Secret Asian Man

Hola Familia!

It's been a great first week in the Santa Gertrudes Ward. It's an English ward, but it's super awesome. Most of our work is done in the southern portion of the area, which is just a normal suburban-city area. The northern half of the area, La Habra Heights, is a huge, sprawling hill-type area that makes Getchell Hill look like a teeny-little ghetto in comparison. For the sake of gas mileage and time and such, we normally only work up there a couple days per week. One interesting thing is that the mission president has authorized us to take some out-of-mission routes to go up to that area when necessary. It's kind of weird driving through "outer darkness".

Anyhow, the work in the area has been great. Elder Jeon has been in this area for 5 transfers already (~7.5 months), which makes for 9 months by the end of this current transfer (note to self: it's weird to think that would have been my year mark if it weren't for the whole jaw debacle). The president has already told him that this will be his last transfer in the area (most likely), so Elder Jeon has really been focusing on getting me to meet as many people as possible: members, investigators, former investigators, potential investigators; the list goes on... I already feel like I have a pretty good handle on the area now (at least geographically).

Elder Jeon is really cool. He's originally from Korea, but his family moved to the states when he was 14, so English is his second language. He's glad to have me with him so he can actually have some language-study time. He has a good sense of humor and we like to talk to each other a lot. I've had a lot of good conversations with him already about some of the fundamentals of missionary work, not to mention the usual subjects of favorite colors and movies and such (sidenote: I have come to the frightening realization that I've forgotten much of the plot sequence in The Princess Bride).

The work is going pretty well in the area. Our main baptismal prospects right now are a couple of kids who actively come to activities and church and such, but since they're minors the main obstacle here is parental permission. We also had some surprising success finding this week, mostly through former investigators. One of the people we found yesterday we were having a doorstep conversation with, though it was teetering on the edge of being combative/bashy and he didn't seem interested in listening to us in the first place. However, when I simply gave my testimony about a few things, he opened up a lot more and told us at the end to stop by anytime later (and he gave us a cup's worth of peanuts as a parting gift (delicious)). Following the spirit. It works.

Also, I think mom would like to know this: I've been studying Isaiah daily for the past couple of weeks. I'm only in chapter 4 (after 3 weeks), but I really really like it. I don't know how, but somehow I'm managing to gain a lot of insight from it on a relatively intuitive level. It's rather impressive at how many different layers of meaning you can find in a single passage. It's sad though to think that somebody thought he should be sawed in half. He deserved better.

Peace Out,
Elder West

$14.99 + tax

I picked up this vase at Goodwill today.  I picked it up and carried all around the store...all the while I was debating with myself whether or not it might be worth $14.99 (+ tax).  It was filled to the brim with assorted jewelry, and by assorted, I mean just that.  The top was securely taped, so no digging through to check out the merchandise before paying.  I finally talked myself into shelling out over $15 bucks.  Would it be worth it? I'd have to take it home to find out.

If you think of it in terms of raw material, I feel confident that I came out ahead.  There were a ton of necklaces and bracelets - which I plan to cheerfully cannibalize.

Not all the necklaces are going to turn into something beautiful...some are beyond redemption.

This bracelet will be going either in the trash or back to GW. It looks like it was made from vertebrae that were colored with Easter egg dye.

Keychains, tie tacks, pandas and handcuffs round out the haul. These will be sharing the same fate as the backbone bracelet.

 Why did I get all this crap? Because nothing says "Sisters Craft Weekend" like junk from Goodwill.

Spring Break

Photographic evidence that Bigfoot Danny actually went on vacation with us.

This would go quite well with my globe collection.  Please?

This was the place...for a refreshing soda break.

Elder West is elderwesting

Hola Familia!

I'm using a new strategy of writing this email this week. I decided to
write my letter to President Bubert first, so it could actually be
substantial, and then I just copied it over here and will edit it
accordingly.

Agent P

Also, I've finally decided to put that Agent P notebook to good use
and use it as a little quote book of interesting quotes we hear.
Highlights include the title of this letter (courtesy of Elder George)
and "Do you guys only preach on St. Patrick's Day?"

During weekly planning this past week, it occurred to Elder George that
we needed to drop all of our non-progressing investigators. It was a
difficult decision, but we determined that if any of them wanted to
continue learning that they could try contacting us (one of them has).
As a result, our investigator pool shrank drastically, so we'll be
trying this next week to bring it back up (goal: 10 new
investigators). In retrospect, I think we should have done this
earlier, given that since the size of our investigator pool is limited
(due to time) that the number of people we find cannot be greater than
the number of people we drop/baptize for a given period of time.

A couple weeks ago the mission decided that we should bike three days
a week, to save gas money and have us do more street contacting. We
haven't quite yet made the transition yet (we're planning to fix that
this afternoon), but we've decided in the meantime to do more walking
and parking farther away from appointments and such. Already we've
seen some minor successes here, with a couple of instances where we
street contacted somebody and set up a fixed appointment. Really, for
somebody who started off being scared to talk to random people, I'm
surprised at how easy it is when you know what you're doing.

My Spanish is coming along pretty well. Ever since we've decided that
I should say all my prayers in Spanish, my skills have improved quite
a bit. Other than that, most my Spanish usage comes from street
contacting, and I've noticed that I've been having more success
getting peoples' addresses and such.

Our teaching as a trio has been getting better. When practice-teaching
during companionship study, we've been all teaching together, working
out the smoothness of the transitions and the time-sharing. We're
nowhere near perfect, but we've been getting Elder George to speak
less than 50% of the time during some lessons. Elder Jenson has been
proving himself to be a rather effective teacher, even though in
practices Elder George tends to ask him a question to get him started
("So Elder Jenson, can you please teach the entire first lesson for
us?").

For our two investigators with a baptismal date, we've determined that
one is very solid, and the other one will (probably) need to be
delayed. One has a lot of member-support when we're not around, and
we've been able to meet with him almost every day. Last night we let
him pick who was doing what at the baptism, and he was very excited.
The other person has been harder to make contact with and teach, so
although he is also excited for his baptism, it's unlikely that we'll
be able to teach him all of the lessons on time.

- Elder West

Proof that I've been busy...

Not only have I been caring for four busy grandchildren under the age of nine, I've also been working on a neglected room in Stephanie's house...her second family room...

Before:

The race car bed was not a fixture - Sterling was graciously allowing me to
sleep in his room for a couple of nights.

Oddly placed window, bookcase with strange awning...

After:

Ta-da!!

I'm hoping these will be the only hand prints on the walls.

 

Hola Elder

Hola Familia,

This has been an excellent and exciting week. We've been super busy,
with Wednesday being the craziest day.

For Wednesday, we literally had every hour of the day booked
beforehand: morning, afternoon, and everning. In the morning we had a
couple appointments with some less-active members, and also a service
appointment for a member. She needed us to take a sewing machine down
from the top of her really really full garage. In the process my arm
ended up being brutalized by a light bulb. And by brutalized I mean it
gave me a huge gash. And by huge gash I mean a super-clean, inch and a
half long cut (of awesomeness). Elder George liked it because it gave
him the opportunity to finally use the first aid kit he's been
carrying around for the past 6 months. None of our appointments in the
afternoon held, but we still got some stuff done.

That evening was really good. We started off with a lesson with
super-smart singles ward investigator. He really knows a lot of stuff
about the Bible and religion and such, and we taught him about the
Plan of Salvation. He asked a lot of really good and really deep
questions, which we were able to answer satisfactorially and to his
understanding. He understands how the Plan of Salvation makes sense on
an intellectual level (as it should), so now we're praying that he'll
be able to understand the Gospel on a spiritual level (as he should).

After that we visited a nice less-active family. Following that, we
did the impossible: Triple Splits. Elder George went to go teach a
family that has been progressing very nicely; Elder Teng went to a
couple singles' ward investigators who always have very-interested
friends over (literally our best finding activity for that ward); and
I stopped by a less-active single who we've been really successful at
reactivating. The miracle here is that all three appointments held
perfectly, and they all went amazing.

Second best day of the week was yesterday (Sunday). The aforementioned
singles' ward investigators decided to have a bonfire in their
backyard, and invited a bunch of friends over telling them "There will
be s'mores and Mormons" ("S'Mormons"). We in turn invited a couple
people from the singles' ward. Sadly, there weren't any s'mores, but
it was good all things considered. After a good amount of friendly
conversation, we were able to explain to all the stangers what exactly
we were about, and a couple of them were interested enough to set up
appointments with us.

If only members were crazy enough to do stuff like that...

Elder Teng leaves for Taiwan on February 21.

Hasta Banana,
- Elder West

P.S. Tell David that his Subway card has proved to be infinitely
(infinitely) useful.

Frequent Flier

I'm flying down to Charleston in three weeks...the week after flying down to San Francisco, and two weeks after driving down to Portland...cue some traveling music...

...anywho...while I'm spending the week with my grandchildren I might just have to paint something. The last time we visited, I ended up painting most of the rooms downstairs. I've got my eye on her upstairs family room. I asked her for the dimensions of the room - and she steered me to the builders website. I found her floor plan, but unfortunately I couldn't pin the plan, so I snipped it, saved it, and put it here...all so that I could pin it on Pinterest.