Wednesday, August 13, 2014

New area - Poway California

Lo and behold, I have arrived in my new area. And it wasn't even close to anything that I was expecting. Turns out, I got white-washed into the richest area in the mission. My new companion is Elder M from Honduras, and he's a very talkative, very interesting missionary. I'm in the Poway Spanish Branch, and our area covers the Penasquitos Stake. Yup. We cover another zone entirely. BUT, what's cool is that Mitt Romney's son is in the Stake Presidency in Poway. So there's a little hint as to how rich some of these people are. Our new area is very large, and we have to drive 12 miles just to get to it from our apartment. THEN, we have to go find the people that live there, and that uses up quite a few more miles. So far, we've only met 3 or 4 people, so we're pretty fresh in the area, and we really don't have any records to go off of as to finding new investigators.

The problem that we're trying to resolve in our area is this. The missionaries that started out in this area ended up telling some of the Spanish speaking members of the Penasquitos stake to attend the Branch up in Poway, which was taking numbers away from the Penasquitos (PQ) stake. The stake President then banned the missionaries from visiting any of the members in the stake, and even called the mission President to say so. We're not exactly sure why, but it sounds like he was just concerned about losing numbers in his stake. As of right now, neither of us are very sure about these things, so we're hoping that we can get a meeting set up with the Stake President of PQ to tell him about our plans to find and teach the people that can only speak Spanish that live in his stake.

My companion ended up spending all of his money for the month in the week before he got transferred, so for the last week he's been piggy-backing off of me for laundry and stuff. We're going to call the mission office to get him some money so that he's not moochin' off my mulah. Otherwise, neither of us will have enough food to last the month. Don't worry, I still have enough for me, but he'll have to get some more money for that to work.

As far as the new area goes, we've only been able to really meet one member, and that's A B. He just recently got baptized with his family a couple of years ago, and he's been swamped with work to be able to pay the rent for his apartment. He has to pay $1,800 a month to afford it. He works in A/C repair and installation. We met him, and he bought us some really fantastic burritos from this awesome taco shop. Tonight, we're ending P-day one hour early and moving it to 8:00 so that we can go bowling with him. Normally 8:00 would be the perfect time for us to work, but since our apartment is way out of our area, we could only work for a little bit, and then we'd have to drive home. So we've moved it around to get more proselyting out of it, and so that we can go bowling with our member.

The branch is actually pretty small, and it's full of less-actives. The sister missionaries have plenty of less-actives to go around, and have plenty of work with those people. OOH. Right. There's me and Elder M, then there's two companionships of sisters in the district. Sisters H and C and Sisters A and D. They're all really good sisters, and very hard-working, so I'm glad to be in this district right now.

When we got to our new apartment, we found it in probably one of the worst conditions that I've ever seen in an apartment. The missionaries previous were unbelievably slobby. One went home, and left a huge bunch of stuff just lying around, and the other's birthday was the day before transfers, so there was trash all over from that. We ended up having to deep clean our apartment for the first day, taking out 3 bags full of trash, cleaning the entire kitchen top to bottom, including the fridge/freezer, (in the which we found old meat loaf, really old chicken, moldy breads, and some food from 2010), cleaning the bathroom, especially the shower, vacuuming 4 times over the entire floor, and each time we vacuumed, the filter came out full. There are bugs in the bathroom fan, the desks were a mess, and the blinds were in shambles. We spent a LOT of time cleaning, but finally got it all spic and span. It looks really nice, now that it's clean. The other Elders in the complex, Elder B and M (English), commented that it looked many times nicer, and were quite surprised.

Yeah, I'm still district leader. *sigh*. I was thinking that I might get a break, but I guess the Lord still needs me in this position. Personally, I think that being district leader is much better than being a zone leader. As a DL you're down in the trenches with the other missionaries, and you get to be much closer with them.

Talk to you next week!

-Love, Elder Crook

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