Mmmmm..... Road kill.

 

My other new companion, Elder Poulsen

Helloooo everybody!

Once again we have a wonderful day as the temperature proceeds to drop from comfortable warm temperatures.

Lately its been rather chilly, I'm starting to have to wear a light jacket everywhere I go now. 

You all know this man, it's Elder Vazquez, we came out together.

Things have picked up now that we can actually get back to work. Already we have had more lessons than our previous week and we aren't being close to done yet.

My new companion is companions are crazy and fun. We have had many funny moments already, one of my favorites involves road kill.

Every time we pass by a roadkill that wasn't intact, one of my companions either wants the meat or the pelt of what the animal is. So far he has not had success, but I believe that will change soon.

He also tells members if any of them hits a dear to call us so we can take care of the body. 

Orofino Mountain Range

So far we have done a ton of service. Just the other day, we helped some members move out for about 6 hours. We have helped others by digging fence posts and building additions on to homes as well. The service just keeps coming. 

Orofino

We have been having some sweet lessons.

Lately there has been a returning member reaching out to us. Her family lives in the ward as well, but she wants to avoid them for the time being. She had toldus that she wanted to change and work past all of her mistakes, and upon further discussions it seemed to me that she didn't need to talk to us as much as she needed to talk to bishop. (You see, our leaders make sure that we understand that us missionaries are called to teach not to council. They tell us to leave it to people who have been around longer and would know how to deal more delicate situations). After a while we were able to convinced her to talk to the bishop and since then she's been on cloud 9 (she's happy). 

Orofino is pretty

We have lots of plans in the works for teaching people. We plan on rallying the members to help us find and teach. If we are successful in this we will be able to revive the work in this area. I will let you all know of our tender mercies when they come. But for now I must go.

I love you all and thank you for your support and emails throughout my time here in the Spokane Washington Mission.

Sunset

Let's get ready for some Earth Wind and Fire tonight!

Getting a haircut with the missionaries.

I remember the 21 night of September. Around that time I was in Moscow, the college town for the U of Idaho. Now I'm a lot further south and I'm am able to enjoy what the locals around here call the Banana Belt of Northern Idaho. 

I'm told here that during the winter that it doesn't get too cold, and not only that, they don't get much snow either. I hope I spend the rest of my mission down here in the mission where I won't have to break out of my cold weather clothing. 

I'm sorry that I forgot to write you all last week. This had totally spaced my mind. I guess I was having too much fun.

So the fires, after hitting a huge climax, last week have all died out. All the fire men, helicopters and mobile command centers are gone to fight fires elsewhere. The smoke that come from the fires here in Orofino were bad, but the smoke that came from them wasn't nearly as bad as the smoke from the the burning west coast. The smoke had blanketed our mission in a thick unhealthy haze. It had gotten so bad that they told us to stay inside at all times, and in the event where we would have travel to a lesson or go outside for any reason we would have to wear our masks. 

Lots of food walking around. I guess is a redneck food storage.

Covid-19 had made it very difficult to find new people. It limited out chances of ever meeting new people. However the smoke made impossible for us to do any kind of work outside, no more service for us. So our lives in Orofino became very slow and boring. But the other day there was a good rain storm and it took all the smoke out of the sky, now we can get on to business as usual. 

I almost forgot to mention. Now we can officially proselyte again!!! We can begin tracting and give this area a jumpstart and get some baptisms on the way! From this moment you can expect more stories from teaching and lessons. 

One more thing worth mentioning. In our mission, they finally approved the missionary dress codes which allows us to wear blue shirts and if we choose we can forego wearing ties all together. 

Okay, this will actually be the last thing. Today we got our transfer calls. I am staying in Orofino and will be getting 2 new companions: Elder Vazquez and Elder Poulsen. My current companion is going to one of my old areas in Moscow.

That's all folks, see you next week. 

Spicy Nose

This week some sweet things happened. 

First we got a referral that hasn't gone anywhere yet, but the fact that we got it brings tears to my eyes. We got some work to do!

Second, now that we will be having church every week more and more people will now be able to attend. Yesterday a member had brought a new friend of his to sacrament meeting. What makes this awesome is that the guy wants us to teach him about the church. He seems so promising and eager to learn, and to add to our excitement he lives across the street from us!

