Received Mon July 27, 2009

Dear Family,

Happy Birthday on Thursday G-MAN! The scout story sounds exactly how I remember scouts being. I don’t think I ever remember going up a correct trail and we always ended up camping out in the middle of nowhere. That was a huge error on the leaders part to let a group of scouts hike way in front by themselves.

The dodgeball game also sounded fun. We played a pretty fun game a while ago…I think I may have told you about it. I’ll say it again anyway. Its called Pivot Tag. Its basically like a free for all dodgeball. You start out by having everyone line up on one side of the room and you put 2 dodge balls in the middle. You start and run to get a ball and when you get a ball you have to plant one of your feet and you cant move it until you through the ball, hence the name pivot tag. When you get hit you have to sit on the ground and you're out, until the person that hit you gets out. So basically to win, you have to get everyone out. It is really fun.

This week was a good week. We had a zone conference on Wednesday. It was President Saylin’s first zone conference, so he and everyone else was really excited. He told us he’s been excited for it because he wanted to teach us things that the prophet and apostles told them they should teach to us, and if we put those things into action we are promised an increase in baptisms. All the things he talked about were things that would be perfect for our area. I’ve really been trying to think of ways to find new investigators in our area and I know we have to use the members, but its hard to know how to use the members to help you find people. That’s what half the conference was about: how to get the members to actively do missionary work. Instead of sharing missionary related scriptures with families then asking them if they have any referrals for you, we need to actually help them with their missionary work. So, instead of saying that, we ask them if they’ve ever had any sort of gospel conversation before with anyone. Nearly every single person has. Then we give them suggestions and ideas as to how to take that little gospel conversation to the next level. Usually inviting them over for a lunch or showing them one of the pamphlets that we use or inviting them to an upcoming ward activity. That is so much more effective than just asking for referrals and making members feel guilty that don’t have any. Pretty much every member wants to share the gospel, its just hard and they aren’t sure how. So we have been doing that with a lot of members and its working really well. We were also taught a lot of other really good things in zone conference. It was a memorable one. In our zone we have 6 more baptismal dates in this week alone.

Elder Campbell and I plan on extending baptismal invitations to Niyeem, and also Michael and Yabo Akinola (the Nigerians) this week. It has been really cool to see our relationship with the Akinola’s evolve over these past few months. At first they kind of avoided anyone from the church and they were very hesitant about everything. Now every time Yabo sees us she gets a big smile on her face and gets all excited. They both work a lot, so its hard to schedule appointments with them, but they really want to meet with us and they are making time on this Wednesday so we can have an appointment. If all goes well, we plan to extend baptismal invitations to each of them at that appointment.

On Thursday afternoon, we went over to go on exchanges with the Elders in Rosenberg because they had a couple appointments, but one of them is sick (he’s actually got a hernia but he’s trying to wait til the end of his mission to get surgery on it) so we helped them out with that. Then that evening I went to Alief to go on exchanges with them. This was an awesome exchange. Alief is a ghetto part of Houston. There are tons and tons of African refugees there. There are entire apartment complexes just full of people from nearly every African country. It was so fun to go there and be with those people and to learn about their culture. It was like spending time in Africa. The first people I met were these 3 older African men who were standing outside of an apartment arguing about something. I couldn’t figure out exactly what language they were speaking, then after a couple seconds I realized it was English. After a while I learned how they speak and I could even speak it myself. They’ll cut off the end of a lot of words, they have really broken grammar, and the funniest thing is that they end “O” to the end of a lot of words, especially if they’re asking a question. One of them was asking me what I was drinking, so he said, “Wha you drink-o?” And of course they say it in their thick African accent. Another funny little thing they do is that instead of doing a normal handshake, you start out like you're going in for a hand shank, then you snap your fingers together with theirs. Its hard to explain, but once you get good at it you can make a loud snap. If you don’t snap it loud enough then they make you do it again.

In one of those apartments there was a man named Pappi. He is a member and hes from Liberia. Everyone in the whole complex knows Pappi, because everyone donates all their extra stuff to Pappi, then he gives it out to needy people. He’s like their own little DI/Goodwill. Like half his apartment is full of random junk he has acquired. People also bring them their empty bottle and cans, so he can recycle it, then use the money to buy soda to give out to all the kids who stop by. While I was there a group of 6 little African girls stopped by. 3 of them were from Tanzania and the other 3 were from Somalia. It was fun to be able to talk to them and make them laugh. A lot of them didn’t have shoes and they had probably not changed their clothes for long time (that might not seem too strange to SOME members of our family). But the neat thing is that they were all so happy and always smiled. The oldest one was 10 and she would watch out for all the other little girls. They would just roam this apartment complex by themselves and so would so many other kids. It was like being in a different country. It was fun.

Then on Friday evening, the Mission Bend Elders had some appointments and one of those missionaries is sick, so we went on exchanges to help them out too. So I toured most of our stake in 24 hours. Its amazing how many random members I know from each of the wards because of all the exchanges I’ve been on in the past 5 months.

Hmm..there is only 1 other story that I can think of. Last week on Sunday I woke up and my ankle was really itchy. At church it started to itch a ton so when I got home, I took of my shoe and sock to see that my ankle was huuuge. I actually couldn’t see my ankle anymore. It was pretty funny. After looking I saw a little red mark above my ankle and I’m guessing that while I was playing soccer a bee stung me and I didn’t notice. It healed in a few days and its back to normal size again.

That’s about all for this week! Thank you Christopher for your e-mail too. It was very interesting and entertaining to read. It sounds like a lot of work, but I’m sure it will pay off afterwards. I love you all!! Have a great week!

Love,
Chase

PS. I listened to a really cool recording this week. It was Glenn Beck's conversion story. Its titled, "An Unlikely Mormon." I thought it was really interesting and funny. I've met a lot of people who have gone through similar situations to him. I'm sure it was so fun for me to listen to because I'm a missionary, but if you are really bored, I bet you could youtube it.