Rednecks

May 24, 2010

Hello Family.

This week was a long week. We've been tracting for at least 2 or 3 hours every day. Usually at like noon to 3. The least effective time to do anything especially tracting but whatever. I've decided that our motto right now is 'work harder not smarter'. The heat has been a killer and I've had to shower every night because we get so nasty during the day. Not too many amusing things have happened lately. I'm just tired of seeing trailers. Out here in the middle of nowhere the hispanics are harder to find. They're hidden among the white folks in the trailer parks, so a lot of the people we've talked to this week are white and it gets old real fast. Because no anglo-saxon wants anything to do with missionaries or talk about religion unless they're drunk.

The other day we just walking down this street when we came across three white guys out on their lawn drinking. All of three of them were 'Nam veterans and I wanted to talk to them and hear some cool stories from the war, but my companion, never wanting to waste a minute moved on. Though one of them showed us this shack that he built next to his trailer, it was surrounded by barbed wire fences and other sorts of barricades, he told us that's where he keeps his wife. He told us that she's a crack head and he just built this "house" for her because it was cold last winter and she's been getting into too much trouble lately wandering around the streets. And this whole time his wife was yelling at us, "Church people! Church People! Come over here!" We went up to the fence to see her and she was just sitting at this table under an umbrella, listening to the radio and smoking a cigarette. She started talking to us and was all twitchy and kept winking and smiling and twitching and then she burst into tears and suddenly cleared up again and was normal and kept on talking as if nothing had happened.... We were like... okay.... have a good day! See ya! We left and later as we were talking to some mexicans father down the street we heard gunshots from that trailer...

It's really quite sad to see these people living in these conditions. We were talking to this one family from Mexico in their "yard". The husband didn't want anything to do with us and went away, the wife was actually interested and we talked to her for a while, in the meantime her three children were annoying us to death. Her oldest was this 9 year old girl who's arms and legs were coated in bug bites and she just kept talking and talking and talking. The two smaller children could have been raised by monkeys for all we know. The little boy who was about 4 or 5, just stared at us and was incapable of speaking, we'd try to give him high five's but he just stared, blankly, and wouldn't move. The 2 or 3 year old little girl was just covered in dirt, constantly screaming and throwing things at us. Then she'd go find a stick and dig in the mud for a while or try to throw rocks at their chiuauas or at us. She too was incapable of coherent speech. Even when communicating with her mother it was screams, growls, and grunts. The whole time I was sitting there, a certain song from the Pocahontas Disney movie was going through my head..

So that's how most of our week was. Though through our efforts we did get like 14 new investigators. Less than half of that will likely remain investigators but oh well. I decided there is no efficient way to do missionary work. And to cap off the week we got a nasty surprise on sunday when Carlos decided at the very last minute that he didn't feel ready to be baptized. That was a bummer, he was good to go and everything but he told us that he "doesn't know enough" and that he needed to learn more before he was ready for baptism. We hear this excuse a lot and it's probably one of the lamest excusas. You don't need to really 'know' anything to be baptized, you just have repent, have a testimony, feel the spirit, and realize that from now on your going to try to live as a better person. So that was frustrating but we will see what happens with him.

Well that's about all that happened this week. Bummer that Alyssa's google drawing didn't go anywhere, I thought it was really good. And Aidan I really liked the comic you sent, I was laughing. Aidan's drawings are starting to look more and more like Alyssa's. I'm getting better at drawing now, that's what I do during church and zone conferences, if I don't then I fall asleep, so I've been doodling in my planner and I've got some pretty cool drawings that I think I will send in a letter one day.

Okay I'm done now. I love you all and have a good last week or whatever of school.

-- Elder Rice

That Was Just Your Life

Howdy Family.

