wednesday afternoon we got a call from the mission office. One of the office ladies told us that President Saylin wanted to see us in his office the next day at 11:00am for an interview. That’s all that we knew. We didn’t know if he was going to interview just one of us, both of us, or what. I was trying to figure out in my mind why he would want to have an interview. The only thing that I could think of was that in my last president’s letter I mentioned that this has been probably the hardest portion of my mission (especially with the companion, the area, other stuff like that). But I also mentioned how I had that good exchange with Elder Geinger and that helped a lot. I was thinking maybe he was going to interview us both at the same time and try to figure out how to help us or something. That is definitely not what I was hoping would happen. Well, when we arrived at the mission office the next day it turns out President Saylin just wanted to interview me. He started by asking the normal questions, like asking how I was doing and all that. I told him good. Then he said that he had been praying about transfers all week and last night, well morning, at 1:30am he finally got confirmation on everything he was supposed to do. He said he was planning on keeping me in my area to help the branch and to get everything rolling there, but upon praying he found that the Lord wanted me to be a zone leader. I was not expecting that. But of course I accepted. He told me how the responsibilities of zone leaders are going to be increased and a bunch of other stuff that all translated into it is going to be stressful and a lot of work. I am a little nervous, but not too bad. I’ll just do the best that I can do and that’s all that I can do, so I’ll be happy with that. One of my good friends in the mission is also a zone leader right now, so hopefully I’ll be with him, but we’ll see. Transfer meeting is this Wednesday, so next week I’ll fill you in on everything.
Next piece of news. Elder Claudio R.M. Costa from the presidency of the Seventy came and spoke to the 3 Houston missions on Saturday morning. He is from Brazil and he joined the church when he was 28. He has a pretty amazing conversion story, which he shared with us. He was also a mission president twice and he has some incredible missionary stories, which are always fun to hear. He is an awesome speaker. After that meeting he automatically became one of my favorite general authorities. He was really funny and entertaining and interesting for the entire 2 hours he spoke. He had no notes or anything, but it all flowed together and he taught a lot of interesting things. He taught all about what exactly the Seventy is, how many quorums there are, how long they are called for, etc. Then he talked about mission presidents and their responsibilities, then he talked about the calling of a missionary and missionary experiences for the rest of the time. He told some amazing stories. He was the mission president over the whole amazon jungle in Brazil. He told stories about how missionaries would baptize every single week of their entire missions, and he told us how they did it. The thing I loved about him is that he still does missionary work every day. He told us how people had told him that missionary work was hard in America. He said he wanted to see for himself, so for these past 2 years, he has been sharing the gospel with everyone. He told about a lot of experiences and one he just had when he was in the airport coming from Provo to Houston just hours before. Then he said, “See, its easy!!” It was a good talk. Very motivating too.
After that we had some great lessons and we extended 4 more baptismal dates. I think I mentioned how we’ve been taught that we need to start extending baptismal dates earlier and more effectively. So that’s what we’ve been doing. We finally have some fairly solid investigators, so I feel pretty good about that. One of my goals in my mission is to always leave and area better than I found it. So I feel pretty good about leaving this area…I think we have made a lot of progress.
Other stories…I got some good compliments on my Spanish again this week. We were visiting this one older member and she asked me where I learned Spanish because I don’t have the same accent that most of the other missionaries do. She said I sounded like I was from somewhere in Central America. I told her I just learned in the MTC then from talking to everyone out here. That made me feel good though. I actually have bumped up my Spanish studies a notch this past week or so. Anytime I’m just relaxing after eating a meal, or in the mornings or evenings, I have a dictionary, then this little red Spanish book we get in the MTC and I just read out of there and study vocab all the time. It has not only helped me increase my vocab, but it also gets my mind in Spanish mode 24/7. The only problem is whenever we knock on someone’s door and they are English speaking, I stumble over a lot of my word and have trouble speaking because Spanish words keep coming out instead of English.
I also got another good compliment this week. Well, I consider it a compliment at least. We were teaching this one investigator who has been taught by missionaries a lot in the past. This was just my second time having a conversation with him, then part way through the lesson he was like, wait I have 1 question…it doesn’t really have to do with what were talking about right now, but I was just wondering when you joined the church. I was kind of puzzled and told him I got baptized when I was 8. He was like, oh wow…I was thinking you didn’t grow up in the church because you use a lot of scriptures from the bible and most missionaries I’ve talked to just use the Book of Mormon. He went on the explain he knows the Book of Mormon is good, but its just new to him and its more comforting to know that all this stuff is also in the Bible.
Ok, that’s most of my updates for this week, but now I will give my reactions/comments in response to Mom’s e-mail.
Have fun on the trip to Utah/Idaho and good luck to Christopher. That sounds like something really exciting. I would have loved to come and watch that…I think it would be really interesting. But on second thought, its probably not quite and bad as mission a trip to Hawaii.
Griffin’s sacrament story made me laugh out loud.
I am very excited for the cookies. Its also funny because I was thinking this morning about how one of my latest craves has been cookies. As of right now my favorite snack before I go to bed has been dipping oreos in milk. I bought Chips Ahoy last week, but they just aren’t as good. Hopefully I will get it soon. If it gets here before Wednesday I will get it at transfer meeting, if not, well since I have no idea where I’ll be, I have no idea when I’ll get it, but hopefully I’ll get it on Friday at our district meeting.
And lastly, Mom don't worry about the start/finish of your e-mails (I don't you probably aren't too worried about it, but just in case). The best way to start is to just start typing about whatever you want, and the best way to finish is to write Love, Mom. It doesn't matter to me if it is all random.
Ok, that’s all for this week! Have a great week and have fun in Utah/Idaho!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
This has been a pretty interesting week for me.
I’ll start off with a story. On Wednesday afternoon we got a call from the mission office. One of the office ladies told us that President Saylin wanted to see us in his office the next day at 11:00am for an interview. That’s all that we knew. We didn’t know if he was going to interview just one of us, both of us, or what. I was trying to figure out in my mind why he would want to have an interview. The only thing that I could think of was that in my last president’s letter I mentioned that this has been probably the hardest portion of my mission (especially with the companion, the area, other stuff like that). But I also mentioned how I had that good exchange with Elder Geinger and that helped a lot. I was thinking maybe he was going to interview us both at the same time and try to figure out how to help us or something. That is definitely not what I was hoping would happen. Well, when we arrived at the mission office the next day it turns out President Saylin just wanted to interview me. He started by asking the normal questions, like asking how I was doing and all that. I told him good. Then he said that he had been praying about transfers all week and last night, well morning, at 1:30am he finally got confirmation on everything he was supposed to do. He said he was planning on keeping me in my area to help the branch and to get everything rolling there, but upon praying he found that the Lord wanted me to be a zone leader. I was not expecting that. But of course I accepted. He told me how the responsibilities of zone leaders are going to be increased and a bunch of other stuff that all translated into it is going to be stressful and a lot of work. I am a little nervous, but not too bad. I’ll just do the best that I can do and that’s all that I can do, so I’ll be happy with that. One of my good friends in the mission is also a zone leader right now, so hopefully I’ll be with him, but we’ll see. Transfer meeting is this Wednesday, so next week I’ll fill you in on everything.
Next piece of news. Elder Claudio R.M. Costa from the presidency of the Seventy came and spoke to the 3 Houston missions on Saturday morning. He is from Brazil and he joined the church when he was 28. He has a pretty amazing conversion story, which he shared with us. He was also a mission president twice and he has some incredible missionary stories, which are always fun to hear. He is an awesome speaker. After that meeting he automatically became one of my favorite general authorities. He was really funny and entertaining and interesting for the entire 2 hours he spoke. He had no notes or anything, but it all flowed together and he taught a lot of interesting things. He taught all about what exactly the Seventy is, how many quorums there are, how long they are called for, etc. Then he talked about mission presidents and their responsibilities, then he talked about the calling of a missionary and missionary experiences for the rest of the time. He told some amazing stories. He was the mission president over the whole amazon jungle in Brazil. He told stories about how missionaries would baptize every single week of their entire missions, and he told us how they did it. The thing I loved about him is that he still does missionary work every day. He told us how people had told him that missionary work was hard in America. He said he wanted to see for himself, so for these past 2 years, he has been sharing the gospel with everyone. He told about a lot of experiences and one he just had when he was in the airport coming from Provo to Houston just hours before. Then he said, “See, its easy!!” It was a good talk. Very motivating too.
After that we had some great lessons and we extended 4 more baptismal dates. I think I mentioned how we’ve been taught that we need to start extending baptismal dates earlier and more effectively. So that’s what we’ve been doing. We finally have some fairly solid investigators, so I feel pretty good about that. One of my goals in my mission is to always leave and area better than I found it. So I feel pretty good about leaving this area…I think we have made a lot of progress.
Other stories…I got some good compliments on my Spanish again this week. We were visiting this one older member and she asked me where I learned Spanish because I don’t have the same accent that most of the other missionaries do. She said I sounded like I was from somewhere in Central America. I told her I just learned in the MTC then from talking to everyone out here. That made me feel good though. I actually have bumped up my Spanish studies a notch this past week or so. Anytime I’m just relaxing after eating a meal, or in the mornings or evenings, I have a dictionary, then this little red Spanish book we get in the MTC and I just read out of there and study vocab all the time. It has not only helped me increase my vocab, but it also gets my mind in Spanish mode 24/7. The only problem is whenever we knock on someone’s door and they are English speaking, I stumble over a lot of my word and have trouble speaking because Spanish words keep coming out instead of English.
