September 27, 2010
Hello family...
Well that's quite odd that Frost and Bone ended up in the house. I'll bet that was weird. Well this last week has seen some interesting developments. We got a new investigator on Tuesday, we set a baptismal date and everything, it's a 9 year old girl of a less active family that moved to Katy from Houston a few years ago and they've been hiding under the radar up until now. They decided that they want to come back and get their daughter baptized so we will see what happens with that. They didn't come to church on Sunday on account of having "visitors" over. Things will probably go slow with them. Elder Lamoure is getting better. Last week he was in the vitamin isle in wal-mart and decided to by these "St. John's Wart" pills that supposedly improve ones mood when taken regularly. And it's actually worked, he's been much more pleasant lately, now we just need to work on his laziness.
Thursday was a brutal day. Two days previously as we were coming out of our apartment this old lady in a car asked us if we could help her move out her friend, this 70-something year old man with one leg and Alzheimer's disease. Lived two floors below us and couldn't pay his rent and he was getting evicted from the apartment. We happily agreed and said we set up a time on Thrusday morning at 7:30 to get this guy moved out. We expected the move to take about 2 hours at the most. Well we finished at about 9:45 pm that night. The thing this woman had failed to mention was that they hadn't packed anything. It was ridiculous, this man had a ton of nasty old junk, he's a huge pack rat and he had all sorts of old junk and trinkets that he didn't want to leave behind, and a ton of furniture, like 3 huge glass cabinets full of expensive china, and all of these large dressers, hundreds of old books and papers, this man was a Catholic Priest back in the day and he still had his clerical wardrobe and all the incense, prayer books, and whatnot. We had one member from the local english ward helping us out, his name is Tony and he's 21 and just got back from Iraq. He's way cool, he and his family are Colombians who were originally in our ward but they switched the english ward a few years ago. So we had him and two sets of english elders who jumped back and forth between helping us and their appointments. We made so many phone calls that day, this sort of work is what members are for. But unsurprisingly nobody from our ward, and two english wards could help out except for this one guy. We couldn't just leave them though, this man and his friend, two aged people literally didn't have anyone else to help them. And the whole time the old man drove us nuts, wheeling around on his wheel-chair, complaining, making sure we didn't throw anything away, asking where his prosthetic leg was after we had told him that we had already packed it. The poor guy wasn't all there and we got so tired of him that we came very close to locking him in the bathroom while we packed up all his old nasty junk. The lady had rented a 17 foot U-haul truck. And from this little apartment this guy had it took two trips. His new apartment was actually out of the mission boundaries, it was 20 minutes south of us more towards downtown Houston. We called up the Houston Texas South Mission hoping to get some of the missionaries down there waiting on the other side so they could unload the guy but typically they were all "too busy" and wouldn't get help from their wards either. Except for two elders who had a 30 minute window to help us unload. It was a massive project so we got permission from President Hansen to go down there with our member in the U-Haul truck and unload. So we got down there, and the South elders helped us for about 20 minutes then they had to leave, leaving the three of us to unload this truck by ourselves. It took us a while, we were dead tired and our arms were like noodles but we did it, started on our way back, got stuck in Houston traffic, and finally got back around 6:00, we had left at 2:00. We had planned on the english elders finishing the rest of the packing so that it would all be ready to go by the time we got back. But it was not so, so we got back and packed and the truck was finally all ready to go by 8:00. Obviously we couldn't go unload the second trip because our curfew is 9:30. The best we could do was the give the woman the number of the south missionaries and we dropped the truck off in front of her sister's house who didn't live too far from the new apartments. We were exhausted, that whole day we didn't shower, shave, or even get dressed in proselyting clothes. All we had to eat the whole day was a yogurt for breakfast and a granola bar for lunch. After we had dropped off the truck Tony took us through the drive through of Taco Bell and the three of us gorged ourselves on cheap tacos and burritos. Then he took us home, we showered and went to be, completely exhausted. And ever since then we've had a crappy week, being sore and stiff and generally too tired to do anything, that and all of our investigators bailed out on us. We don't quite get it, an exhausting 14 hour act of charity and our area goes down the drain. You'd think that we'd be more blessed after doing something like that.
Whatever, I hope everything is going good at home. The weather is getting better here, it's starting to cool down. Today it feels almost like Utah outside. Well I'm out of time, I love you all and hope you have a good week.
-- Elder Rice
Atascada
September 20, 2010
Ahoy there family,
This week has been rough, the process of whipping my companion into shape goes slowly. I have to drag him out of bed and out the door everyday. It's been rough, with not a few instances of gnashing of teeth. Though I did get my bike back on Friday so we were no longer on foot which has helped a lot. Other than that not much is going on. Though I think the work is starting to pick up, have some people who we are going to try and set some baptismal dates with this week. We've found some cool new investigators as well. One such person was a media referral we got through the phone and at first we thought it was a joke because he had some crazy name that we weren't entirely sure how to pronounce. We concluded that it must be someone with some indigenous Mayan name or something. Well we found the guy and he's an old man from Colombia but his parents or grandparents immigrated to Colombia from India, hence his bizarre name. He said we could call him 'Salim'. He's way cool though, keenly interested in the Book of Mormon, we gave one to him, talked about it a bit and set up a return appointment for saturday. I hope it goes well.
We also have a possible source of new families to teach. In this one apartment complex there is this Dominican Family in our ward and we go over every now and then to check on Travis, a 12 year old recent convert. The family consists of a single mother and 4 or 5 kids, I'm not sure how many, ranging from ages 4-14. So every time we are over there, the apartment is just full of the kids and they're friends just coming and going. Now Travis has an incredibly short attention span so most of our new member lessons with him are these cool little games and object lessons. The past couple times all of the kids friends have sat in on the lesson and have been amazed by the stupid little magic tricks we do to demonstrate gospel principles. In fact some of the older children, who are 10, 11, 12, etc. Showed up to the Fiesta de Patrias we had a couple weeks ago and have been asking their parents if they could go to church with this family. And they have, we've had a couple of these kids friends come with them to church the past couple weeks, it's amazing. I never would have guessed that children of such young age would even have the slightest interest in the church. What we're banking on is to start teaching these kids' families if we can get this family to start inviting their friends over for our little visits. It will be sweet. The problem is that we are almost out of ideas for stupid little games and magic tricks. From my time in the mission I've learned a few from my many companions, we have about 5 really cool little tricks/games that demonstrate gospel principles really well. But we're almost out of them. So I need ideas, in fact I've seen some book called "The Missionaries' little Book of Object Lessons" that some missionary had. So I was wondering if you all could find that book, or something like it, some little book full of cool little things you can do with common household items and send it to me, 'twould be much appreciated. Also send some postage stamps with it if you could. I'm completely out.
And, uh... Yeah. That's just about all I got to say this week. This area is really boring, all suburbs, and nothing really epic or crazy happens. Oh and mom I've started working on some letters, but as I said I need stamps if they are to go anywhere anytime soon. Oh and I got the package, turns out it did arrive on the 3rd it's just that the apartment office didn't notify me or the little package slip they put in our mail was lost or something but I got it. Thanks, it was really sweet. Okay I'm done now, I hope you all recover and have a good week. Peace out...
-- Elder Rice
Ahoy there family,
This week has been rough, the process of whipping my companion into shape goes slowly. I have to drag him out of bed and out the door everyday. It's been rough, with not a few instances of gnashing of teeth. Though I did get my bike back on Friday so we were no longer on foot which has helped a lot. Other than that not much is going on. Though I think the work is starting to pick up, have some people who we are going to try and set some baptismal dates with this week. We've found some cool new investigators as well. One such person was a media referral we got through the phone and at first we thought it was a joke because he had some crazy name that we weren't entirely sure how to pronounce. We concluded that it must be someone with some indigenous Mayan name or something. Well we found the guy and he's an old man from Colombia but his parents or grandparents immigrated to Colombia from India, hence his bizarre name. He said we could call him 'Salim'. He's way cool though, keenly interested in the Book of Mormon, we gave one to him, talked about it a bit and set up a return appointment for saturday. I hope it goes well.
We also have a possible source of new families to teach. In this one apartment complex there is this Dominican Family in our ward and we go over every now and then to check on Travis, a 12 year old recent convert. The family consists of a single mother and 4 or 5 kids, I'm not sure how many, ranging from ages 4-14. So every time we are over there, the apartment is just full of the kids and they're friends just coming and going. Now Travis has an incredibly short attention span so most of our new member lessons with him are these cool little games and object lessons. The past couple times all of the kids friends have sat in on the lesson and have been amazed by the stupid little magic tricks we do to demonstrate gospel principles. In fact some of the older children, who are 10, 11, 12, etc. Showed up to the Fiesta de Patrias we had a couple weeks ago and have been asking their parents if they could go to church with this family. And they have, we've had a couple of these kids friends come with them to church the past couple weeks, it's amazing. I never would have guessed that children of such young age would even have the slightest interest in the church. What we're banking on is to start teaching these kids' families if we can get this family to start inviting their friends over for our little visits. It will be sweet. The problem is that we are almost out of ideas for stupid little games and magic tricks. From my time in the mission I've learned a few from my many companions, we have about 5 really cool little tricks/games that demonstrate gospel principles really well. But we're almost out of them. So I need ideas, in fact I've seen some book called "The Missionaries' little Book of Object Lessons" that some missionary had. So I was wondering if you all could find that book, or something like it, some little book full of cool little things you can do with common household items and send it to me, 'twould be much appreciated. Also send some postage stamps with it if you could. I'm completely out.
And, uh... Yeah. That's just about all I got to say this week. This area is really boring, all suburbs, and nothing really epic or crazy happens. Oh and mom I've started working on some letters, but as I said I need stamps if they are to go anywhere anytime soon. Oh and I got the package, turns out it did arrive on the 3rd it's just that the apartment office didn't notify me or the little package slip they put in our mail was lost or something but I got it. Thanks, it was really sweet. Okay I'm done now, I hope you all recover and have a good week. Peace out...
-- Elder Rice
Inquieta
September 13, 2010
Hello FAm...
This has been a rather stressful week. My bike is still broken so we walked everywhere, we went by every member in our area to see if they or anyone they knew, knew how to fix bikes. They all had their own theories and all of them tried but none of them could, I myself have spent hours on it, and nothing has come of it. So I gave up and today we went by the local bike shop and dropped off to be fixed. Knowing how bike shops are it'll probably cost me an arm and a leg but whatever, I don't care anymore. They said they'd have it done by Thursday so we're not through walking yet.
My new companion, Elder Lamoure, is an interesting fellow. He started his mission in the Dominican Republic and after being there for three months, got seriously ill and was sent home. Apparently the local diet got him, they eat nothing but rice over there and he entered the mission weighing 255 lbs, all the rice plugged him up and he couldn't use the bathroom for a month, and in that same month he lost 70 lbs. He's not sure where it all went seeing that he couldn't poop for a month but it went somewhere. He was at home another three months recovering then he was reassigned to this mission. He's not quite over whatever happened to him over there, he can't eat rice, bananas, or pasta, and only has to poop twice or three times a week. He's been in this mission for 4 months, so he has 7 months total as a missionary. So he's still pretty new and his spanish isn't good at all, I've been pretty much teaching by myself this last week and he's just been following me around. I try to get him to do something but he generally has a very negative attitude about... everything, I've felt the temptation on multiple occasions to tell him to suck it up and get his act together... This transfer is looking to be a challenge, hopefully things will go better this week, last week was a little rough but we're a little better off now.
So in addition to walking everywhere and not teaching too many people our ward had it's "Fiesta de Patrias" saturday night. It was cool, it was a good turn out and lots of potential investigators came. It's basically just a party in which everyone brings food, clothes, and dances from their native countries and shows them off to everyone else. It was great, there was so much food, I got to try all sorts of weird things from all sorts of weird countries. We had Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Peru, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. I took lots of pictures as you can see. There was this really bizarre dance performed by the Bishop and his wife, some Venezuelan thing where he hopped around like a monkey beating his stick on the ground while holding a rope that was tied around his wife while she stumbled around pretending to be a donkey or something. It was one of the most odd things I've ever seen in my life, and we weren't alone the whole ward was like: "What the freak...?" The bishop and his wife are the only Venezuelans so the rest of us didn't seem to get it.
Oh and that's way weird that Alyssa ran into Frost and Bone, very weird...
Okay so the pictures are of the area and me with the bike. Myself and Elder Rupp with the two english elders we live with, Elder Gustafson and Elder Miller, and the others are of the Fiesta de Patrias. I still haven't gotten the package, we'll swing by the apartment office tomorrow and see what they say. If not then I don't know, I don't really care about too much right now, mostly just trying to stay awake and getting my companion out the door. Okay, that's all for this week. Hopefully next week's e-mail will have better news, and sorry mom I haven't had anytime to write any letters, hopefully I can start some soon though. Adios.
Tortica
September 6, 2010
Hello family.
This is going to be a short one since today is transfer day and we couldn't e-mail yesterday because of the holiday. My companion Elder Rupp is getting transferred and I shall once again be getting a new companion. Which kind of stinks since I just barely got here and barely know this area and it's a lot harder to get to know your area when you're on all bike. My new companion will be Elder Lamoure, I've never met nor even heard of him. I think he's pretty new. We will see how that goes.
It's been raining a lot this last week and seems like it's going to rain a lot more this week so we'll likely not have too much to do. One quick amusing anecdote. My bike has been giving me all sorts of problems lately. On friday the rear breaks locked up and we tried to fix them with no avail and finally on Saturday we found a member who had worked in a bikeshop before and the 3 of us together finally fixed it. Turns out the wire thing was messed all down the inside of the thing tube that runs up the body of the bike to the handle bars. I would never had guessed. So we fixed them and the brakes work now just not as good as they did before however. Then Sunday morning we found to our dismay that our tires had been slashed. We live on the 3rd floor of our apartment complex so we keep our bikes on the 1st floor locked up under and to the stairwell. Well somebody decided to slash up our back tires, just the back ones. So once again we were on foot that day. So yesterday we bought new tires and new intertubes, but fortunately the bike place was having a sale on everything so we got some pretty sweet discounts. Then after that when we were biking in a drizzle my bike slipped out from under me and while I came out of the crash completely unharmed, I didn't even hit the ground, I just jumped off and ran next to it. Some metal sprocket thing that the chain goes through next to wheel got all bent up and once again we were hoofing it the nearest members house, luckily the member is a pretty handy guy and we managed to bend it back in to place more or less. One thing I've come to admire about the hispanic people as that almost all of them are really handy like that. Since many of them can't go to school and get upper-class jobs, most of them work as mechanics, construction workers, and people who do yards. So they can fix just about anything.
Okay I'm out of time. I'm, looking forward to the package whenever it may come and I love you all and hope you have a good week. Peace!
--Elder Rice
Hello family.
This is going to be a short one since today is transfer day and we couldn't e-mail yesterday because of the holiday. My companion Elder Rupp is getting transferred and I shall once again be getting a new companion. Which kind of stinks since I just barely got here and barely know this area and it's a lot harder to get to know your area when you're on all bike. My new companion will be Elder Lamoure, I've never met nor even heard of him. I think he's pretty new. We will see how that goes.
It's been raining a lot this last week and seems like it's going to rain a lot more this week so we'll likely not have too much to do. One quick amusing anecdote. My bike has been giving me all sorts of problems lately. On friday the rear breaks locked up and we tried to fix them with no avail and finally on Saturday we found a member who had worked in a bikeshop before and the 3 of us together finally fixed it. Turns out the wire thing was messed all down the inside of the thing tube that runs up the body of the bike to the handle bars. I would never had guessed. So we fixed them and the brakes work now just not as good as they did before however. Then Sunday morning we found to our dismay that our tires had been slashed. We live on the 3rd floor of our apartment complex so we keep our bikes on the 1st floor locked up under and to the stairwell. Well somebody decided to slash up our back tires, just the back ones. So once again we were on foot that day. So yesterday we bought new tires and new intertubes, but fortunately the bike place was having a sale on everything so we got some pretty sweet discounts. Then after that when we were biking in a drizzle my bike slipped out from under me and while I came out of the crash completely unharmed, I didn't even hit the ground, I just jumped off and ran next to it. Some metal sprocket thing that the chain goes through next to wheel got all bent up and once again we were hoofing it the nearest members house, luckily the member is a pretty handy guy and we managed to bend it back in to place more or less. One thing I've come to admire about the hispanic people as that almost all of them are really handy like that. Since many of them can't go to school and get upper-class jobs, most of them work as mechanics, construction workers, and people who do yards. So they can fix just about anything.
Okay I'm out of time. I'm, looking forward to the package whenever it may come and I love you all and hope you have a good week. Peace!
--Elder Rice
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