Day By Day

​Here's a picture of the invitation to today's zone activity.
Picture credits to yours truly.*

Hello everyone! Surprise, I'm emailing early this week! This week was a fun week, I'll try to go day by day.

Monday was Pday, and we pretty much just did the stuff we had to like clean, shop, and email and then napped. It was pretty great actually. We also had our ward's first FHE, which is geared towards getting recent converts, less-actives, and investigators into the church for a little activity and gospel lesson. It was pretty successful, we got all our recent converts from the other week there. We played 2 truths and a lie and then our ward mission leader gave the lesson. Pretty fun, it's only going to be once a month though to start.

Tuesday we didn't do much other than knocking and visiting people in the blackbird. We also had correlation meeting, and a little Book of Mormon class afterwards with some of the ward missionaries and recent converts. That was good, we started reading through the book of Enos and talked about prayer.

Wednesday was pretty much the same thing, but we got to do a little family history! So far I've just been scanning through everything I already have and looking for people ready to do ordinances before I do too much tweaking, but pretty soon I'll start trying to find new people and get rid of duplicates and resolve errors and whatnot. It's hard to do much with only 1 hour a day twice a week, but it's still fun to look at stuff and find work to do.

Thursday we had interviews with President, that was pretty fun. I didn't have any questions for him though so it was super short. He just asked me if I was having fun a bunch of times haha. He also gave some cryptic hints about transfers to the other elders, so I have no idea what to expect. We also went to the Netane's house, one of the counselors in the Bishopric, with Bertina and her family for a pizza night! It was super fun but really hard to get the spiritual thought in haha.

Friday was pretty much the same as Wednesday. We did get in contact with an "eternigator" that we met at the beginning of last transfer and haven't seen since. She's super Mormon, but can't be baptized because she's not married to her boyfriend she's living with. Super lame, but she made us good food so that's good.

Saturday we got to take Bertina out teaching with us! It was super awesome, she's like a naturally good teacher and awesome fellowshipper. She was using like all the missionary teaching skills, it's almost like we didn't have to be there!The investigator kind of dropped off though, which is lame, but it was cool to have Bertina with us!

Sunday was Mother's Day! Yay! I got to facetime my family, which was super fun. It's weird that people still have lives while I'm a missionary haha. Our member also had Star Wars Episode 7 playing in the background, which was pretty distracting even though I've already seen it haha. Elder Hatch hasn't seen it, so it was really distracting for him haha. Other than that refer to the above knocking/blackbird.

That's pretty much it for this week, thank you all for your support!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

*Editor's Notes:

1-The Elders don't know what it is going on with politics. They just hear snippets here and there. We think this is funny even though it could be offensive to several different groups.  ;)

2-Transfers are coming up, so please wait to send any mail until we get his address confirmed next week.

Family History and The Blackbird

Here's a picture of my district for #MuchoMay:
Elder Hansen, Me, Sister Osborne, Sister Sweetnam,
Sister Wertz, Sister Dees, Elder Hatch, Elder Foster​

Hello friends and family! This week was pretty good, seemed to go by pretty fast. Here's a couple things that happened.

First off I was able to do a little family history for like an hour, it was actually pretty fun. I was able to find 3 people on my tree that haven't had any ordinances done for them, and hopefully we can get Bertina to the temple so I can do baptisms for them. Hopefully I'll be able to do more family history work, it's really fun to be able to look at your tree and trim it up a bit. To any reader that has tips and tricks for that it would be appreciated.

​Crazy looking rain clouds part 1​

Another thing we've been working on this week is something we call the 'Blackbird." Basically it's just a map of all the members on record that live in your area. The only thing is that since we don't have iPads, we have to make it by hand. Fortunately the church has a map on lds.org, but it just shows a dot for each household so we had to go through and label them all. We were able to get it all finished and nice, we have 213 households in our half of the ward and about 10% of those are active. So we've been going around to all the less-active names whenever we have time, and we're finding that most of the people don't even live there. One of them had been moved for at least 13 years, and no one knew. That's pretty sad, it seems like a couple years ago missionaries would just baptize a ton of people that almost immediately went less-active and now are missing. Our ward is now working on cleaning up the ward list and really emphasizing Home/Visiting teaching to keep it from getting worse. Hopefully that helps, it's so sad when a recent convert gets no support and goes less active.

​Crazy looking rain clouds part 2

This week we were able to find a pretty good Haitian knocking spot! We have not been able to find Haitians in this area, they're so spread out and even though we cover creole for the whole stake we don't go out that far because of time and miles. But we found a little complex with Haitians in it and have found a couple investigators! They haven't progressed very far yet, but could be promising. It's nice just to be able to teach in creole again, even if it is still a little stressful. I almost had to translate for Sacrament meeting yesterday, which would have been my first time, but the people that usually need translation weren't there. I'm sure I'll have to later on in some other ward, I've just been blessed that both my wards so far have had equipment and members to do the translation.

