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
