Saturday, July 26, 2014

On the Ground in Colusa


 14 July, 2014

Dear Family,

Well, I'm on the ground in Colusa.

First impressions: the water tastes like butt. That's the only complaint I'll verbalize about this area. I just needed to get if off my chest. There's a ton of sulfur in the water here because we're near a dormant volcano or something like that. So we have to drink filtered water.

Colusa is... Interesting. It's a tiny little town wayyy out in the countryside. We actually cover four or five small towns in total. I'm pretty sure we have the biggest single area in the mission here. Mt. Shasta could be bigger, I'm not sure. From what I've seen here the elders before me have hardly had work in English, let alone Spanish. Van Leeuwen told me on the way out that he was surprised they hadn't closed the area this transfer. Encouraging, that. But I guess it just gives me a chance to do some work. We found four new investigators here last week, both Spanish speaking couples. We taught them some good lessons and we're hoping to teach both of them again this week. I feel bad for Elder Roberts because being trained here, his Spanish is more or less still at "fresh out of the MTC" level. We'll get to work on that too though.

Sweet bonus of being in an English branch, we get fed dinners almost every night!

So, aside from the butt water, it's steady as she goes.

We met President Marston last Friday. He's a pretty cool guy. Very down to earth. He'll be a great mission president. We're going to have interviews with him this month.

I'm going to email him today to ask if we can get some help with starting a Spanish branch out here. We need Spanish-speaking members to help us fellowship, because starting a branch from an English branch where nobody speaks Spanish would take some seriously golden investigators.

On Sunday Elder Roberts and I got roped into singing in sacrament meeting, then we had to teach sharing time in primary because the teachers weren't there. I wasn't really looking forward to teaching a bunch of little kids, but it wasn't bad. Kind of fun, actually. We pretended to be reporters talking about baptism, and we had the kids come up and answer questions. It was goofy, but they liked it.

So yeah, that's me. It was great to hear from all of you. I'm glad you survived trek!

Love,

Jake

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