Latest letters

Ninja in training. Erik's Halloween costume, I guess, complete with the missionary name tag. I'm a little jealous of the short sleeves.

I'm discovering that my weekly missionary email comes between 6:30 and 7:00 in the morning. This allows me to email back and forth for a minute. Even though Erik still manages to drive us crazy from 1000s of miles away, we miss him and he finds ways to bring some humor to our lives.

In his last email he told me he definitely bought the right phone because it allows him to do memes. This is what he does on P-day I guess. Ashlyn managed to lock us out of the kids computer by continually putting in the wrong picture password and NONE of us know the real password. The only person who might know is Erik, who unfortunately doesn't live here anymore. After waiting a week, he sent us what might work. Nope. After much trying we are able to get into the Kids account but not the Admin. Ahhhhhhhh!!!!! And he thought he would be funny by typing the the password hint as "Hahahahahahahah." How aggravating. One day we'll get that computer back to full working capacity, probably when Elder Erik makes his way back home in two years.

October 22 Letter
Here's a dumb missionary joke for ya'll. What is a missionary's favorite car? A convertible. 🤣 Anyway, like I said last week we are whitewashing our area, so we are getting to know all the members and all the investigators and others. Not a lot of super exciting stuff. I pass a tennis court every day on the bike ride to our area. I really wish I could just pause for an hour and go play, but I have more important things to do.We could get some new investigators by playing "beat you, teach you" but that isn't allowed. Bummer. I guess for this special edition 1 month in email I'll give you a pros and cons list. Here's a list of things that have been hardest for me. And I guess I'll throw in some good stuff too.

Biggest struggles so far of being a missionary:
1. Not playing tennis
2. No good music, and no, MoTab is not good music
3. No movies or YouTube, I guess I'll just say no media
4. No naps/Wake up at 6:30
5. I guess I also miss my family and friends just a little bit😁

Biggest blessings/ Pros:
1. Stronger testimony
2. I have more purpose/ I know what I'll be doing every day.
3. I'm out of the "Utah bubble" as people keep saying, which is a good thing to be out of for a little bit
4. It's not cold. In fact, its warm.
5. I can have a quadruple stacker PB&J and there's nobody to stop me.
     
On to my week, we taught an elderly couple named Sky and Clem. They are Catholic but their son's a member. They're really nice people and always feed us. We've also been teaching a Colombian guy named Manuel. He is also really fun to talk to and is really interested in our church. We've been talking to a lot of people and making ourselves known. We've also done a lot of service which has been fun. We got to do some digging the other day which was fun. This might sound kind of weird but I really miss my job and being able to dig with a shovel. Anyway, that's mainly what I spend my time doing. A lot of time is also spend riding bikes, we don't have a car, so we have about a 10 minute ride just to get to our area, plus an extra 5 to 25 minutes depending. We should be sharing a car soon though. 

Some highlights: 
I held an alligator head. We talked to a member that hunts alligators and had a whole huge freezer full of alligators that he had killed the week before. It was cool.

I went to Wendy's for my 1 month mark on Friday. And I did bring my frosty cards all the way from home, so I got 2 free frostys.

I did the worst thing ever. We were calling a member named Wanda to try to set up a time to meet with her. She didn't answer and we usually don't leave voicemails. Anyway, Elder Squires decided to leave one this time, but I didn't know that. This was late at night and we were in weird moods. Anyway, right when it beeped I was in the middle of saying "This is Wanda" in a really weird accent. Then Elder Squires freaked out and hung up. So basically a member we've never met now has a voicemail of the missionaries saying "This is Wanda" in a really weird voice and hanging up. Oh well. None of you need to know that or care, but that's what happened. 

I was told there were a lot of bugs here, that there are a lot of Alligators, that it rains a lot, and that the humidity makes things go soft. I guess I'm just lucky because I haven't dealt with any of that yet. It's been sunny, warm, and bug free. 

I try to keep my emails lighthearted, but seriously I have been learning a lot. I think I'm going to start putting a "Spiritual Spiel" (cool name, huh) in each of my emails, or maybe once a month. But here it is. 

SPIRITUAL SPIEL
My testimony of The Book of Mormon, Christ and the Atonement, and Prayer has grown so much. It has been great being a full time servant of the Lord, because if you put your trust in him he wont let his servants down. I've really learned even in just 1 month that sometimes you just need to pray and ask Heavenly Father to help you and to show you the way. This is a lot harder than it seems, but it does help immensely. There's no way I could leave home and come here and be a missionary day in and day out without his help.
   

I guess that's how you write a big long email about a pretty uneventful week. And as always, check this link out for all my photos. I got a photo with an alligator head, which is pretty sweet.

October 29 Letter
I'm 354,240,000 milliseconds into my mission. Not much happened this week. I'm not sure what to say. We did go to a Trunk or Treat which was fun. We were going to starve to death until my prayer got answered, so we aren't going to starve anymore. I also had to give a talk on Sunday about my favorite hymn, which was fun. I did a lot of service, knocked some doors, taught some lessons, and met with members.

Trunk or Treat was really fun. There were lots of good costumes. There's a kid named River that always wanted to race us and fight us. He thought he was the strongest person in the world because he dressed up as Black Panther. It was funny. 

One of my prayers was answered yesterday. I wasn't given the full amount of money for the month because I got here a little into the month. I also had to buy lots of hygiene products because I just got to the field, we also had 5 p days this month which means we had to go another month without money, and we're whitewashing our area so we had to buy lots of food and apartment supplies to get us started. Anyway, we have no money and no food and we have to go another week. I prayed that it would last its the week, but there was no way. We had a dinner today, and it was amazing. It was with Sister Boileau and her nonmember husband. They had cleaned out their food supply earlier that day and had 3 huge bags of food to be thrown out that wasn't even expired. She decided to give them to us. We now have food for a month. 

There are so many people that slam doors in our faces like Sister Young said. What's really been working for us is when they say "Leave me alone, go bother someone else, bye" we just offer our help with anything they're doing. We've gotten to talk to lots of people that way. They realize that we actually want to help them, not lecture them about repenting or anything like that. Anyway, life's good out here when I'm working. It's when I stop for a minute that I get homesick or start thinking about all the stuff I can't do. Like you said, I had an easy life before coming out, but I'm trying to always stay focused on my purpose. Time really does fly here. It's already been a month.

I also gave a talk 3 weeks in. And we had 2 investigators there that heard me, which is great.