That reminds me that transfers are coming up on May 24th! There's a good chance that I'll be moving but you never know. Also Mother's Day is this Sunday, I'll be able to Skype my family!

This week we also got a little taste of the "Florida Summer" aka Rain. There was one day where is was pretty clear, and then out of nowhere some crazy looking clouds come and DUMP rain on us. We ran from the house we were at to our car for like 2 seconds and got SOAKED. Then after like 5 minutes the dumping stopped and in 15 minutes it was gone and sunny again. I got some pictures of it though so that's good.

Florida Summer

One last thing that happened this week is that we got a Bible referral for someone named Erika, but it turns out she was already a member. She's less active and just moved down here from Boca Raton, but contacted us so that we could help her get active in the church again! She has older kids that are already baptized and one 8 year old that wants to be baptized too. It's hard for her to get to church since her husband is not a member, but she's super solid and really committed to coming back. One of our members offered to give her a ride and she came to church yesterday! That was a pretty cool miracle.

Other than that everything with Bertina is still going well except that she couldn't come to church because of a family emergency. We're still working on getting the boys the Priesthood so that we can all go to the temple for baptisms, hopefully we can do that before transfers. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers! Keep up the good work!

​Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

Wow, That Felt Good!

​Zariah, Bertina, Noah, and Donell​

Hello everybody! So here are the highlights from this week, it's a pretty good one so stay tuned.

So, BERTINA AND HER FAMILY ALL GOT BAPTIZED! That's super amazing, I don't think it's quite set in yet that it actually happened! I'm so glad that I got the privilege to be the ones to find them (knocking!), teach them all the lessons, and see them baptized! It was a super great experience. Knocked on their door April 1st, baptized April 30th! I feel like that if I had to go home tomorrow I would be completely satisfied just because of them. The baptism itself went pretty smoothly, and the ward really took care of pretty much everything which is super nice. It's the first baptism this ward has had in a couple months, and between us and the other Elders we had 5 CONVERT BAPTISMS (Bertina+Donnell+Noah+Zariah+other elders' investigator). I even got to confirm 2 of them, Zariah and Bertina. It was a very spiritual experience being able to feel what the Spirit directed me to say in their blessings, and a very spiritual experience overall.

​A picture of us together with Brother Davis,
the member that baptized them.​

There were even a couple laughs. Donell was being super talkative for some reason, usually he's super reserved. After he came out of the water he went into the room to change and said "WOW, THAT FELT GOOD!" really loud. It was pretty funny. After his confirmation too he went around shaking hands saying "Good job, good job, thank you." It was weirdly out of character for him, but at least it made it memorable. Another funny thing was that the Primary and Relief Society were all prepared with lots of books and things to give out, and then the Young Mens [Leader] guy wasn't there so another man from the Presidency gets up and has no clue what to say. He ended up shaking their hands a bunch and saying how much they'll like the Young Mens [Program]. Sounds like Young Mens I guess.

Another big announcement came this week from our Zone Conference. About a year and a half ago, the General Authorities for our region said that we could no longer go to the temple to do baptisms for the dead because some missionaries in another state had been camping out at the temple all day. President Richardson went to a conference with some of them and told them about the temple program he used to do, and they counciled and decided to reinstate it! Which means that we can go to the temple for baptisms! It used to be that you could only go in on the last day of your mission and if someone you baptized was getting their endowment, but now we can go with them to do baptisms for the dead! The only caveats are that it's only for people you baptized in the ward you're serving in, for their first time only, and a member has to be with you. A really great rule change, because the mission saw a huge drop in retention rates when the missionaries couldn't go with them to the temple. Which also means that we can go with Bertina!!

​Elder Foster gave me a haircut last night.

Nice and short.​

Yet another announcement from Zone Conference is that we can spend up to 2 hours a week working on our personal family history, to find family names we can bring to the temple for baptisms! I'm going to try to utilize this time, so that I can learn how to do family history and have family names to take with me to the temple when I go with my converts.

That's pretty much it for the week. We have a couple people that we've met that might progress, but we've only seen them once so it's not solid yet. I'll let you know if they stay cool. Hopefully we can find more people to teach, because now that Bertina got baptized our teaching pool is pretty much empty. We're still going to meet with them for the "new member lessons", which is just going over the lessons again slowly and in depth, without the time crunch which is nice. But the work moves on, and it's time to find more people to be baptized! I love you all, thank you so much for your support! Keep up the "Good Work"!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

​

Emailed Question From Mom

Topic: Describe in Haitian Creole one (or more) of the weird interactions you've had door knocking. Ready, go.... 

