Saturday, October 25, 2014

Caleb is sharing his piano talents!!

October 22, 2014-

The last paragraph really made me happy!  If you know Caleb, you know how much he loves to play the piano!  The gun part was really hard to hear and put me on my knees.  I sent my son because I know God lives.   Caleb wanted to serve because he loves his Savior.   It's an act of Faith for all of us!!
This is the day Caleb opened his mission call!  April 2014

Mom,

This week has been good. I did a lot of different things so it made it go by a lot faster.  It´s weird that Christmas is going to be in the middle of summer, but oh well. Almost half way done with training. I can´t wait for it to be over.  It has sucked haha. Zone conference was good. It started with a talk by the mission president´s wife, then the mission president. We had an awesome lunch, then the assistants to the president talked to us, then we split into three groups and had three short lessons. It was about six hours long. And all in Spanish, so I didn´t get much out of it. Elder Leon is a really good missionary, I just don´t think that he´s very good as a trainer. He´d be a lot better with another latino. I didn´t really get to talk to president Cook, but I´ll just be patient and take charge if it gets any worse. My room mates both know about it.  Elder Ware was actually companions with him about 6 months ago. He had problems with Elder Leon too.  I just have to be patient with him. I also need to step up more and take charge. Because he just treats me like I´m a doll. I went on divisions with other missionaries yesterday, and they told me a few things I could do to make things better. I´ve been patient with him for sure. I haven´t really yelled at him yet, so there´s a start haha.  I would just about kill someone for some alone time. It´s been alright though. I´m adjusting. I gotta get used to it because it´s going to be my life for the next two years.

We have a few investigators now. We have one named... Heido? Jeido? I have no idea how to spell it. But he came to church with us one week and he actually stayed for the entire three hours. And after he was asking about baptism and stuff so he´s a pretty solid investigator.  One thing that has really helped us with finding people to teach is we teach English lessons! We´ve taught like three of them. All the people here want to learn English. I think it´s really cool and I love getting to speak a little bit of English to the people here haha.

 I´ve realized that I´m not learning Spanish.  Castellano is so much different. It´s so hard. The vocab is a lot different.  It has seriously been so hot the last few days. I am sweating like crazy all the time.  I now sleep on top of the blankets too.

We mostly buy food with our money, and use it for transportation.  Not really anything else. A little bit for P Day activities, but not much else. I only use the converter to charge the camera.  I do use everything that I brought though.

 I really hope we get to hear from Elder Holland.  I would die!  He´s my favorite apostle. I don´t think it would be too smart to go to the areas that I´m serving in if we come here. They´re super sketchy, and we are the only white people. Yesterday I went on divisions with a kid named Elder Stokes, and some guy pointed a gun at as at like 9:30 at night. I was talking to a few missionaries that have been serving for a while, and they said that it´s pretty normal here for that to happen. So that´s really scary.  No one has been shot yet though. (Gee, that sure makes his mom feel so much better!)

I don't know how Pres Hutchison can have to entire BOM memorized!  That's crazy! If the missionaries could do that we would be a lot more powerful.  I have all of DC 4 memorized in Spanish and I feel like that´s a huge accomplishment haha. That´s absolutely crazy.  I´m still trying to finish the Bible.  I´m in Job right now, and it´s been pretty boring up until now.  Job is a pretty cool book.

 So apparently in this mission quite a while ago, the missionaries did a really bad job. They taught a bunch of people, and they baptized almost everyone. The problem was, they did a terrible job with teaching and almost nobody was converted. You can look at the numbers here, and in our ward, we have 400 people in the ward. Only 45 attend. My old MTC companion has approximately 950 members in his ward, and only 40 attend. So that´s the problems with baptisms here. It´s almost all reactivation. The people here definitely act a lot different than the people in America, so it´ll take a little while til I figure out the people here and understand their culture. 

Speaking of piano. So I played for the ward right? Well after that, the person in charge of the ward choir asked if I could play for them. So I did. And when I played for them it was during the ward conference, so the stake leaders were there. After that sacrament the stake leaders asked me if I could play for the stake Christmas thing in December. So I´ve definitely been playing a lot of piano here.  Thanks mom love you!

Love,
Elder Stam

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