Welcome to Naples!

​New house: Elder Spotts, Elder Steed, Elder Dick, Elder Stevenson.

Hello everyone! My first week here in Naples has been an interesting one, that's for sure. I'm officially on the west coast now, about 100 miles away from my last area. It's weird being in a "full creole" area now, meaning we only really teach creole speaking people and all the English people we find we have to refer to other missionaries. One thing I've noticed too is that it's WAY more chill and calm over here, and the average age is WAY higher. Our ward is basically a branch now because all the "snowbirds" left haha.

So transfer day happened, and I got to see a lot of my old companions and missionary friends, several of which were going home. It was a big group of missionaries leaving and probably the first where people I got to know well left. It's weird to see how old I'm getting! 

My new companion is Elder Dick. He's from Tualatin Oregon. He came into the MTC the week before I went home for surgery, and I was his DL there. Now he's my DL for his first transfer as DL. Crazy! The other people in my house are Elder Steed and Elder Spotts. Elder Steed is from Texas and this is his last transfer, Elder Spotts is from New Mexico. It's been pretty fun so far so we'll see how it goes! On the transfer call, the APs informed us that President Garns wanted us to know to expect to stay in our areas longer than we may be used to, whatever that means haha. 

Transfer day was also my first day EVER biking as a missionary! I was hoping I could keep the streak going at least to my year mark but oh well. It's been alright, definitely an adjustment. We've mostly been staying pretty local so far, so it's only been a couple miles a day. However, this area is HUGE. I'll see if I can send a picture of the map or something. We haven't found hardly any Haitians yet, apparently because they mostly live farther south. We'll be heading down there pretty soon though.

Driving into a rainstorm on our way to Naples.​

This week we helped a family move out. It was pretty smooth it just took a long time. He thought it would only take an hour (it never does) and it ended up taking 3 and 1/2 hours. It was fun though, everything was organized and in boxes already so that's good. He was also pitching becoming a Nurse Anesthesiologist pretty hard, it's tempting if it didn't take 9 years of school, but we'll see.

Friday I went on exchange with Elder Long, one of my ZLs. It was fun, even though everything was in Spanish. It's amazing how much Spanish I can actually understand. I can't speak it to save my life but I can follow a conversation pretty well. Maybe it's just because I speak missionary haha.

So far we really only have one solid investigator that they were working with before the transfer. Her name is Janette She's the daughter of one of the members in the ward. She seems pretty solid, she came to church on Sunday even though she was out late and got into a car accident. She has a [baptism] date for the 30th, so hopefully everything keeps working out for that.

Other than that, it's just been knocking and biking all day. Fortunately it hasn't dumped rain while we were biking yet, but it'll come. It rains at some point every day pretty much, which I love because it brings lightning! I don't know if I'll ever get sick of lightning haha. Anyways hope you're doing well and thank you all for your support!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson