Email Semanal 24 de febrero 2014

Well we really worked hard this week, it seems to be a recurring theme that we are working hard, and seeing results, and it seems to be a recurring theme our weekly routine too, but we are trying not to get into a routine and just go out and work like we're supposed to. In the words of President Watkins' father "I do what I ought, when I ought"

We did quite a bit on Tuesday, we helped one of our members clean his trailer, he is a member from Brasil and he's been here in the Bay Area for a few years just to work, he is a man of humble roots, and is still humble today. His name is Allan Da Cunha, and he's great. We helped him out for a few hours, and then we got ready and left, (all 4 of us at the time, all of the spanish elders) and went to a funeral, it was a family that we all helped out with with service, and they wanted us to come to the funeral, so we did. They lost the matriarch of the family, the grandmother, and it was a good opportunity to share the plan of salvation with them.

We then went to lunch, got my favorite food, L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, and then we headed off to work. We got in to a few homes to teach, including Juan and Jenny, the Alfaro Family, and finally for dinner, the Ruiz's of course. Nariko is the oldest daughter, and she has been gone from our Tuesday dinners for almost 5 weeks, and so this week she was there, and she was happy to be there so I could tutor her in Chinese. She's taking Chinese in school, and her teacher gives her long story's to read, and she doesn't understand the sentence flow in Chinese that well and how words 'interact' with each other. It's the best language out there!

Wednesday was a long day, because we spent some time in the morning cleaning, because we had a hunch that President and Sister Watkins were going to be coming to inspect the apartment and do interviews. So we did just that, and did our studies as normal, had lunch, and did some more studies and he finally arrived (with notice, yes) at 2:20 PM. It was a short interview, but we got to talking, and he said "There's a good chance you're going back to Chinese next transfer, so let me see what I can do"... and then he went on to talk about how there is a chance to stay here another transfer but that is what he has to say in order to keep missionaries focused on the work. So I'm more than likely to be transferred it looks like. Fremont again here I come. He told be at the end  of the interview "Thank you for being flexible, I mean... ambidextrous, you're borderlining trilingual, so keep it up"

He thanked me a lot in the interview and that meant a lot, but it is really him that I should thank.

After that, we didn't have much time before dinner to go out and work, but we hit the streets, and went contacting, and talked to everyone we met. We were able to have dinner, and correlation at the chapel. After correlation we stopped by to visit a less active family, and they were actually home for once, they invited us in, and we shared a message, and they invited us to come back the next monday for dinner. They are from Mexico, not sure where, but they make good food.

Thursdays mean district meetings and district lunches, so we had our district meeting in the morning, and then we headed off to Indochine for lunch, this place is super good, and it's free for missionaries, so you can't beat it. Here in the picture in the white shirt is Bill, he's from Shanghai, and he waits on us every time we come here. He gives us double desserts and double candy to take for the road, he's awesome, and he always gets a good tip haha.

That night we had dinner with the Alfaro's again, and they made this soup, and I don't even remember what it was called, but it was nice, it was like bean base, with pinto or black or both, then it had tiny bits of steak and bacon, and you garnish it the way you like with cilantro, onion, salsa (homemade habanero, it was nice) and anything else you want, with corn tortillas of course. We shared a message, invited Josue (the 17 year old son)  to come with us to our next appointment which was down the road with the investigators Juan and Jenny. We were planning on reteaching the Word of Wisdom, because they have a big problem with it, they aren't willing to give it up so easily, so we retaught it, and promised blessings to them, and I went even as far as writing up a fake contract for them, to help them feel more committed. They agreed, and we will need to support them even more in getting to the point where they are free of the addictions that they have.

The weekend was kind of slow this past weekend, but we did get some lessons and were able to invite many people to come unto Christ. Sunday we did contacting in the morning in "mini mexico" went to church, and then went off to do visits. We visited Juan and Jenny again, and taught about temple blessings because they have questions about it. We are going up to the temple this Saturday to help them see more of the blessings that stem from it.

