"I come from Southern California. We're known for fires and surfing."

My Zone

Hello everyone! So this was an interesting week, a couple things that I can talk about.

Last pday our zone went and did a little nature hike and played some games. It was pretty fun, I'll send some of the pictures.

This week we also had our interviews with president. It went well, and president was like "apparently your mom is good friends with the Sher[......] family?" and I was like "yeah, our families are very close and I'm good friends with their son in Paris" so that was a fun connection. We also received a training this week about how to make our knocking less robotic and more effective. It's been hard trying not to fall back into the old ruts.

If you remember, back when I was in Hollywood we worked on something called the "blackbird" that has maps of all the members in the ward. We're working on redoing ours now for this ward and that's been going well, hopefully it'll be more useful.

So this week Peggy kinda gave us the run around. We had our appointment scheduled with her and our member for Thursday but she cancelled on us. She said she'd still be able to come to church though, but when our member went to pick her up she said that she hadn't slept all night and was feeling sick. So that was disappointing, we really need to get on top of this if she is going to be baptized this month like we have planned. Hopefully we can meet with her more often starting this week.

Peggy was really all we had going for us, this week we got all 0s in our key indicators. (That means for confirmations, investigators at sacrament, investigators with dates, and new investigators and service hours.) Sometimes that happens I guess, that even though your working hard and doing everything you're supposed to it doesn't always translate to numbers. Still, it shows that there's room for improvement somewhere so hopefully we can do better this week.

The highlight of the week however was the International Dinner that the ward put on Saturday. We had a good turnout and a couple recent converts and less active members even came. It was a lot of fun with lots of good international food. We have a very diverse ward so there was lots to choose from. Pupusas, tostadas, jerk chicken, complatos, empanadas, chicken pot pie, and griyo just to name a few (sorry, no spell check for the Spanish ones haha). They made everyone name tags and drew little flags representing different languages that they could speak. They even had people go up and share about their countries, and they had me and Elder Marshall give shout outs to California and Arizona. It was a fun time.

That's pretty much it for this week. Looking forward to a nice relaxing pday. I don't believe I mentioned it last week but that's when I hit 13 MONTHS as a missionary. The time's going fast, I'm getting old! I feel like I'm at the point now where I'm very comfortable and confident in my skills as a missionary, I just need to make sure that I'm still looking for ways to improve so that I don't become stagnant. Hope you all have a great week too!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

[more pictures to be added soon]