We spent a long time helping some members move lots of stuff around in their garage. In this garage we found lots of spiders, bullets and miscellaneous assorted stuff. Lots to clean up and lots of dust, in all the work I had a bad reaction to all the dust making my sinuses clogged and my nose leak like crazy.

After about an hour of this torture we found some nasal pepper spray for an instant cleaning of the sinuses. Only problem we had though was that the case said that it had expired in 2012. But as desperate as I was I would take any chance to not have to constantly blow or wipe my nose.

It was a spicy experience. It had me in spicy tears, but it worked like a charm.

Anyways gotta go. 

Love you all!

I See Fire

Hello everyone, today is a special day. P-DAY! 

Fire at night - really cool

Recently our zone has been putting our heads together and trying to figure out what kind of fun activities we can do even when we are required to social distance. 

So we are doing a Zone Olympics, where each district represents a country of our own making. Because my district is contained entirely in the boons, we decided to call our country Dijbooni (yes it is right spelling, just like Djibouti). 

There are many activities planned and we are just getting started. First we have to make some type of clothing that would identify us as the people of Dijbooni, to be honest there weren't many good ideas, but we all settled on tie dye shirts. 

There will be more on that later though. 

This week we had a lot on our plate, but the big one was exchanges with our district leader and zone leaders.

Helicopters everywhere! We were confused for why they were around until we saw the fire

First the district exchange, our day was looking pretty empty at that time, but after a ward coordination it all changed. 

We had heard that a new family had moved in the ward but we didn't know who. After some discussions we found that one of our members helped the new family move in and made good friends with them already. Upon meeting this new family we found that the had been inactive for a long time and their kids weren't baptized either, but it seemed like they wanted to get back into the Church. They have become the most promising people we have to teach. For us that's pretty exciting. 

For the exchange with the zone leadership I went to Lewiston. 

There we had a lot to do - service and even a few lessons. Unfortunately one of the lessons fell through, but we still had more to accomplish. One of the only things worth note in this exchange was a lesson we had with two YSA age girls. The Elders had established a good relationship with them and was able to get them to read and pray about the stuff we had to share. They had great attitudes and were eager to learn. Teaching them was great. They were so receptive and everything made sense to them. It was so fun to teach them, and I would not be surprised if they got baptized soon. 

Get to the chopper

Recently there have been a few fires in this area. The valley we live in is covered in smoke and we can see fires on the hills across the river from us. Helicopters fly day in and day out, filling buckets from the river and dumping it on the fire. All worries aside it's really neat to look at the fire at night. Today it's raining so it may not last much longer.

The next day, the fire died down quite a bit, it also began raining.

That's about it, not much else to mention for the day. I hope you all have a great week and make the most of it.

The Spirit of a Warior

A hot day for work

Hey, sorry I wasn't able to push out my email last week, we got preoccupied with buying groceries later in the day. 

I have to mention that tomorrow is my birthday, I'm turning 21! It snuck up on me and it didn't even dawn on me that I was getting just a little wiser. 

We have had some cool stuff for the past two weeks. 

For starters we had a full day of service in one of the most redneck towns I have ever seen in my life. It could give Radiator Springs from Cars a run for its money. It was a 2 hour drive from where we were in Orofino. Elk city, (for this it was called) is so far out that even our phone with special service couldn't get a connection. 

Unfortunately, along the way to service we hit a fawn. Sadly we hit it hard enough that we had to put it down. We were lucky enough to have Elder Groll with us who is experienced with this sort of thing. Although it was a little disturbing, it has helped me think a lot about how valuable life is and how we must fight to preserve it. We must make the most of the time we have here.

Much like the sons of Helaman we may be young and even lack the experience and knowledge our enemy has that would give an advantage. To the world these Strippling Warriors were rookies, many of them just around my age and younger were able to defend against their greatest enemy, seasoned battle hardened warriors. I think about how they did it, and two things always come to mind; their great faith and their noble cause to defend that which is right  "by our faith, by our religion, and by our rites of worship, and by our church, and by the sacred support which we owe to our wives and our children, by that liberty which binds us to our lands and our country; yea, and also by the maintenance of the sacred word of God, to which we owe all our happiness; and by all that is most dear unto us". I aim to be more like the sons of Helaman, to know what I am serving for and why I am serving. To have a greater faith in God.

Thank you all for sticking with me this far into my mission, I know that your support has made it easier for me to serve through these hard times.