Received Aug 17, 2009

Dear Family, (August 17th’s letter)

Well, I believe I answered Mom’s first question when I re-sent my last week’s e-mail. Here is a recap of transfer day. It was on Wednesday; I packed a little on Tuesday night and finished on Wednesday morning. We went to Sugar Land where we always have our transfer meeting, which includes singing hymns (of course) and hearing a talk or 2…I don’t even remember what happens because its so hard to pay attention. After you sit through those talks thinking about where you're getting transferred to, the mission president finally reads off a list of the new companionships and what area they will be. So he goes down a list and says like…Elder Cole and Elder McGrath will be serving together in the Brazos Central area. Then I stand up/look around to see who Elder McGrath is. Then after he goes through all the names we end the meeting, you throw all your luggage into a car and drive to your area. Our area is a bike area, so the English elders who cover our same area took us because they have a car.

So my new companion is Elder McGrath. He is from Sandy Utah. He’s been out for about 10 ½ months. My area is called Brazos Central, which covers mostly the city of Rosenberg, which is a city that borders Richmond (my last area). I’ve actually been on exchanges to Rosenberg several times, so I recognize a lot of different places, so I’m not totally lost. We attend the Brazos Spanish branch, hence the name Brazos central. We are in charge of teaching all the Spanish people around here, so there are English elders who teach all the English people in the same area. So if we run into a good potential English investigator we give them to the English elders. They also have a car, so sometimes they’ll give us rides, which is nice. There are also Spanish sisters who cover the Brazos branch and they have a car, so they cover everything that’s too far for us to bike to. We live in an apartment complex and luckily it is pretty clean for a missionary apartment. Of course its not like any of the last places I’ve stayed at, but its still pretty nice.
Yesterday was my first day going to church in Spanish since Galveston…so about 6 months. I forgot how it is to be in a Spanish branch, but it brought back a lot of memories that made me laugh. When we started sacrament meeting there were around 20-30 people there and I was thinking…”wow this is a tiny branch.” But over the next 30 minutes about 20-30 more people wandered in. Then I remembered that everyone always comes late to everything in Spanish culture. I also noticed that they started off sacrament meeting and they hadn’t even finished preparing the sacrament yet. They finished maybe 15 minutes or so after sacrament meeting started. I think one of my favorite parts about attending church in Spanish is the singing. I love it because almost every single person sings, but almost nobody has any idea how to sing. There may be 1 or 2 people in the congregation that hit most of the notes and sing well. Everyone else basically says the words really loud and make their voices go up and down whenever they feel like it. I think the funniest part is that there is always at least 1 lady who loves to sing loud, but doesn’t really understand how to sing along with the notes. It is always a good experience.
Now I will tell you a little about the city of Rosenberg. It is completely opposite of Richmond, even though they are so close to each other. Rosenberg is a very rich, affluent area. Rosenberg is definitely ghetto and has a lot of Hispanic and African American people. All day long we hear Hispanic music blasting as cars drive past us. I definitely need to take some pictures of some of the areas that we go to, because it is exactly what I imagine when I think of ghetto. Old brick buildings, where the bricks are falling out with graffiti everywhere and a bunch of black metal bars everywhere. I probably wont take a ton of pictures here though because its not a very smart thing to carry that around with me everywhere and show it off.

So far it hasn’t been too bad on the bikes. We’ve been really lucky and have had a lot of cloud coverage for most of the time I’ve been here. Of course we still sweat like crazy and now I shower 2 times a day every day. When I got here it was 105 degrees outside…that was hot. Plus my companion doesn’t really ride very fast, so its not too bad. Our area is huge for a bike area though, so we ride at least 20 miles a day. My thighs are definitely sore today. We live on the second floor too, so running up and down there all the time doesn’t really help that much.

Other than that I didn’t really write down a whole lot to write about. I am very happy with the way my last area was going when I left. I believe in leaving the area better than you found it. We have a lot of really good things going on there, so I feel really good about that. I also like my district a lot too. We have 6 Elders and 2 sisters. I already knew everyone except for 1 elder, so I was excited about that.

Ok, that’s all for this week. Have a good week everyone! I love you! Hopefully my e-mails go through today.

Love,
Chase