I also got another good compliment this week. Well, I consider it a compliment at least. We were teaching this one investigator who has been taught by missionaries a lot in the past. This was just my second time having a conversation with him, then part way through the lesson he was like, wait I have 1 question…it doesn’t really have to do with what were talking about right now, but I was just wondering when you joined the church. I was kind of puzzled and told him I got baptized when I was 8. He was like, oh wow…I was thinking you didn’t grow up in the church because you use a lot of scriptures from the bible and most missionaries I’ve talked to just use the Book of Mormon. He went on the explain he knows the Book of Mormon is good, but its just new to him and its more comforting to know that all this stuff is also in the Bible.
Ok, that’s most of my updates for this week, but now I will give my reactions/comments in response to Mom’s e-mail.
Have fun on the trip to Utah/Idaho and good luck to Christopher. That sounds like something really exciting. I would have loved to come and watch that…I think it would be really interesting. But on second thought, its probably not quite and bad as mission a trip to Hawaii.
Griffin’s sacrament story made me laugh out loud.
I am very excited for the cookies. Its also funny because I was thinking this morning about how one of my latest craves has been cookies. As of right now my favorite snack before I go to bed has been dipping oreos in milk. I bought Chips Ahoy last week, but they just aren’t as good. Hopefully I will get it soon. If it gets here before Wednesday I will get it at transfer meeting, if not, well since I have no idea where I’ll be, I have no idea when I’ll get it, but hopefully I’ll get it on Friday at our district meeting.
And lastly, Mom don't worry about the start/finish of your e-mails (I don't you probably aren't too worried about it, but just in case). The best way to start is to just start typing about whatever you want, and the best way to finish is to write Love, Mom. It doesn't matter to me if it is all random.
Ok, that’s all for this week! Have a great week and have fun in Utah/Idaho!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Monday, September 14, 2009
Received Mon Sept 14, 2009
Dear Family,
Lets see…I only have a couple things written down for this week. First, I realized that I made a mistake in my last e-mail. I mentioned a drink called Sangria that was a watermelon drink. Well actually Sangria is a nasty grape juice drink that people always give us to drink. I think its gross. Sandia is actually the watermelon drink.
Second, I got to go to the Pulga yesterday. The Pulga is basically a big swap meet…I think that’s what its called. It’s a flea market for Hispanics. Its just full of a bunch of stands of random stuff…most of which is counterfeit and really cheap. I got to go because the missionaries have a stand there with copies of the Book of Mormon, pass a long cards, pamphlets, etc, and we talk to everyone that walks by. We didn’t get to talk to that many people because it was sprinkling on and off so there weren’t that many people, but it was still a fun experience. There was Hispanic music blasting all around us and it was cool to see all the stuff they have there. There is also this guy there who loves missionaries and he owns this juice stand, so he always gives the missionaries a free drink every time we go. I got horchata…it was way good. Before we left I also got a Barcelona soccer jersey. That’s Ronaldinho’s team…he’s an amazing soccer player. It cost 15 bucks and that is a really good price for a jersey. So I am pretty excited about that. Watching soccer is obviously huge among the Hispanic culture here. Everyone has their team that they love. A lot of the Hispanics love Chivas, but I’ve decided my team is Barcelona. I would like to get a Chivas jersey before the end of my mission though. We see people playing soccer all throughout the day and whenever we go into houses they have the games on…that always makes me want to play soccer. I definitely want to play on an intramural team at BYU.
When I went to the Pulga I was actually on exchanges with an elder named Elder Geinger. He’s been one of my friends pretty much since the beginning of my mission. This is his very last transfer, so hes going home in about a week. We had a really good exchange though. I haven’t really written about it much, but I have been having a really difficult time with my companion. I feel like I have to defend myself all day long and it’s a fight any time I suggest anything. He’s a good guy, but he just has a single tracked mind, so if I suggest anything that isn’t exactly in line with what he was thinking, it is an absurd idea. There's just a lot of things that haven’t been going that well and it is really tiring. Elder Geinger and I have had very similar missions in terms of companions and areas and he knew exactly what I was going through. It was really reassuring to have someone I respect agree with me and tell me he knows exactly whats going on. It helped me to be confident about it all and to know that’s just part of the mission and its one of those times where you grow the most, so I am pretty happy about that.
Spanish is still going really well. I’ve actually had several dreams in Spanish and at night all my thoughts and conversations going through my mind are all in Spanish.