It was a good week, we could have pushed a little harder and done a little more, but we had a good week. The biggest thing I learned this week from my studies was in 3 Nephi 4, when the Nephites were preparing themselves for a battle with the Gadianton robbers, how their faith in God overcame the fear of these evil men conspiring against them, and how we have people coming against us every day, the forces of the adversary and constantly over us, but when we have faith we can overcome that, and be richly blessed. You must not forget that in order to reap the blessings, you need to first have opposition, because without the opposition, namely the bad that we sometimes face, there will never be the good.

 Love,

Elder Sanchez

Email Semanal 17 de febrero 2014

Hey this weekly letter I forgot to send last week. Sorry about that everyone.

We dropped the car off in EPA and rode up the Redwood City as fast as we could because we were late to our dinner with Cesar and his family, they are part-member, Cesar is not a member of the church, we had pollo that was seasoned in like a chorizo seasoning, and rice and noodles with tortillas of course. We got to know Alma his wife better, and talk to Cesar more about this past week. Cesar asked us if we could come back the next day for our "class" and so we respected his request and shared a message on repentance and removing the dark cloud that's over us by repenting.

Elder Phillips and I then went on Middlefield Road and just talked to people for the last 20 minutes of the night, and then finally we went to Los Manguitos to buy a paleta, I got Chamoy and he got Pistachio, and they were 2$ each. It was really good, we headed off home, and we got the keys off the roof  of our apartment (which I accidentally threw up there) and everything was good in the world. I was happy last night to get to sleep in a nice cold semi-humid room. Not dry not overly humid, and it was cooold. I liked it, but my companion didn't. I had a great sleep.

Man, today was pretty great and crazy. First of all Helena is not going through very good times, she met with the Bishop last night to clear up and figure out what she will do about her mother and father, they are both very against the church, and are asking her to come home back to China. So been keeping her in my thoughts. You should too.

Today we had service at St Anthony's Catholic Church, that was cool, it's just peeling and cutting vegetables for a few hours to prep for their lunch the next day, it's really a good place to serve as missionaries. After we had served there we ate lunch for the Redwood City 1st elders, Elders Porter and Jones and then we had our language study.

After language study we went and visited Daniel Paiz, he is a recently coming back from less activity, and he is pretty awesome, he is getting his patriarchal blessing this Thursday, receiving the classes for receiving the Melchizedek Priesthood and going to the temple now. He is pretty golden. He was asking us about what we think he should do with his life, because right now he is 32 and no job, no money, and no education, and how he needs to be more patient with God and with his life, but he is coming to conclusions himself on what he needs to do in order to do what he needs to do. We shared about spiritual and temporal blessings that come from being obedient, and then he headed off to do some 'odd jobs' with another member of the church.

After that we went and visited a couple people, and on the way we pulled over and talked to a young man on the street, and ended up teaching him the restoration, his name was Ricky, and he was really cool and receptive. We have a time to go back and bring him a Book of Mormon.

We kept going around RWC talking to everyone, and it was great. We eventually ran into Cesar our investigator in front of the Chavez supermarket and he asked us not to come at 6 because he was busy with things, so we went into Chavez to use the bathroom and he bought us candy and drinks... I think he just felt bad that he cancelled on us. We went and kept doing the work, and kept talking to everyone. We went to our ward mission leaders house to visit him, update him on our investigators and shared a message with him.

After we did that, we ran into a guy named Elmer, he's from Guatemala, and he was really interesting, he kept repeating the things that we said when we taught him, and we taught him the whole restoration on the street. We went and invited him to meet with us, and he didn't remember his address? So we got his cell phone number and we think it might be fake. But we did pray with him. We then headed off to dinner in Menlo Park with the Ruiz Family of course (every tuesday!) It was pretty amazing, as usual. Great day, 5 lessons. 

We started cleaning our house for interviews at around 9 oclock and got our laundry in, there isn't really much to write about today besides we cleaned our house for like 5  hours and then went shopping and got groceries.