Here's a little story in creole about some knocking experiences:

Ok, gen anpil bagay ki vreman bizare ke nou jwenn lè nou fe pòtapòt, m pa ka jwenn yon sèl! Lòt jou a, nou te frappe sou pòt yon nèg, e nou te mande li "Kijan ou ye jodi a?" e li te di "Pye kraze." Li te komik, li te vreman kalm. M te explike "ministè ki te tonnen mal" deja, sa sete ekspiryans pi komik epi bizare. Map pense de sa, epi poutèt semèn pwochen m ka jwenn plis bagay.

(Ok, there's a lot of things which are really bizarre that we find when we do door to door, I can't find just one! The other day, we knocked on one guy's door, and we asked him "How are you today?" and he said "Broken toe." It was funny, he was very calm. I explained the "minister gone bad" already, this was the most funny and bizarre experience. I'll think about it, and maybe next week I can find more stuff.)

Another Week

​Here's the river that formed behind our house.

Hello friends and family! This week was, astonishingly, another week. Not too much has been going on recently, which is all right except that it makes writing my letter super hard haha. 

Of course Bertina and kids are all doing super well, and we're getting everything set for their baptisms on the 30th. We taught them about the Word of Wisdom and Law of Chastity, and it was like water off a duck's back. Bertina said she stopped drinking coffee 2 years ago and committed herself to throw out her tea. Nice! We also gave them one of the children's Book of Mormon story books, so that should be good to. We still have a couple things to go over before the baptism, but she lets us come by pretty much every day so it shouldn't be a problem. I'm super grateful for the privilege to have found them, taught them, and soon see them baptized. It's so satisfying, it's literally the ideal, a family! There will even be 2 priesthood holders that might even go on missions themselves! I feel like once they get baptized I could end my mission totally satisfied. I shouldn't count my chickens before they hatch, but either way I'll definitely stay in contact with them because they're just that cool.

Another thing we focused on this week was visiting some recent converts and checking in to see if they have home teachers, visiting teachers, callings, and have been to the temple and all that. The bishop is super on top of things, so he's working really hard to make sure everyone has those things. He's very missionary minded, which is super awesome. He even will make time to come out teaching with us! He's really young too, like 28, and has an 18 month old. I admire him a lot for all he does even though he might be able to make excuses. Sometimes I feel like he's going to burn out at some point, but as long as he's going I'll take it!

​When the Polynesian guys in your ward buy each of you
a large pizza with toppings, a 2 liter of soda, breadsticks, and brownies,
and then when you see them at church and tell them that it was a lot of food
 they say "Yeah, I guess there's usually leftovers."​

Other than that, we just spend our time knocking in Dania Beach (aka The Skrait-Up Hood). It's like the only place people will really talk to us, the rest of Hollywood is pretty much just upper to middle class white people, so we're just making our way through it all. You never know what to expect, I thought about making a series of all the weird people we find, but there's just too many. Keeps the day kinda interesting at least.

We also randomly got a lot of rain yesterday, fortunately we didn't have to knock in too much of it. It did form a river behind our apartments though, so that's kinda fun.

That's pretty much everything, all we really do for the time being is knock doors, try to find some of the 700 less actives on the ward list, teach Bertina, and talk to everyone we see and hope something sticks. It's not as bad as it sounds, something must be working because we are still happy and see random little miracles every day. Let me know what cool stuff you guys are doing, and keep up the good work!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

​

Well... It Was A Week

​My new planner cover!​

Hey everyone! So, this week was a week. I don't know what else to really say about it haha. All we really did was knock doors all day every day. A couple things of note however:

One day while we were knocking we found Evans! He is a less active member from Haiti that no one knew about. He moved here about a year ago and hadn't been able to find the church! He still remembers a lot from when he was baptized 7 years ago, and the second time we saw him he had a friend there visiting that we taught the Restoration to! He'd met with missionaries in the past in Haiti and has even visited the church before. He leaves in a few days, but hopefully it'll spark something when he's back in Haiti. Evans just started a new job too and works Sundays, so we'll just drop by once a week until he can get Sundays off and come to church.

A day in the life

Bertina is still doing awesome! All 3 of her kids are set to be baptized with her too. Her date is for the 29th, and we still have a lot to teach her because she has so many questions. But that's a problem we want to have! She loves the church and her kids are already making friends too. One of them even asked if we could move the baptism up a week so he could go on a temple trip with the youth! We're going to be doing our best to see them every day so they can be ready for baptism. Probably the coolest family I've ever met, hopefully things keep up!

Yesterday was Easter, and I'm going to take the opportunity to share my testimony. I know that God and Jesus Christ live. I know that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and the Savior of the world. I know that His church was restored in our days through the prophet Joseph Smith. I know that the Book of Mormon is the word of God and contains the fullness of the Everlasting gospel. I know that we are led by living prophets and apostles today as in days of old. I know that through faith in Christ, repentance, baptism and other covenants, and continuing to the end of my life that I will return to live with God one day. I am grateful for my friends and family who support me and for this opportunity to preach this gospel to the world.

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson