Things are going way better with the ward

Things are going way better with the ward. We have really been trying super hard to get with them a lot more and get them engaged in the mission work. We have been getting a lot of members to come out with us and be able to become friends with a lot of our investigators. My new comp is named elder Curtis. He’s GREAT. He also knows Gary Loveless, so that’s kind of funny. He was talking to me like "do you know Gary, someone told me he’s in your home ward" so that was kind of funny.

So this week was SOOOO much fun hahah. We were able to go down to this Baptist church and help out pack some food for kids in Korea. IT WAS CRAZY!!!! There was like 1000 of us and we were in this assembly line type thing. And they had a bunch of music playing on the stage and were packing food for like an hour. And after an hour they add up all of the food that we packed. We packed 111,384,283 meals. CRAZY RIGHT. It was super fun. And the church that we were in was HUGE. All in all it was a great place to be able to help out and meet a lot of people. After that we were able to go help out in another service project putting in a little garden box for an elderly lady. We were there for a few hours and fixed it up super good.

We have not been getting a lot of progression from our investigators this week so we focused a lot on the less actives in the ward. We were able to see 5 families the last few days and each visit we were able to bring someone from the ward out to come see them. It was super nice to have them talking with the ward and just getting back friends with them haha. Speaking of friends I hope that everyone is doing good back there in Utah. It’s been cold down here the last few days ha-ha. It goes from 24 to 70 in a day... CRAZY the weather here just does what it wants.

We don’t have a lot of time today we’re going to a zone activity in about 10 minutes and lunch and all sorts of fun stuff,  but I’ll give you guys some good information on my comp next week and so on.

The next week-

Hey family soooooo last week I wrote a letter but it never got sent because we were in such a hurry to get out and run off so I sent it anyway, but I’ll have to write a new one for y'all so this week was great for the most part haha. On Monday we had a big zone activity where we were all supposed to set goals for this transfer. It was a good activity for everyone to get together and have some fun playing sports mostly volley-ball. it was kind of bitter sweet because we were going over all of the standards of excellence that were like supposed to get as far as like, people that were teaching, lessons that were having this week, and like people that you going to visit as far as members of the ward.

In Columbiana it’s a HARD area. We just got a few new people to the area and they are super sad because they just came from an area where they were used to having around 20 lessons a week and then coming to Columbiana where on a good week we might get 6. It just broke people for the first week. :/ I’m glad that I was able to start here because I’m kind of use to getting the short stick, but like Columbiana is the bomb. It stinks because we don’t get a lot of lessons and when we try to work with the ward all they want to do it just like talk for a little and then go on the rest of the week and not worry about anything else. We were able to have a lot more teem-ups this week with the ward and getting more people to come out with us. When we get people to come out with us most of the time we just go to a less active members home, and we try to get the member and the less active to make friends. It seems to be working I think, and were getting a lot more people to come out with us, so were going to have to keep trying something like this.

We were planning for ward correlation, or where you talk with the ward and the other missionary’s to find out what’s going on in the area. We were thinking that it would be super fun to try and get some activities going on in the next few months. I’m thinking that if we can get something fun going on every month that would be an easy thing for people to invite there nonmember friends to come over to. All in all the mission work is going alright... haha but that doesn’t matter. I love the people in this area.

So this week we were working down in the projects, and we met this lady, and she’s SUPER nice. She has this super funny kid who’s 4. HES CRAZY he runs up and down the projects and into the road so this lady runs after him all around the projects haha. But she’s this super skinny white girl. We started to talk with her just about her kid and like how’s everything going with her. and we had a super good conversation just about everything and like how she had met missionaries before but they kept telling her that like she wasn’t saved, and wasn’t praying right and all sorts of stuff so she never used to talk with missionary’s before.... but we were having so much fun playing with her kid and her for a little bit. And so we left and a few days later came back on a sunny day when they were outside and started talking again.

This time she we were still talking about everything and such and she’s like sooooo what do y'all believe in and such. So we gave her like a super-fast 5 min lesson on like the book of Mormon, she took it and was keeping it away from her kid. She’s sooo funny. She hides it from her kid because she doesn’t want him to draw in it or rip it because she’s watched to many scary movies about bad things that happen if you mess with a bible and stuff haha. She’s super nice, were thinking about going over there some times later this week and having a pie or something and talking about the B.O.M. and trying to see where all she is.

I’ve started to think that one of the reasons that I’m here is because I have never had problems making friends or just getting along with everyone. There’s sooo many people here that smoke and drink and have tattoos, and for some reason like the missionary’s down here don’t like that.. Like their not good people or something :/ anyway I don’t know, but I just like talking with everyone. I’ve found that the people that are drinking and smoking are way funny to talk with and better people to have conversations with then some of the rich people here. They don’t even open their doors for us sooo.

I was reading something in my patriarchal blessing that was talking about life. It went something like, you will be blessed with a healthy body and mind so that you can face the trials in your life, and that there will be many in my future. I was thinking a lot about like how there’s not a lot of mission work to do down here but a lot of people to talk with and get to know. And like it’s just a hard place to be. I just like to think that I’m ready for it and have the right mindset to go into it.

Anyway love y'all hope your all doing good

Elder Aldana