Elder Ian Rich: Nov 26: Primero Semana en el Campo

Good afternoon, Overall such a fun week here in Arizona. I love it here so much and love the people here too.

Tuesday: On Tuesday, our entire district woke up at 4 excited to leave the MTC. We didn't have to report until 8:15, so we took our time getting ready. When our time was about up, we all took a victory lap around the whole MTC campus. It was one of the best feelings of my life knowing I had endured it and then had to look at all the people who were stuck there. When the time came to depart, we grabbed our bags and took off. It was such a weird feeling to walk out of the back doors and into the real world. Right when I got on the bus, I called both my parents and talked to them the entire time we shuttled downtown (thanks for sending a tracphone). And I accomplished something I never thought I ever would. Somehow out of my persuasive lips, I convinced my mom to meet me at the airport. It was such a beautiful feeling to see her and to talk to her for a bit. Once through security, all the missionaries ate some super good Cafe Rio and waited about 2 hours for our flight to take off. I didn't last long on the plane ride and fell right asleep. The flight was super short, and before I knew it we had landed. We met our mission president, and drove over to his house for a delicious dinner and stayed the night at some Elders’ home.

Wednesday: We got up early like always and headed straight to the church building to eat breakfast, and to go over some safety rules for the mission. We are mainly a biking mission, but we still drive cars most of the time. We walked into the gym and got assigned our trainers. My trainer’s name is Elder Badstubner (only took me like 4 days to remember lol). He is from Atlanta and is about 6'4. He just finished his training, and now he is training me so it’s a straight up party. We grabbed my stuff and went to our house and dropped off my stuff and went right out. Arizona has the prettiest sunsets ever and perfect winter temperature. There are a lot of Mexican people here who speak Spanish so my Spanish should be good by the time I leave.

Thursday: Was an absolute breeze. Because it was Thanksgiving, we could not proselyte so we played sports and games all day long. We started off playing soccer with the Spanish ward here for about an hour. I am pretty bad at soccer and Mexicans are super good. We then drove over and played football with a whole bunch of firefighters here in Tempe. We ate some super good food for lunch at a member’s home. We just relaxed and then ate more food at night time at another member’s home. Mexicans sure know how to do Thanksgiving right. We ended the night by playing some basketball - Really just enjoyed a day off.

Friday: Elder "Bad stew" and I got assigned to serve in the South Mountain side of Phoenix. We are whitewashing the whole area, which means we are both brand new to the area and have no idea what we are doing and who the people are here. It was a little difficult for both of us because we are practically starting from scratch. We have no people to teach, nobody to check up on, and no idea where we are half the time. We decided to meet with the Bishop and the Ward mission leader here. They gave us a ton of info and gave us some names of people to go by and see how they are doing. He mainly wanted us to stop by members’ homes and get to know the families and ask for referrals. The bishop here is awesome, his main focus is missionary work so he makes sure the whole ward is helping out with it. We have a member feed us every night, and actually, they cook decent food. Most of the area here is super poor. Most people live in trailer homes, or just on the side of the road in little shacks. They are super grateful though for what they have. Elder strew and I did a lot of tracking on Friday and didn't have too much luck.

Saturday: Saturday was my favorite day so far in the Mission. Our main focus was to find people to teach. We had set up a couple of appointments to teach, but most of them bailed. We did teach one to a recent convert named Antonio. We taught him the importance of attending the temple and why we should strive to enter. We invited him to work towards entering the temple on the 8th of December. We also attended 2 baptisms on Saturday. One was an 8-year-old boy, and the other was a young lady who made the changes necessary in her life to be baptized. Elder Badstubner and I were in charge of the halftime show so we had to teach the whole Restoration. It went by pretty smoothly. I sure don't know a lot of Spanish, but the spirit was there for sure.

Sunday: Sunday was honestly a super weird day. It was my first time attending a full 3 hour church, not in English. I was pretty confused the whole time. I honestly had no idea what anybody was speaking about. Anytime anyone would try and talk to me I would just sit there and smile, and look at my companion haha. Good times! I still have a lot to learn but I know by having faith in God, anything is possible. We spent the remainder of our day tracting. We found a man named Carlos, and we taught him a short lesson. We spent the remainder of our night trying to find people. We weren't having much luck so we decided to say a prayer and asked God where we needed to go because there were people here waiting to hear our message. I felt prompted to go to a trailer park area and we did. We talked to tons of people and set 4 appointments to come back to teach. One woman, in particular, had seen missionaries before but had never wanted to talk to them. She felt something different from us, something that she had never felt before and decided to hear us out. I have really come to love Tempe. My attitude had totally flipped. I was so biased towards United State missions, but they are all foreign and they all need missionaries to teach the word of God. I am happy to be here, and I know I am here for a reason. Much Love.

Elder Rich