One Gun Salute

November 2, 2009

Family:

I got the big package, thanks for all the food and stuff, that was great I really needed a lot of that stuff. I've not yet received the clothes yet but I hope it will come eventually.

So things in Texas are going well. I forgot to bring my camera today, I've taken some more epic pictures but that can wait till next week. Oh, so those last pictures I've sent. I laughed when you asked me who was the elder that was "praying over the washing machine". That was Elder Pitts, and you may not be able to tell but you will notice in that picture that the kitchen floor is rather reflective, because it's under 2 inches of water. Elder Pitts was on the chair, out of the water and finishing his laundry. He was the one who flooded out apartment and in that picture he's doing it while our apartment is flooded, he didn't care about the flooding he just wanted to get his laundry done. I'll do the names of the people in the pictures some other time when I have it with me.

So the work is going well, we have 4 baptisms lined up, but only two of which are for sure, we think. It's rather miraculous how this happens, our best investigator was one that just came out of nowhere and just showed up to church one day and said he wanted to be baptized and we started teaching him. It's astonishing to me that people actually want to know about this stuff, I always try to put myself in the shoes of the people we teach and I think I would be bored out of my mind if a couple of guys were telling me this mysterious stuff. Maybe that's just something unique about Texas and other such places, people are still concerned about religious matters and not all that secular as the modern world is.


Oh and an interesting thing Dad, there are no native spanish speakers in this mission. I found that out and was rather shocked but that's indeed the situation. Which is odd but whatever. We do have one missionary here from Mongolia, I haven't met him but most people like him, and think he's weird, he's an english missionary though so I don't know if I'll run into him. Areas like mine are mixed english and spanish, but mostly english. Down the Houston Zones, that are actually in Houston itself they are entirely spanish zones, that would be nice except that it's in the ghetto. It's bad enough here, I hate that dank grimey smell of the nasty little trailers that hispanics live in, it'll be a hundred times worse down in those Houston Zones. They tell me horrid tales of multitudes of fleas, roaches, and bed bugs. Not looking forward to that but whatever. It's not too bad up here. Did I mention our bed-bug infestation in my last e-mail? Well we had one, we think we've gotten them all and we've finally gotten some zip up mattress covers. But now we think we have fleas, Elder Astin saw one jump off his arm yesterday. And we killed this HUGE cockroach the other day. It was a monster, I was hoping to send pictures of it today but you can look forward to those next week.

Hmm.... Anything else interesting? Oh, I'm learning how to crochet. My whole district does it and one day when we had this huge thunderstorm that kept us in all day they taught me and I got my own yarn and hook and I'm making a hat right now... Yeah... It's kind of fun but rather mind-numbing. The others do it to send back to the girls they're writing at home, I don't have any such reason so I just do it just because.

Yeah.... Well that's all I got today. I love y'all. Peace out.

-Elder Rice