Ice Storm

What's up everybody? 

This past week has been pretty good for us here in Ankeny. We have been working hard to find people to teach after our recent string of baptisms. We have been finding a ton, but it's always fun and good for stories. We do have a few promising investigators that are progressing pretty well. 

I'll just talk a little about each of them real quick. 

Jamie- Jamie is a really nice lady that we found using our area book. She used to be an investigator about a year ago but her husband kind of pushed the missionaries away. We stopped by to try and see if we could get in and teach her, we were able to catch her home and we started teaching her again. She's a heavy smoker but we will be teaching her the stop smoking workshop tomorrow and that thing is straight fire. It works every time! She's super humble and has a date for February 18th. so we will be working hard with her to make sure she can quit smoking before then. 

Osheana- Osheana is a cool young mom, she has the cutest little daughter ever named Brealya. We have been working with her my whole time her in Ankeny. She's got a lot of commandment issues but we are working to help her get through them. Her date is for Feb. 11th :)

Malinda- Malinda is a really nice lady! She is actually our mail woman! We've interacted with her quite a few times and we always know right when she is going to come through our complex. She's super funny, she always teases us when we get letters and knows about what we do as missionaries. She always talks about how cold she gets so we thought we'd leave her a suprise in our mail box to help her get through the day. I noticed we have approximately 37 thermoses in our kitchen so we made her some hot chocolate and left it in there with a note. Later that week we talked to her and she thanked us and we set up a time to teach her. She's now an investigator, I've got really high hopes for her! :)

Some other stuff that happened this week was that we got a crazy big ice storm. It was pretty intense a lot of trees and power lines got taken out cause of all the ice. Our car had like 2 inches of ice all over it that we had to thaw and scrape off. I'll send videos of it haha. But other than the crazy weather not much else has happened. I hit my Year Mark last Friday, can't believe missions go by so fast! Also quick late shout out to everyone who sent me gifts for Christmas! I really appreciated it! You're all the best! 

I love you all! I hope you have a great week!

Last Day With my homie Elder Anitok (Spent the last 4 days of the Transfer on exchanges with him haha)

The final pic of the P-Day Dream Team

My favorite little African boy, Pooki.

Our Liberian squad of recent converts:

My Chain is too Loose, My Pants are too Tight....

What's up fam, this week has kind of been all over the place (fifteen miles between Cedar Rapids and Ely to be exact) but it's been really good. I feel like last Monday was forever ago, we started this week out living in Ely cause of the mini Armageddon happening in Cedar Rapids, but now we are back in our house safe and sound. So the flood ended up not being quite as bad as predicted the city built a ton of dykes and sand barriers to try and keep the water back and it worked pretty well actually. It was a pretty well done project for being run and funded by the Government... anyways the dykes kept the water away from our street but a few of them broke and a lot of people got flooded on both sides of the river which was sad. We'll probably spend a ton of time doing service the next few week helping get rid of sand bags and muck out peoples house. But luckily our house wasn't even touched #blessings. 

So we spent the first half of the week living with the Checketts family out in Ely, Iowa. Ely is kind of like the Eagle of Cedar Rapids. Except imagine Eagle is a 25 minute drive from Boise and you can only get there via freeway or dirt back roads that are underwater. But it's super nice, the Checketts are from Nampa and turns out my sister knows their son, the Church is such a small world. But we lived there till Thursday, then we got the okay to move back in to our house. It was fun while it lasted though, it was nice living in a first world neighborhood for a bit. But Missionary work isn't so hot there ;)

So we actually got to do Missionary stuff this week which was fun, we didn't have the truck so we broke out the bikes for the first time in my mission lol. I never realized how big of a lie the whole "Iowa is flat" thing is until we had to ride our crappy bikes up the massive hills in CR. But it was fun, I felt like I finally go the full missionary experience of having to ride a bike in the rain. My "Hipster missionary" pants as Prez. Badger calls them got pretty wrecked though lol. We had a great week, we have been teaching this household of ladies that are all related in different ways. One of them is Jasmine (the one who lost her leg) we started teaching her aunt Arielle and Arielle's 5 kids 3 of which are above the age of 8! :) We also had our new Investigator Deloras come and watch GC at the Church on Sunday morning it was sick, we set a date with her and she's excited to learn more. Also Bro. Dawson is getting interviewed by President Badger this weekend FINALLY. But yeah it twas a good week I suppose. 

Oh and GC don't  even get me started on GC that stuff was BOMB. Dallin H. Oaks is the man, Member Missionary work lets go fam! Get Pumped! 

I really loved every talk so I'm just goona leave it at that, I liked GC a lot.

Alright love you guys!

Craziest Week of My Life

Alright this week was straight up insane. By far the craziest week of my mission, probably my life too. There's so many things that happened this week I probably won't be able to write about them all without this turning into a novel. But I'll try and sum up everything that has happened this week accurately. I'm just goona jump into it. 

#1 

So on Tuesday it was a pretty fun day we worked a ton and found a really solid guy named Nathan Gapo, he's from the Congo. We are going to teach him with our Recent Convert Tresure who's also from the Congo and speaks French fluently. I'm excite, Trey is a great member missionary, and he's only been a member since June! But anyways we got a call from a member who is from Sierra Leon, he invited us over to have African food... Safe to say we were kind of nervous, I personally felt kind of cheated I thought I was safe getting called to Iowa. But since I've been in CR the only people I talk to are Africans it's crazy haha. But we had a nice meal of Cassava Leaves (Peanut Butter, Potato Leaves, Goat, Pork, Jalapenos, Habaneros, Sardines, Bones, Some kind of sticks and Rice. We ate it all though, I'm not sure how I just took a bite and drank their African Soda and repeated about 30x. Heavenly Father Knows how to challenge us :) 

#2

So Elder Madsen and I were on exchanges and we were teaching our new Investigator Tauheed. He is a cool kid, he's in college and plays basketball. We also found out he deals. Like drugs. So we were teaching the Plan of Salvation and he kept getting texts and stuff and was super distracted. So he gets up and excuses himself for a second and starts rummaging around with this plastic bag and he sits back down and says "Y'all ain't cops righ?" and I'm just like "haha..no?..." and he's like "Y'all act like it some times...haha just playin mahn!" and I'm just like nervous laughing looking at Madsen like what the heck is going on. Then his friend came in and took the baggie and left "Something" on the counter for him. So I got to see a live drug deal up close and personal this week! Stay tuned next to hear about our Word of Wisdom lesson this Tuesday at 3:00! :)

#3

So I don't know if word travels all the way to the West but Cedar Rapids is actually flooding. So we have been evacuated out of our area and are living south of Cedar Rapids in a town called Ely. So the rest of this transfer will be interesting to say the least. The members are really cool, they just moved from Nampa and they are super familiar with Eagle. It's kind of like being home it's weird. But we spent the last few days Sandbagging houses and doing service for people in our neighborhood. The River is supposed to be 31 ft higher than what it normally holds, so that means our house will probably have about 5 ft of standing water in it when it crests tomorrow morning. So yeah it should be crazy but we are safe! Our city was on ABC breaking news though! 

#4

Ok last Crazy thing, we got in a car wreck. Elder Madsen and I were up front and Esplin and Jackson were in the back. But we were at an intersection and we had the green and a guy ran a red light going like 40 and we T-boned him and he spun out and hit another lady who was turning so he took out 3 cars in all. The ZL's truck is wrecked pretty bad. But we're happy he didn't T-bone us or else Jackson and I might have gotten pretty messed up lol. But once again we're safe and grateful no one was seriously hurt.

So that's all the crazy stories in short form. We had Zone Conference this week that was pretty cool! Our investigator Alex is still wanting to be baptized, but his brother is trying to block it so we will have to figure things out with him. 

I hope you all have a great and safe week! Love you guys!

Flash Floods and Gang Wars

Hey Guys, this week was pretty crazy. 

The work was pretty slow this past week which is frustrating, but we still found people to teach and had a lot of fun a long the way. We found 3 really cool people this past week that we are working with the first is a guy named Fabrice, he's a super cool guy from West Africa. We taught him the Restoration and he's supposed to be coming to Church this week so hopefully that works out and he keeps progressing! The second person we found was a guy named Zeb. So sometimes when I'm sick of just knocking doors and I want to find people to go teach I just look through all the old investigators in the area book, so I found this guy named Zeb, and his record was totally full. But it looked like he just dropped off the map. So we called him and he came to Church! We are now teaching him and his family. They are all really awesome, we are trying to figure out some legal issues he has right now. But if everything goes well he should be getting baptized ASAP. The last person we found was a lady named Saje, she's the girlfriend of a cool new member that just moved to the Ward from Philly. I'm stoked to work with her, we are working on getting them Married and then we can baptize her! I feel like a part time lawyer with all these legal issues I'm trying to figure out, I have to call our Mission President every other day it seems like lol.  

Alright crazy stuff:

1. So we had more crazy weather, we were on our way to teach our Recent Convert Kayla at the Library, but as we were driving it just started dumping rain! It turned into a flash flood real quick and we were driving through the road and the water was like a third of the way up our tires it felt like. The video I'll send dosn't really do it justice, I'll give a lot of credit to the city of CR. It may be one of the most dirty cities in the world, but it's drainage system is really well orchestrated.

2. Ok this was insane. So two of the Sister's in my District were stopped at their apartment to take a phone call and when they went outside, there was cops every where and ambulances and firetrucks! Turns out there was a shooting outside their apartment! Pretty crazy! I was jealous they got to have one so close lol. But President Badger told them they are going to have to move in with members so that's too bad for them haha. 

3. On Saturday the ZL's baptized Isiah (the chubby kid that got hit with the truck) we went because I interviewed Isiah and have taught him a few times, so I was pretty excited to see him get baptized. So the thing with Isiah is he is crazy. Like ADHD x1000 when I interviewed him for his baptism he was jumping from chair to chair, and I had to calm him down and get him to draw his answers to the questions on the board so he'd focus lol. But he did not want to get dunked infront of all these people so he was panicking and during the whole lead up to the baptism he was like "Nope I'm not doing it, I can't. I'm not going in." 

So we get him in the font and he's like freaking out so they shut the doors to the font so no one can watch, and they needed me to witness and I walk back there and Isiah is like swimming around the font, so the member who's supposed to baptize him just says the prayer and pushes him down under the water it was so funny. By far the craziest baptism I'll ever see probably.

Ok sorry for the long email. I love you guys. Stay blessed.