December 31: Transfer Week

Hello again, this week was super bomb. I found out last night that Elder Badstubner and I are getting split up. I'm super bummed out. President tricked us and said he was gonna second-half train me, but guess not. Elder Badstubner is gonna stay here in South Phoenix and first half train another fresh kid right out of the MTC, and I'm headed down to Ajo to whitewash again. (Which is when both missionaries are new to the area so they both know absolutely nothing) Apparently, there are only 2 missionaries in all of Ajo because it's a secluded town - Ajo is about 3 hours away from Phoenix and close to the border. The closest set of missionaries are 45 minutes away so I'm legit stuck with a new kid for 6 weeks. I also heard there are roaming pigs all over town. They run in packs, but I'm gonna try and see if I can't catch one. Also, I heard we have a huge backyard, so we might be able to actually build a pigeon cage. More to come haha.

Not really a ton happened this week, we found about 10 new people to teach and have been slaying our lessons. Coming into this area we started out with nothing. Legit, not a single person to teach, but now looking back to all the finding we've done and all the hours we've put in, it has really paid off. 

This week I had to go to the Instacare. We were weekly planning in our church building and I fell back in my chair while I was trying to scoot it back. As I feel back in the chair, it collapsed and 3 of my fingers got caught in between and were stuck. We tried to pull them out, but my knuckles were too fat and wouldn't budge. So we then decided to try and open the chair and slip them out but with my fingers in the worst possible spot, we couldn't open it.  It almost seemed helpless and my fingers were gonna lose circulation. We started to pry them out with different kitchen tools and they began to break one after another, but after some time we pried each one out. They were stuck inside for about 2 minutes in total. They looked pretty bad when we freed them. My pointer finger looked really bad, and so we drove to the Instacare to get it checked out. Luckily, just some superglue and a splint. More to come next week. Happy New Years to all, set some good goals. 

Elder Rich

5 minutes after

Smile

Vintage Cop

Classic Phoenix for ya

December 25: Christmas Week

Hola mass, Feliz Navidad! I wish you all who read this (my mass) a Merry Christmas. 

This week flew by, Im’a switch this week up and talk about the main/important parts about my week instead of a day by day list. 

Having said that Elder Badstubner woke up super sick Wednesday morning. He was throwing up all morning so we decided it was better to take the day a little bit slower. I took advantage of my time studying Spanish, reading from the Book of Mormon, studying grammar, and memorizing words. We found out that the other set of Spanish Elders were all throwing up all day too. We tied it back to yesterday's dinner, Taco Bell. They all ate the same thing, a Quesorito #1 - worse decision.

The man who said we could go catch pigeons on his house decided last minute not to let us. 

I went on exchanges on Friday with our district leader Elder James. He is an English elder and decided to come to my area so technically I was in charge of all the Spanish for the whole area. Not gonna lie I was a little nervous but Elder James and I straight up killed it. We saw tons of success. We talked to a ton of people (mainly in English) but when I spoke to those who spoke Spanish I realized that I know ALOT more Spanish that I thought I knew. I understood most of what people were saying and spoke enough to put my point across and try and set a return date. It's absolutely insane to think how far I've come. Thinking back to when I entered the MTC and knew practically nothing, no Spanish until now when I can hold my ground, It's crazy to think how fast you learn here. We study a lot, and pray a lot but to think how the Lord blesses his missionaries truly inspires me to work harder. To have only been here for such a short time and to understand as much as I do and to speak as much as I know is a tender mercy that the Lord is actively helping me. All in all, we set something like 6 return dates, oh and we got Shantel on date for the 12 of January so that's pretty cool. 

Love you all! 

Typical Arizona Picture for ya

Tamales

Merry Christmas

Skyping the family

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

Santa - all I want for Christmas is my visa

Christmas is coming

Handing out presents 

Tacos

One of me for you for Christmas

Dec 10: Chilies and nińos... oh and a baptism

Another quick week another quick email from E. Reech. I hope everybody had a good week. This is basically what my week consisted of. 

Tuesday: The first half of Tuesday summed up was driving to Tempe for a zone conference and about 5 hours of pure fun sitting, listening and trying not to fall asleep. Quite a boring time, not a fan if I'm being honest. We met with Pedro again on Tuesday night. One of the first things he mentioned was that he had a direct answer to his prayer. He had been praying for a decision that he needed to make. He didn't know whether he should drive to Mexico and see his brother who was dying or to stay here in Arizona to find a job and continue listening to the missionaries. He said the next morning he received 2 phone calls from people trying to hire him. Super cool. I offered the opening prayer, and when I finished he was just sobbing in tears. He was like, "I'm sorry, I'm just so happy with my life right now." No doubt it was the spirit testifying the truthfulness of all things. 

Wednesday: Today was an absolute blast, absolute insane day. I really have been focusing on my Spanish this past week. I get up every morning and listen to a conference talk and just start reading Spanish in the Book of Mormon, trying to memorize 30 words per day. All in all, I forget all those words by nighttime. Hahahaha. We taught Shantel again tonight. She has been investigating the church for about 3 years now. Her husband is pretty anti-Mormon and doesn't really like her taking the discussions but she is spiritually prepared. She has been taking lessons for 3 years now, so she knows a ton about our gospel. The only thing she really is missing is baptism, it's really her last step.  We asked if we could kneel down and pray and ask God to see what her next step in her spiritual progression would be, and when we concluded she felt that it needed to be Baptism. She knew it, Elder Badstubner and I both knew it... the last step. We didn't invite her though, but we told her that it is the end goal and we're going to get her prepared for the day. We also met with my boy Tyler - A little bit about him, he is a recent graduate from high school and was referred to us by a woman in our ward who's daughter is dating him. The man is just a straight up beast, love the kid. In our previous lesson, we invited him to read Second Nephi chapter 31 when Jesus was baptized and set that perfect example for us to all follow him. He was super engaged and immediately wanted to share what he loved and felt when he read it. He was super interested in the topic or baptism, and straight up said he wanted to follow Jesus and be baptized. We got him on date for the 29th of December. Talk about the Lord preparing people. 

Thursday: We had another lesson with Pedro, and we figured we'd send it and teach him about baptism, and we had a very spiritual lesson. Pedro currently has 2 sons serving missions. One of them is in Africa, and the other in India. Pedro went through a divorce some time ago, and his ex-wife got baptized and raised their sons in the church. Pedro told us that he wants to use the atonement of Jesus Christ before he gets baptized so he'll have a super spiritual experience. We have that end goal in mind. We stopped by Antonio's house again, and he was dressed in the Grinch Pajamas onesie. We were talking to him for a while and all the sudden his little 3-year-old walks over to me and punches me right in the groin, and my companion goes "Audios Elder Riches Ninos" It was super funny. 

Friday: Went to 5 Guys for lunch, spiced it up a little. We prepared all our lessons for the day early in the morning and every single one of them bailed. So we spent the whole day finding. Mexicans love their Chilies. You can tell if they are Mexican because almost every house has chili plants in the front. We started doing this thing where we would eat the full seeds and all chili right when we knock on the door and when they opened up we would try and play it off. In one particular door approach we did, and the lady answered right when the spice just kicked in. Man, I swear they have the hottest peppers ever. We just try to play it off, but it is for real, the hardest thing because you just feel like you are going to throw up on the inside and die because your mouth is on absolute fire and you have no water, and we can't be like, "Your chilies are super hot, can we have some water!" hahahhaha. We are all about the full sends and memories. If you ain't full sendin you ain't livin. 

Saturday: We did a service project for about 5 hours, refurbishing an old baseball park. Sanding, and staining old bleacher seats. Cutting and ripping out grass in the infield. For real was a workout. We taught Tyler again about the atonement, and after we invited him to pray and ask for forgiveness he goes. "I'm not promising anything, I just can't. I'm just going to because I have to. It's not a promise, I'm just going to." What a stud. 

Sunday: Another 3-hour meeting at church ALL in Spanish, wasn't too bad. I understood a lot of it. Pedro showed up though which was awesome. He was a little teary-eyed the whole time. 

Love you all, Don't forget to find opportunities to Light the World this week!

Elder Rich

My boy Ty

For the little sisters

full sends only

pigeons

Dec 3 - Out Here In Arizona

Buenos Dias otra vez. This week was flat out awesome. The field just keeps getting better and better. I'm loving it out here, my comp is an all-around beast. Anyway, this is what happened this week. 

Tuesday: We woke up at 6:30 every morning, and I'm still not used to it. I'm dead tired every single morning. I usually eat fruity pebbles or cream of wheat every morning - what else do you need? We do about 3 hours of studies every morning - 1 hour of personal, 1 hour of companionship, and 1 hour of language. This week our main focus was to find people to teach and to find referrals from members. We found an older woman named Virginia who had been taking lessons from the previous elders. We got to know her and her brother for a bit and read a couple scriptures in 2nd Nephi. They were just astonished, they said they could just feel the power in the message we shared and really wanted to learn more about our message. 

Wednesday: We did service at a food bank on Wednesday morning. We pretty much moved food around and organized it into piles. All of it was expired and pretty gross. There was a huge crowd of people waiting outside trying to get their hands on some of it. We would bring out small portions at a time and they would legit fight over the food. It was pretty funny. Right after Elder bad stew and I drove back over to Virginia's house for our lesson. She walked out and the first thing she said was "I'm gonna be honest with you guys, I'm not interested in anything you have to say or what you want to teach me. I would rather drink my beers then have you tell me what I can't do." She went on to say her daughter is super depressed so she has to take care of her 6 kids and she can't survive without drinking some alcohol. We began to teach her that our message can help her and her daughter and that through Jesus Christ anything is possible. Elder Badstubner and I were super bummed out because they had admitted to feeling the spirit so strongly the night before, and now nothing. 

Thursday: On Thursday all the newbies got to go to the Gilbert Temple, so we had to wake up decently early to drive to the mission home. It felt good to leave the mission boundaries haha. The Gilbert Temple is absolutely huge, and it's super nice. Mama sent me a package stuffed full of Christmas stuff, so we spent the next little bit decorating our room. It looks awesome now. We had a couple of lessons we had to attend but they both bailed, so we knocked doors for a while and had no luck. 

I often find myself just staring at pigeons here. There are so many, and they are twice the size as they are in Utah. They thrive here I swear, and there are so many different colors and flocks flying around. I have been trying to catch them for about a week now, but unsuccessful. I had so much fun trapping pigeons at home, so Elder Stew and I wish we could make a pigeon trap and set it somewhere

Friday: Funny story, We drink a LOT of water here, so you have to use the restroom a lot. I woke up around 2 in the morning and when I walked out of the bathroom, my companion gets out of bed turns the lights on and kneels down by his bedside and starts to pray. I was so confused, I thought that he couldn't sleep or something so he was praying for help. He finishes, and continues to look at me and then looks at the clock and back at me and was like “Oh my gosh what am I doing?"  That day, we drove downtown to do a service project for “Feed my starving children.” We boxed and made bags full of food for children all around the world. All in all, we packaged $45,000 worth of food for kids. 

Saturday: first off Happy late birthday to my sister Jill! Today was pretty festive. We sipped hot chocolate all day now that it's the season. Since it was a day of service, we went and laid shingles for one of the families we are teaching. We cleaned up his yard and laid tons of shingles for about 4 hours. We hope our service helps them realize we are here to help them and we care for them. They brought us Little Caesar's pizza like an hour before dinner. At dinner, we hardly ate anything. We felt bad because the lady who made us dinner kept telling us to go get more and we were like "We're too full."

Sunday: On Sunday we got to hear from President Ballard from the 12, and also President Gay from the 70. We got to also shake their hands. Our whole zone went to listen to them. Is was super cool to see them and to meet with them for a second. 

Anyway sorry, that was a lot if you made it to this point!

 I love you. Haha till next week 

Elder Rich

Pictures: (1-2) Temple pics (3) serving (4) pigeons (5) Arizona sunset (6) Views 

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 

The boys

Reassignment Elders

Here we go

Mom!

My aunt Lig was picking up her daughter, Elise, for Thanksgiving
at the same time so I got to see them too which was cool

companion, Elder Badstubner

Mission president, President Christensen and his wife

Out on "Lake Powell"

Nov 17: MTC week 6 - Last few days

Man, what a wonderful sight. Only 2 more days until we actually get to teach legit people. This past week flew by. Nothing really happened this week. 

One of the best things about the MTC is the opportunity to attend the temple every P-Day. Not only do we enjoy our time in the temple, but after as well. THE MOST important thing though is that we don't eat breakfast before, and after we finish our session - we FEAST, I'm telling ya! Today, we got to the temple around 7:25 and did Initiatories and then right after we did a session. As soon as we finish, we race to the men's dressing room and change quick. The whole basement of the temple just smells like food. Y'all don't even understand. After eating MTC processed food for days and days going to the Temple and taking your first bite of legit food is a miracle. I'm telling you, the best thing ever. One of the best moments of my week every week.

Also this week, we taught about 10 lessons to our fellow classmates. I still think back to my first lesson that Elder Flake and I taught and I distinctly remember just sitting there not saying a single word. I would write down my testimony and my prayer on paper and while teaching, I would just read it off!  Contrast to this last lesson, and I realized how much I have learned here at the MTC and how much I have learned about teaching the doctrine of Christ instead of just reading what you think you know on a piece of paper. I can't wait to get immersed in Spanish and really start the journey of a mission. 2 more groundhog days left. Next email will be from Tempe. 

Shout out to my boy T-Pac for starting the best adventure of your lifetime on Tuesday.

Also thank you for all of you that supported me while I've been at the MTC, all the letters, packages, and emails. Much love!

Happy Thanksgiving this week

Elder Rich

At the temple

The district

Elder Mitch making us all laugh