Ok, I have a question now. Christopher wrote me a while ago to tell me all about what exactly his thesis and all that was about and I liked it a lot because I really know nothing about that. My question now is, what exactly is defending your thesis. You stand in front of some people and they ask you questions about it, is what I think Christopher told me. But everyone is going up there to watch it, so other people are invited to come and watch too?
My responses to Mom’s random thoughts:
Wow…it looks like BYU might seriously have a good team this year. That is exciting. One of the players, Carter Mees, I believe hes some sort of safety, he just left out mission in December. He was an AP…he was a really cool guy. And I’ve never heard of the team called Tulane. Probably because they clearly stink.
Not surprising to hear Donovan McNabb got hurt again, but I am surprised it happened so soon in the season.
Zak’s quote made me laugh.
I was impressed by Mom’s correct use of the command form in Spanish (Habla espanol).
Ok that’s all for this week. This is the last week in the transfer already! It always seems to come so fast. I am about to complete my 9th transfer. That means I’ll get the transfer call next Monday. I don’t fully expect any changes, but you never know, so we’ll see. Have a good week! I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
Lets see…I only have a couple things written down for this week. First, I realized that I made a mistake in my last e-mail. I mentioned a drink called Sangria that was a watermelon drink. Well actually Sangria is a nasty grape juice drink that people always give us to drink. I think its gross. Sandia is actually the watermelon drink.
Second, I got to go to the Pulga yesterday. The Pulga is basically a big swap meet…I think that’s what its called. It’s a flea market for Hispanics. Its just full of a bunch of stands of random stuff…most of which is counterfeit and really cheap. I got to go because the missionaries have a stand there with copies of the Book of Mormon, pass a long cards, pamphlets, etc, and we talk to everyone that walks by. We didn’t get to talk to that many people because it was sprinkling on and off so there weren’t that many people, but it was still a fun experience. There was Hispanic music blasting all around us and it was cool to see all the stuff they have there. There is also this guy there who loves missionaries and he owns this juice stand, so he always gives the missionaries a free drink every time we go. I got horchata…it was way good. Before we left I also got a Barcelona soccer jersey. That’s Ronaldinho’s team…he’s an amazing soccer player. It cost 15 bucks and that is a really good price for a jersey. So I am pretty excited about that. Watching soccer is obviously huge among the Hispanic culture here. Everyone has their team that they love. A lot of the Hispanics love Chivas, but I’ve decided my team is Barcelona. I would like to get a Chivas jersey before the end of my mission though. We see people playing soccer all throughout the day and whenever we go into houses they have the games on…that always makes me want to play soccer. I definitely want to play on an intramural team at BYU.
When I went to the Pulga I was actually on exchanges with an elder named Elder Geinger. He’s been one of my friends pretty much since the beginning of my mission. This is his very last transfer, so hes going home in about a week. We had a really good exchange though. I haven’t really written about it much, but I have been having a really difficult time with my companion. I feel like I have to defend myself all day long and it’s a fight any time I suggest anything. He’s a good guy, but he just has a single tracked mind, so if I suggest anything that isn’t exactly in line with what he was thinking, it is an absurd idea. There's just a lot of things that haven’t been going that well and it is really tiring. Elder Geinger and I have had very similar missions in terms of companions and areas and he knew exactly what I was going through. It was really reassuring to have someone I respect agree with me and tell me he knows exactly whats going on. It helped me to be confident about it all and to know that’s just part of the mission and its one of those times where you grow the most, so I am pretty happy about that.
Spanish is still going really well. I’ve actually had several dreams in Spanish and at night all my thoughts and conversations going through my mind are all in Spanish.
Ok, I have a question now. Christopher wrote me a while ago to tell me all about what exactly his thesis and all that was about and I liked it a lot because I really know nothing about that. My question now is, what exactly is defending your thesis. You stand in front of some people and they ask you questions about it, is what I think Christopher told me. But everyone is going up there to watch it, so other people are invited to come and watch too?
My responses to Mom’s random thoughts:
Wow…it looks like BYU might seriously have a good team this year. That is exciting. One of the players, Carter Mees, I believe hes some sort of safety, he just left out mission in December. He was an AP…he was a really cool guy. And I’ve never heard of the team called Tulane. Probably because they clearly stink.
Not surprising to hear Donovan McNabb got hurt again, but I am surprised it happened so soon in the season.
Zak’s quote made me laugh.
I was impressed by Mom’s correct use of the command form in Spanish (Habla espanol).
Ok that’s all for this week. This is the last week in the transfer already! It always seems to come so fast. I am about to complete my 9th transfer. That means I’ll get the transfer call next Monday. I don’t fully expect any changes, but you never know, so we’ll see. Have a good week! I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
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