Midwest in the Wild West

 Hola! 

Wow, what a week. This week flew by but honestly was probably the most fun I've ever had in the mission. So, I got transferred to the most southern part of the entire mission, the South Diamond Zone. It's all new houses, rich people, desert, off-roading, and dinners every day. Reminds me of the beginning of my mission up north. The wards I'm in are called the Coronado Ward, Huntington Cove Ward, and the Sandy Valley Branch a bit south of here. My new companion is Elder Muraski. He's from Washington but grew up in Illinois. He's hilarious and will probably be one of my favorite companions. I have less than two transfers left and so it's possible he'll be my last companion, but you never know what the Lord has in store for you. 

A lot happened this week. Our teaching pool is very small and it's super hard to find people, so we just work heavily with members and knock doors in apartment complexes. It works well and we are always inviting people to church. We made our zone theme this transfer mining because the name of the zone is south diamond. We then gave a Minecraft training to the entire zone. It was awesome. A lot of old trunky missionaries get sent here to either die or waste time so we're trying this thing to make people absolutely hyped and get an absurd amount of church invites and commitments. It's super fun. Seems like everyone likes it and is engaged. Plus who doesn't like Minecraft? We write Minecraft on the mini white handheld board and then completely broke the board in half. It super cut me but was totally worth it. Elder Plaster, my old companion, is in my zone if you remember him, I'm excited for that. He is so awesome. Helping encourage the zone and work with it is so fun. It's nice to help other missionaries out and get to know them.

Elder Muraski is such a goofy guy but also apparently knows how to do pretty much everything. Like he sewed my shoe back together and gave me a haircut. He learned to cut hair on the mission by telling everyone he did even though he didn't, so he had a lot of experience giving haircuts. Now he's really good. The first couple days he noticed that my previous haircut was terrible, so he offered to fix it for me. He did a really good job.

I'm kind of sad to be back speaking English again. I'm still practicing my Spanish every day and trying to still use it here. Hopefully I don't lose it. I like speaking it, I'm definitely not fluent but I can talk pretty well with everyone. My companion doesn't speak Spanish unfortunately. There is this member that let us use his gym, so we go there every morning and now I'm going to get big. 

So, we accidently picked up a branch in the south part of Nevada called Sandy Valley. We asked our president if we could go out there and he said yes! We'll be the first missionaries out there in a year. It was an hour drive, but my companion and I spent the whole Saturday in Sandy Valley. It's basically anyone who hates people and Las Vegas so they just live super far away. They all commute into work in Las Vegas however. It's basically like the modern wild west. Legit wild west. Seems like there is no law enforcement and there wasn't cell service. It was awesome. The Church building was this little, small shack. The people were honestly either mega nice or terrible jerks. There was no in between. Just the west. We had some guy get mad at us for getting on his property so he flashed his assault rifle. So cool. There's not a whole lot of work out there so we probably will only come back one more time. We found two interested people though which was cool. The population in Sandy Valley is 1600 people so it's just super small and super spread out. 

Anyways, that was pretty much the entire week. Super fun. Can't wait for this transfer.

If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself

-John 7:17

Sincerely,

Elder Neil Pack