Elder Ian Rich: Jan 14: Visa Update

Well, as you can tell by the subject of my email I received 2 updates on my Visa this week. The first one came around Friday. It said that by Visa had been registered, and I will receive another short email as to when I will attend the Visa consulate in Phoenix. The second email came on Saturday, and it said that there was an error with my Visa and I needed to fix it and resubmit it. The other 2 Visa waiters going to Ecuador received the same email so we will be working on that today. I'm not sure how it will turn out but I'm pretty positive I'll get it by the end of this transfer. And actually having said that we just received a call from the mission office saying our visas are fine and nothing is wrong. Apparently, we weren't supposed to get that email. It will take another week to get things finalized and another week to get our meeting set with the consulate. It will be pushing it very close to the end of the transfer, but more than likely I should get it. But I may be here another transfer. If so, we should take off February 12.

Ajo Arizona. What a place to be! This place is super fun. Of course like there isn't anything to do, so every day feels like a p-day. Our Ward is really focused on doing family history work, so as missionaries we try and promote people to use it. This week was decent, we didn't really get anybody to come out because every single person knows who we are in Ajo and has probably been hit by other missionaries. we decided that tracting wasn't the way to go. We had gone a couple times in our week and it was a complete bust, so we have been trying to go to activities where there would be opportunities to find people. So, we have been taking a clay/art class every Tuesday and Thursday for 3 hours. Elder Cowart and I both tried making the basic clay objects like bowls or cups and we are both so bad at art, but we did find a couple of people through that and we found a couple families to do service for. Elder Cowart and I also found a Mexican family this week to teach. We got lost in a neighborhood so we decided to randomly hit this one house. An older man answered and immediately let us in and we started to teach him. We shared some basic beliefs, and shared a video that poured in the spirit. We have since stopped by and given him a Book of Mormon and he loves reading it. We have found 4 new people to teach since we have been here. The work is not easy. Because the community here is so small, everybody knows each other. Although Ajo is so tiny, there are a heard of churches here - I would guess maybe 15 in total including ours. Most of the people stick to their own beliefs. We do a lot of service here. We have an Ajo Facebook post where we post free service opportunities. Our main objective is to find people through doing that. To try and serve people and talk about our religion when we are doing so. Hasn't worked too well but we’re in the midst.

We spent a lot of time this week trying to figure out ideas we can to do to get the community involved to find people. Ideas that you wouldn't usually think of or use to find people. We have a huge list of things we are going to try, but the one we are going to start promoting is basic and free language class taught by the missionaries. We think this has potential because there are always people that want to learn Spanish, especially here being so close to the border. So that is something we will be promoting at our next farmers market. We hope to find people by teaching Spanish and sliding in a brief spiritual message somewhere in there. Ajo holds a decent size farmers market every Saturday where people come and sell stuff. We are going to set a table next week and talk about family history and also about some of our ideas that we came up this week. I’m excited to see how it turns out. We have a lot of fun ideas that we are planning on trying.

Our bishop felt inspired to focus more on the Spanish work and the people here. We want to try and do a Spanish sacrament meeting once a month. It is something that he has been wanting to try for a while but is afraid it won't work. This Sunday a pretty cool miracle happened. We were randomly driving to the church to drop off our garbage, and our Bishop was also there talking to a Hispanic lady. He called us over and turns out she had just moved here from Mexico and had been persistently looking for a church to attend ever since she had moved. She has been trying to find out what time our congregation started for a couple of days. We have plans to teach her and her family this week. She has 5 kids. After she drove away our Bishop explained that he felt inspired to drive over to the church. So looks like we really are going to have to start a Spanish congregation now. The work is coming along here. It's not always easy to White Wash areas but we have been so blessed with the previous missionaries helping out, but also our fantastic ward. We have many service projects this upcoming week. The work keeps moving on. Love you all.

Love Elder Rich