Bonne Anne!

A picture from Christmas that Elder Blood took at the Doxey's​

Hi everyone, Happy New Year! The missionary work is still a little slow, not gonna lie. This week we had set up several appointments to meet people and literally every single one fell through somehow. There's still some crazy cool stories though, so stay tuned!

​Here's us sitting in the Tesla Model X SUV at the mall.
Photo by Elder Blood

Last Pday we went to the Aventura Mall, a crazy big rich-people mall. Like Lamborghinis-just-sitting-on-display rich. It was super fun. They had a Tesla showroom that I definitely made everyone come and look [at] with me. I think I converted Elder Lund to the Tesla. haha-yes!

​Elder Blood and I being super bored on New Years Eve​
Photo by Elder Blood

So this week was new years! For new years eve, all the missionaries were required to be home by 6:00 at night. It was crazy, we had so much time we didn't know what to do with ourselves. We ended up just shooting each other with Nerf guns haha. Elder Lund's dad sent us pizza, which was awesome.

​Eating Soup Joumou at the Victors​
Photo by Elder Blood

So Haitians have a new years tradition, called Soup Joumou (pronounced zjoo-moo). It's a special soup that they only make at new years, and all the Haitians make it. Joumou means pumpkin, so it's a pumpkin soup that they put meat and pasta and vegetables and spices in. It's really good. We went over to the Victor's house and had some in the morning. Then another member gave us some leftovers in the evening. Fun stuff, I think I can steal some pictures of it from the other Elders for you guys.

One cool story actually happened 2 weeks ago that I forgot to write about. Elder Blood had lost his wallet and was looking everywhere for it all morning. We had no clue where it was, and it had like credit cards and drivers license and everything in it. I said a prayer that he'd be able to find it, and then Elder Lund and I left to go work. As we walked to our car, the lady that parks 2 spots over from us was just getting out of her car. She saw us and said, "Are any of you missing a wallet?" Turns out she had found his wallet in the parking lot near where we park our car and had kept it with her to return to the security guard that works in our building. Pretty cool, right?

I also went on exchange with Elder Blood one day this week, and we saw a pretty crazy cool miracle. I knew I wouldn't have the time or the energy to fully transcribe it, so I made a recording talking about it that I'll attach to the email, so take a listen to that. [Coming soon]

Yesterday was Elder Bissereth's 20th birthday! He's old! Haha. We went to Olive Garden for lunch, his choice. It was pretty fun, we even got the workers to sing for him. Then that evening we went to the Victors' for dinner and they had set up a big party for him. They gave little speeches for him, and we all said what we liked about Elder Bissereth. They made a lot of good food for us, complete with birthday cake. After we ate, they had me and Elder Blood sing a duet. We chose to sing The Spirit of God. It was pretty good, pretty fun haha.

That's pretty much it for this week. Hope you're all doing well! I pray for you every day!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

WINTER IS (never) COMING

​Here's my district! From right to left it's Elder Smith, the ZLs Elder Alexis and Elder Riggs,
Elder Widney in the back, Elder Lund and me, and DL Elder Bissereth with Elder Blood.​

Hey all! This has been a pretty good week. Lots of excitement for Christmas!

So this week we had transfers and we got to meet the 2 new elders! They are Elder Blood and Elder Bissereth. There's a picture with my new district and everything so check that out. They are cool guys and look like they're good missionaries too. It'll be a fun time with them. Elder Bissereth is pretty much straight from Haiti, he's been living in the States for about a year before his mission. He speaks pretty good English but is still learning a few things, which is fun haha. I figure if he can learn English then I can learn Creole haha.

When the other Elders left they gave us one of their recent converts to work with. Her name is Pierline, she's cool. The morning before transfers we went out at 7:00 in the morning so the other elders could say goodbye. We walked with her and her son to school which was fun, brought back some fun memories of walking the girls to school.

Probably the most exciting thing this week was the ward Christmas party on Saturday. It was one of those things where they set up the gym to look like Bethlehem and everyone came dressed up and brought authentic food platters and stuff, it was pretty fun. We helped set it up though for hours before hand, and then when it was time to take down it was already getting late so we had to rush everything and it was pretty crazy. We had our car packed with stuff to bring back to a members house and then it was a scramble to get home on time, but we did it. Overall it was a stressful experience, but it was still fun to see the members having a good time.

Haitian Choir is sounding pretty good now, we have one more practice before we sing in church on Sunday. That should be really fun. Our zone is also doing a song for Christmas Conference, the mission wide conference with the Mission President also known as when I get my Christmas presents! I'm a little excited haha.

My advice to get into the Christmas spirit is to study the Atonement, that's what I'm studying now and I can see that it's starting to change my life. Maybe it's just because I have a new perspective while on my mission, but I'm starting to understand just how huge and important and wonderful the Atonement of Christ is. My suggested reads for that are the Book of Mormon (of course), I think the first 20 or so chapters of Alma kind of talk about it, so does Mosiah a bit. I don't really remember where, that's just where I am reading right now. There's also a really good talk from Elder Scott that my parents sent me a copy of. It's called Personal Strength through the Atonement. My parents will link to it in post I'm sure. 

Hope you all have a Merry Christmas!

Some of the food from the party. I say some because there was a ton more that people brought later.​

Ward Christmas Party​

​This is our bishop, Bishop Robles.​

Ward Christmas Party​

​I found my family in the Bible videos! Here's me posing with them.​

​Here's a better picture of it. Emma's on the left and Mom's on the right, with Jesus in between.

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

A Week in The Life of a Missionary: Photo Journal

Hi everyone! So I have a ton of pictures this week for some reason. So I'm just gonna explain each of the pictures and that'll be my email for the week. Plus I have lots of emails from all of you (#ChristmasPerks) so that'll take some time but it's all good. If there's anything that the pictures don't talk about I'll include a little thing at the bottom about it so we'll still get to everything, don't worry about it. 

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Here's our gator with one of the santa hats from my Christmas package! Thanks mom! ​

Elder Lund was practicing piano last week, so I just went ham on the chalkboard. Repost if you understand any of it. ​

​We had a temple trip this week! So in our mission you only go to the temple once, on your last day in the mission. UNLESS you do a tour with one of your recent converts, or one of them is taking out their own endowments or something like that. So we took one of the recent converts in our area, Niviane, on a temple tour! It was fun, got some good pictures. Maybe I'll make Christmas cards out of one of them or something, that'd be fun.

​Here's Niviane out front of the temple.​

​Me and Elder Lund. 

​I like this one better, you get the whole temple in it.​

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Cool statues they had out for christmas time I'm assuming. 

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Dramatic side action shot of the fountains.​​​

Generic Wallpaper Photo ​

Here's some of the lights I got in the Christmas package that I strung across my desk. Matches my Frozen bedsheets.​ 

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On the left is a stocking that the Johnsons, an awesome young student family that feeds us, made for me. They are going out of town for Christmas so when we went over on Sunday they had everything all Christmasy and said it was our Christmas dinner. The house was decorated, they made a roast and potatoes, served eggnog and light a pineapple sherbet punch, and made each of us our own stockings with treats inside! They are so awesome, the Johnsons are my favorite. And their little kids are so cute. The stocking had some chocolates, mandarin oranges, and a tie! So cool.

On the right is an awesome package from Sister Cuillard! She sent letters with little treats and quotes from general authorities in them for every day leading up to christmas. Thank you so much!​

​Here's a little tree I made with lights from the christmas package. Also you can kinda see the nativity that the girls made for me next to it.​

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A better picture of the nativity and stocking. Thanks!

Some other things that happened this week are that I went on exchange with the ZLs (Zone Leaders) for a day. That was fun, I went to their area in Hialeah West and it's all Spanish, so I did lots of smiling and nodding. It was good though. We found some cool people while knocking and met with some less actives and just chatted about stuff.

We also did some zone blitzes, which is where everyone in the zone goes to one area and knocks doors for an hour. Our area was the first one we did it in since we don't have any investigators. We found some potentials from it but none of them were that cool, so still no investigators. We're working on it though, hopefully by next week we'll have someone to teach.

That's pretty much it for this week, thanks for all the love! 

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson