Ball up!

 ¡Hola todos!

I'm so glad to finally write to you all this week. This has been a long week and a lot of stuff happened. It has been pretty wild! We haven't found any new people interested in hearing about the restored gospel but we have made a lot of new friends for sure. I have a good feeling about them though.

We're still waiting on Adrianna to get permission from her parents to get baptized. We've been praying for her a lot and we really hope she can be able to. We finally met with a lady named Jackie who was previously taught by the Elders. She has been having a hard time lately and doesn't feel comfortable coming to church yet so were hoping she can get better. We've met so many great people here that love to talk but aren't interested in hearing a message which is unfortunate. I have faith that they will be able to feel the spirit and open up to us. One guy that we would really love to talk with is Justin who is a friend of someone in the ward that we play basketball with every now and then. 

The scuff on my shoes from playing basketball :(

Speaking of basketball, I'm pretty sure we played basketball everyday this week. Like at first it was pretty cool, but then it kind of became a distraction. Elder Rehkow loves basketball so much and he's pretty good. We went to the park with the elders over the Young Single Adult ward and played basketball with a bunch of guys. It was pretty awesome and we got to talk with a lot of people. But then we kept going to the park to play for a while everyday. I don't know how effective it was in finding new people to be honest. In the end it got us some attention but didn't find us anyone to teach. The only thing I got was a rolled ankle. I messed up my right ankle pretty bad when I landed a little wrong. 

This week something totally random happened. The other elders in our four-man apartment got moved. They needed to be closer to their area so they packed up and moved to a new apartment. We miss them because now its super quiet in our apartment. We have this huge apartment and only two of us living here. Its pretty lame. Good news is now Elder Rehkow and I took the nice beds and shower. The other Elders had all the nice stuff so now its ours haha. 

Unfortunately, the fireside that we prepared for got canceled this week. We never learned why but apparently it just got canceled. I was really excited for it too. Good news is we still got to teach Seminary on Wednesday. It was really cool! Teaching Seminary was a bit harder than I thought. We were trying to be engaging but the kids were super dead inside since it was so early in the morning. We ended up finishing our prepared lesson early and had like 15 minutes left so I just started making up a lesson off the top of my head. I don't know how Seminary teachers do it, like it was pretty tough. Turns out the lesson was better than we thought it would be. Halfway through the students seemed to be super engaged and asked a lot of questions. It went really well! We basically just talked about Doctrine & Covenants 18.

Every Thursday we've been asked to help with Centro Hispano at night. Basically its just a bunch of free classes taught by missionaries for Spanish-speaking individuals. Like we help people find a job or teach them English or any other help they might need. We were supposed to teach English by since it was our first time there they had us teach the finding a job class. We only had one person come in to seek help on Thursday. Her named was Johanna and she was really nice. She didn't speak any English so she has been having trouble getting a job. Turns out she was actually an environmental engineer from Columbia and was pretty smart but she didn't know where to go find work. She was pretty desperate and was willing to work anywhere. We helped her as much as we could and taught her how to fill out information to get hired. There are a lot of good food service jobs with Spanish-speaking people here so we helped her look for those to start out and hopefully find a better job in the future. My Spanish isn't super great but we helped her as much as we could. 

Finally, to end off the week, we had a mission wide zone conference through zoom. It was super awesome and a really special experience. We got to listen to Elder McKay of the seventy and he was super awesome. He was amazing to listen to and I hope one day I can be a speaker like him. He said that missionary work is member focused and missionary supported! If you know someone who could use a spiritual message, then don't be afraid to invite them over and introduce them to the elders! Something else awesome he told us was this: 

"If you have done it before, you can do it again. If you can do it again, then you can do it consistently. If you can do it consistently, then you can improve upon it!" 

Oh, and before I close this email, I want to give a shoutout to my cousin and his wife. I totally forgot to mention this when I got here in Las Vegas, but apparently, my first cousin lives in the Stone Mountain Ward! It was so cool to see them and kinda weird that I have family in this ward. Every other Monday we have dinner with them. They're pretty cool. Robert, my cousin, and his wife were confused why they were never in the weekly email so here is their section haha. I honestly have no idea why I never wrote about it, like, for some reason I never even mentioned it but yeah, I hang out with my cousin on my mission. Anyways, if you guys are reading this, you both are incredible! Seriously, thanks for everything and keep being awesome people!

My super awesome cousin Robert!

Thank you all so much for taking the time to read my emails. I love writing them and I super appreciate you all! I hope you all have an excellent week. 

Sincerely,

Elder Pack

Sweatshirt selfie