This last week was rather busy. We've been mostly tracting and talking to every single person we see, lots of work. Yesterday our investigator, Carlos, had his baptismal interview, and he will get baptized next sunday. It's exciting, I haven't had a baptism since November. We have two other people who are progressing so things are going just swell. Though two days ago we nearly lost Carlos because he almost got deported. In his car the dial on the speedometer doesn't work (fairly typical of hsipancs). So he didn't know how fast he was going. He was on his way to the church where we were going to meet him and have a lesson. Well he was in a 20 mph zone going 40 when a cop got him and pulled him over in the church parking lot. And unsurprisingly Carlos does not have a license, not being a citizen. And the cop could have easily called immigration and that would have been the end of Carlos. Luckily this was not the case, the cop was actually an hispanic (so they understood each other perfectly) and gave him a ticket for nothing more than speeding but was going to tow his car unless someone showed up in the next 15 minutes with a driver's license. The cop told Carlos that he could call someone and if they could get here soon enough he could put the car under the responsibility of someone else and he wouldn't have to tow it. So on our way to the church we got a call from Carlos where told us what had happened, he didn't tell us about the part with towing and the license and whatever. We got there and jumped out of the car and walked over to where Carlos was in his car, the cop who was in his car doing whatever it is they do in there, pointed at us out the window and told us to get back. I did and had to beckon my companion back to our car. My companion doesn't have a lot of common sense in these matters, this is going off on a tangent but we were tracting the other day and we go this trailer with a chain link fence around it with 'BEWARE OF DOG' signs all over it. He was about to open the gate and walk in but I stopped him and told him to shake the fence. He did and two rather large dogs came out of nowhere barking. He seemed very surprised and thanked me for saving him. Interesting that my companion, who's been on his mission for 23 months now, and especially one who likes to tract a lot. Had never done that before. He's very oblivious to 'NO TRESSPASSING' signs and other things of that nature, his catch-phrase is 'God will protect us!' He's probably going to get us killed one of these days or arrested onf of these days so I shall have to step up in 'not being stupid'.

Where was I?.... Oh yeah so after 5 minutes or so the cop beckoned us back over and he told us what had happened and asked who Carlos had called, which was my companion, and to make a long story short he signed Carlos' car to Elder Frost who was now responsible if something happened in the next 24 hours. Meaning that if Carlos wrecked or hit someone on the way back home it would be on Elder Frost's head. Yup... I'm glad I was driving and it wasn't my phone day. Nothing happened but it would have been hard to go through the rest of the day with that on your mind.

But we had a great lesson with Carlos after that and he will get baptized next sunday. That's about everything interesting that happened this week. The pictures attached are of me making tortillas and me sitting on the roof of Hno. Bonilla's house (less active member) teaching him and his cousin, Javier (one of our investigators). We had just dropped by to see if Javier was around and he was up on the roof working on it, so we climbed up and helped him for a while then Hno. Bonilla arrived later and after we worked on the roof for a little bit we sat down and had a lesson.

We were making tortillas because my companion, is one of those super hard working, super obedient, and tries really hard to be super mexican. Last week he bought some tortilla flour from Wal-Mart and wanted to make tortillas. I had finished my lunch and was reading when we calls and asks me if I know anything about cooking because he needed some help. He succeeded in making dough out of the flour and getting the general procedure down but his tortillas were turning out as misshapen lumps of pita bread, and it was literally pita bread, thick and kind of hard. So I showed him to work the dough, get the flour in your fingers, get it nice and thin and in a general round shape and not to let it sit on the cooking pan so long. Now I have never made tortillas before but I knew how to work with dough (thanks mom!) and I had a general idea of what they should look like. And they were turning out pretty good, I wish I had picture of them but I made some decent tortillas, my companion thought it was so amazing that he went and found my camera and started of taking pictures. You'd be suprised how many missionaries don't know how to cook.

Well that's all I got for today. Mom I will send an email to you right after this one with the 5 pictures I have in mind. Okay, love you all, peace out.

-- Elder Rice

Don't Tread on Me

Howdy Family.

This e-mail will be brief since I just talked to y'allllll yesterday. Here's some pictures, the first few are of some of the ward members in Conroe. Hno. Juan, the 1st counselor in the bishopric of the Woodlands 3rd Ward. And the Ortiz family, a family that was baptized about a couple years ago, they went through the temple and everything are are the strongest most active members in Conroe by far, they're great they always help us out with teaching and sharing the gospel, etc. Perfect examples of new members. The taller of the two boys, Alan, is probably the closest person I've yet found that's a mexican double of Austin. The 3rd picture is of Elder Smith, he wasn't my companion but we lived in the same apartement for 3 transfers so we got to be good friends, he's a funny guy from Layton, UT. The following are of the Flores family, that's where I spent my birthday, we had just finished eating papusas when my companion remembered it was my birthday so yeah.... It shows us all sitting there, the one in the blue is Jose, the shorter one in the red is Paul. They're a nice family we became like best friends with them right there as soon as we met them, they already knew my companion Elder Frost, because Elder Frost origionally opened the Oakcrest branch about a year and a half ago. And they gave me some 'flan' with a candle in it to celebrate my birthday. It was fun. There are a lot of good members here. The last picture is basically what the landscape here looks like. Nothingness, dotted with farms and empty wastelands. Well that's all I got to say today. Oh and here is my address, I'm done putting up with the mission office, so here's my address:

811 Cloyd Drive # 716
Magnolia Texas, 77355

Okay, peace out until next week.

-- Elder Rice

Ride the Lightening part 2

Pictures from last week:

The pictures are of many things, the Cowboy Chruch, randome pictures of Conroe and some of my favorite memebers in this ward that I am now leaving. The tall one is Elvin, my favorite Catraccho, and the other two are Antonio and Melon, my favorite Mexicans. Okay that's all the time I got today.

Ride the Lightening

Hello Family.

So we got transfer calls and at last I am finally being transferred to somewhere else. I'm actually going to be opening up a new area south-west of where I am now. That ought to be fun, my companion will be Elder Frost, and this will be his last transfer in the mission. I've met him before and I like him. He trained Elder Manship who was one of my buddies in the MTC. So it should be fun, a lot of work but hopefully a lot of fun as well.

So yeah, transfers go down tommorow morning. I don't have a lot of time to write this email today. We're running on a tight schedule today on my last day in Conroe. And I'm going to send that package to y'all today. Who knows when it's going to get there and it has one of those cassete tapes in it that I finally got around to. So that will make up for lack of length in this e-mail.

The pictures are of many things, the Cowboy Church, random pictures of Conroe and some of my favorite members in this ward that I am now leaving. The tall one is Elvin, my favorite Catraccho, and the other two are Antonio and Melon, my favorite Mexicans. Okay that's all the time I got today, thanks for the package I'm looking forward to it.

(Alex forgot to add the pictures)

Peace out

-- Elder Rice

Creeping Death

Howdy Family.

I appreciate your comments Dad, that Joseph Smith quote was what President Hansen had shared with us when we posed the question to him. And I agree, it'd likely be less than effective. Though lately I haven't been worried too much about Giovanni, I've felt that he's not really concerned about that. He's just doing what he always does. Trying to find loopholes in everything, he really just wants to see if we know everything or not and I am quite tired of it. When we saw him last it was rather lame. We decided to read 2 Nephi 29 with him, which is a pretty hardcore chapter (A Bible! A Bible! we have a Bible and we need no more Bible! etc.) We read it with him and then shared our testimonies about the Book of Mormon. It shut him up pretty good. Then he tried to do the most lamest thing. He read the verse about the 'Great and Abominable Church, the Whore over all the Earth' and he looked up and said "I know what this is talking about!... It's talking about the Catholic Church isn't it?" We were like.... well... sort of... We then told him that it didn't really mean any specific Church but basically all evil institutions. Now this was the dumb part. He sat there for a minute and thought for a bit. Then asked us if our church was expected to grow within the next few years. I was about to say yes when I noticed that my companion didn't move. He sensed a trap, I closed my mouth and waited a bit. Elder Ordaz told him that yes it's going to grow but not not that rapidly, because we know as it says in Revelations that the Church of the Lamb will be few. Thus Elder Ordaz neatly avoided the trap and then Giovanni was forced to reveal it and said that he thought that this verse: 'Great and Abominable Church, the Whore over all the Earth' could be talking about us the Mormons. Pffffftttt.... Lame. This is what he does, he just tries to catch us in our words and find plot holes in the things we teach. I'm tired of it.

Soon Giovanni won't be my problem. Transfer calls are the end of this week and from the rumors and other gossip going around it would seem that I'm finally leaving Conroe, I hope so anyway. I'm way tired of this place.

This week President Hansen introduced a new stat, the "Invitation To Learn" stat or ITL. Which is basically a tracting stat as you have to "extend" an "invitation to learn" to 10 new people you have never met before every day. And it's 10 per person, not companionship so it's 20 per companionship each day. It's kind of dumb and all the missionaries here loath it but whatever.

Yup, that's about it. I assume that y'all are gonna to send me some sort of something for my birthday. If so could you please include some shorts? It's getting ridiculously hot and some shorts for p-days and other things (I already have like basketball shorts but I could use some to wear around). The particular pair I want is the camo shorts I have, I have two different pairs, send me the bigger one, the acercombiesthingandfitch one. Also I gave Austin permission to get into one of my boxes and he is going to get these 5 CDs of mine which are in fact missionary approved music, they're mostly classical soundtracks and Scandinavian folk music. 'Twould be nice if you could get those to me.

I almost have the package for you all ready, just need a couple more things, it was hard to find some of them. The pictures I attached are of the Houston Temple on a nice day. It's funny but that was the first time that we've been to the Temple and it wasn't raining or foggy, and some pictures of Aidan's friends that I met there. Well that's all I got for today next monday I should know where I'm going. Okay love you all, bye.

Nordstjärnans tidsålder

Hello Family. This week was rather uneventful as they all seem to be lately. I did get your letter mom, I've noticed that it takes approximately 10 days to receive a letter from y'all, that is if you sent it the same day you wrote it. Though I got Dad's letter pretty fast within 4 days (by the way that was an excellent letter dad, thank you). So maybe the office isn't the best way to go. When I get to my new area (which should hopefully be in a couple of weeks). I'll give you the address for the apartment so I don't have to put up with this slowness anymore.

So as I said this week was slow and uneventful, we don't have any progressing investigators, we've had to do a lot of finding this week. Last Tuesday we had a throw down with Gionvanni Dubon, I'm not sure what happened but he flipped out a bit. He has this obnoxious habit of liking to bash and catch people in their words. He brought up the Word of Wisdom and how we're all hypocrites because we drink coca-cola. Now when Elder Woodruff and I had taught him that nearly a month ago he had no problem with it and he understood it just fine and we cleared up all his questions and he committed to live it. Now he brought it up again. I told him very plainly that we can't drink coffee or tea, we can drink all the coca-cola or caffeinated beverages we want, it's probably not that good for you but we don't have a commandment forbidding caffeine, just coffee and tea. We had a member with us and we spent twenty minutes on that subject. We all told him that we obey commandments because of faith, you don't always have to know the details of why or why not. Like in Old Testament times why did the Israelites have commandments not to eat pigs, dolphins, rabbits, and various other kinds of animals? There's nothing wrong with the meat of those animals, they had it just because Jehovah said so. So today when we don't know necessarily why coffee or tea is bad for us we obey it anyway because we trust God.

Then we got into the Book of Mormon again and it came down to "it's hard me to accept new things". A lame excuse, first he was like "you guys don't know, you were born in the church!" Our member and Elder Ordaz then reminded him that they in fact were converts... Then he was like "uhh.... well... Rice! He's not a convert! He can't possibly understand what I'm going through! And you two are young I'm 40something years old blah blah blah!" Yeah... That was a long night, he was on one. It was the first time on my mission I'd been angry during a lesson. I was getting really tired of him, we've been doing this with him for the past 7 months and it's getting really really old. I didn't actually get mad during it, I didn't say anything to reveal my anger I just stared directly into his eyes and bored holes through his pupils he wouldn't look at me straight in the eyes after a few minutes. I want to drop him and let him just sit for a month or so and then go back and see how he's doing but Elder Ordaz doesn't want to drop him because of Gionvanni's two teenage daughters... yup... That's my companion... We spent the rest of week finding and tracting and generally not getting much success at all, I hate this area now. I need to leave before I go insane, there's nothing here.

On saturday we had some fun though. The english elders invited us along to go help out this part member family. They lived deep within the depths of Cut-N-Shoot and we spent the whole day clearing out forest from their property. It was too much fun, we were armed with machetes, axes, hatchets, chainsaws, lawnmowers, clippers, you name it. We had just about every sort of sharp and pointy cutting tool imaginable. If you can imagine 6 missionaries armed to the teeth and running around hacking at every green or brown thing in sight all of them screaming war cries and generally just destroying everything, that was us. We demolished so many trees and vines and everything and even after 6 hours we barely made a dent in that jungle, we're going back soon sometime though, I can't wait.

Yeah that was basically the highlight of the week, other than that mostly boringness, and rain. Lots and lots of rain. It was bizarre, this one day it rained brutally hard for 20 minutes, stopped. The sun came out and dried up everything and then a half hour later the rain came back out of nowhere. This cycle continued all day, it was the weirdest thing.

Oh and Beth Breeland tracked me down yesterday, I did get your letter mom and when I read that part about her I was like yeah-sure-okay-whatever. But sure enough I was just sitting in sacrament meeting yesterday zoning out and when the service ended she tapped me on the shoulder and was right there. I'm not sure how she tracked me down but she'd probably be a good bounty hunter or something. So that's that picture up there.

Well that's all for this week, hopefully something amazing will happen this week or there won't be much for me to write about next monday. I love you all, bye.

-- Elder Rice