Elder Ian Rich: Dec 18: Return date for catching pigeons

Good afternoon ladies and gents, welcome to another email. Overall super fire week with tons to talk about. Saw tons of success.

Tuesday: We taught Pedro again on Tuesday afternoon, and believe it or not, he is past Enos! He is straight up pounding the scriptures. He offered our opening prayer and while he was saying it, he just started bawling, it was super tender. We taught him more about the atonement and applying it for help. Mama sent a speaker so you already know we've been jamming in this house. We ate more Little Caesars pizza for dinner (guesstimate we have it probably 3 times a week) which is getting pretty gross. We went tracting for a little in an area that we haven't before and found a nice lady who opened right up and spoke the fastest Spanish I've ever heard. I didn't understand hardly anything, haha, but I caught that she was from Ecuador so that's gonna be fun someday. She was super super talkative and went on for probably an hour and a half and by that point my legs were asleep.

Wednesday: We didn't do too much today, we've been driving over to a local library and doing our studies there because it's a lot easier to focus. We came home and made some classic quesadillas, of course, and went to work. We went to that same neighborhood that we did yesterday and the first thing we noticed was a house that had tons of pigeons roosting on top, so I was like "It's game time." We get to the door, knock, some man opens up and I gave him a speech. "Hey, we were walking around and noticed that you have a serious pigeon problem. We look for service opportunities like this to help out the community. We can remove them for you." The man was all in, so we are returning next week. In the meantime, I got to build a trap out of stuff I find on the side of the road hahaha.

Thursday: We spent our whole morning and afternoon helping a family move. We had a ton of missionaries helping out so it went by super quick. Super grateful to have people to serve, especially during the Christmas Season. We have been scavenging for materials for the trap now on the side of the road. For some reason, people that live here think it's okay, or think it's funny to just throw their furniture and garbage on the side of the road. I don't understand it, but hey one man's trash is another man's treasure. We had found a struggling mother earlier in the week named Cathy, so we stopped by and taught her a little about our beliefs. She is super sweet, but sadly we had to refer her to our English elders here because we are only allowed to teach people in Spanish.

Friday: We have been having so many meetings lately. Today we had another one. The 3-week meeting with President about questions we have or things we don't understand. We were there for a while - at least 3 hours. Super boring. We met with Tyler again. We sat around the campfire for our lesson and laughed for quite some time and eventually taught him the Word of Wisdom. God gave us that commandment because he loves us, and knows what's best for us. Tyler doesn't drink or smoke so he shouldn't have a problem with those. We realized that we have been struggling to find people to teach, and that going door to door doesn't work out, so we looked in our area book for ideas or people that we could stop by and see. We decided to clean up our area book a little by removing a ton of people who weren't interested, and we made a plan to stop by those that had been taught a little but stopped learning for some reason previously. That night we saw our work paying off... we went 3/3 on return dates. The second house we stopped by immediately let us in his house when he answered. We chatted for a bit and taught a little about why we are here on the earth. He was super engaged, and down to earth. He really liked what we had to offer.

Saturday: We drove to one of the contact attempts from yesterday and it turned out unsuccessful. We drove around looking for a place to tract and decided to go to a nearby park. There were tons of people there having parties or playing sports. We approached a large group who were handing out free presents to kids in need for Christmas. The man in charge there was actually a member, so we talked to him for a while. We got there towards the end of the party so they were pretty much packing up. They had a decent amount of leftover toys and they just started giving them to us. The man in charge told us to give them away to families that we are teaching that can't afford toys for Christmas, so we now have about 50 toys to hand out! Super cool tender mercy. What a blessing it is to have the Lord looking out for you at all times allowing his love to shine everywhere at all times. It is a blessing to be able to give away these presents to families that have nothing because they are so grateful to have something.

Sunday: I spent my whole Sunday morning preparing a talk that I was to give in Sacrament meeting. My talk was on having faith and having the faith to ask God for help when we need it, relying on him for comfort, strength, and help for anything. When the time came, I got up and gave my talk in full Spanish. It was kinda weird speaking to an audience in Spanish but the Lord was with me for sure. I read a couple scriptures at the pulpit. The first was 1st Nephi 15:11, and the second was D&C 6:31-36. I encourage you all to take a couple minutes to read them. I read those perfectly with no errors. The gift of tongues in real. I’ve seen it so much in my time thus far! All in all, I think my talk was 7 minutes long.

Monday: I’m gonna keep this short cause I've been writing plenty enough for this week. But pretty much we didn't have our p-day yesterday because we had our actual interviews with President. I had mine, and I'm pretty sure I'll be staying another transfer here with Elder Badstubner which I'm super pumped about.

I hope all you have a very wonderful week. Much love! Elder Rich