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