The rest of the week was pretty interesting. We have had a hard time getting into the doors of our own investigators this week, and for sure in other peoples homes, but we still managed to get our standard 20 lessons this past week. We really pushed this weekend to find and teach people. I am coming down to my last 2 weeks of my time here in Redwood City 2nd Ward as President Watkins told me i'll be here for 2 transfers.

We have really had some trials this week of our faith, but we are come off conqueror. We made our 20 lessons. I am feeling a longing to go back to my mission language, I had a lesson in Chinese this past sunday because the Cupertino elders weren't able to go, so they had me go, and my mind was pretty set on the Spanish language, but as soon as I got into the groove  of the lesson it ended up working out really well. Her name was Cindy and she's 29, it was the first lesson she had with missionaries. She is from Hubei China and she has only been in the US since the beginning of January. She looks younger than me, but that just comes from the youthfulness of Chinese people. 

Anyway, don't know much else to write this week, but it's been a good week. 2 weeks left in the transfer already.

Elder Sanchez 

Email Semanal 10 de febrero 2014

So I figured my 6 months left resolution was to actually get up, and stay awake in the morning, since I wake up, and the first thing I have been doing is getting in the shower, not the best idea so I figured I should actually do what the white handbook says and workout. I got an app on the appstore that is called the '7 minute workout' and it basically tells you what to do. It's pretty boss, I really like it. Anyway, so i'm awake now, usually I would be asleep on my chair or the couch right around this point... (it's 7:22 am and i'm eating cereal... cinnamon toast crunch to be exact) so I want to write about yesterday.

yesterday was preparation day, and we had a great day, this past week or whatever I got a gift card from Rocky, he was a guy we taught in Cupertino for a while, we mostly just helped him get a job since he doesn't have many qualifications, so anyway receive a gift card from him for 80 dollars at a restaurant called BJ's, and they don't have a ton of locations, the closest one to us was in San Mateo, which is out of the mission, so naturally we got permission to go to the one in Cupertino that's on Apple's Campus, so I invited the Spanish Elders, Spanish Sisters, and the Stake Sisters. Elder Perez, Harouny, and Sisters Billings, Baird, Schank and Ikegami. I also invited Helena, which I was happy to do.

Our rest of the p-day consisted of going to Daiso, getting a few news things for the house, and going home and napping until 6. That was really nice.

To make a long story short, I didn't make it the rest of the week writing in my journal every day, it's been a rough week in the work, so it's been hard, but here's a new week, so hopefully I will do better.

My companion got sick over the weekend, and so it made it hard to do work over the weekend, but we were able to get some stuff done. Sunday ended up being a lot better of a day than Friday and Saturday. Saturday we had a mission wide conference with Elder Quentin L. Cook there to speak to us. It was an amazing conference, and I felt the spirit for sure. He gave an apostolic blessing upon the mission and gave us some really great council. He was incredibly impressed with the mission, and said about 5 times how important this mission is on many different fronts, how some very important people live in this mission, and I think that included the large Chinese population as well.

It was great, after he left, we had a mission wide conference with President Watkins, you can feel he is leaving soon, and I don't want him to leave. This was the last 'mission wide' conference that he will have as a mission president here. I could feel it as he left (he had to leave early) but I'll have some 1 on 1 time with him before he leaves of course, we still have 1 month zone conference and 2 more interviews with him (one is next week, or this week rather?) and so i'll be looking forward to that.

Other than that, we are working with our investigators, it's just hard to get a time to meet with them right now, Luis, our most promising, we can't even get a hold of right now because of new job and new hours working there. I wish people didn't have to work. It's quite annoying in missionary work.

I just hope everyone has a safe week with all of this snow on the east coast. It's raining here a lot, and it's supposed to keep raining here, makes it hard for us to talk to people on the street, and just biking in general but we'll see how this week goes. This is the most rain I've seen in California since I've been here, and that's not saying much because it only rained 5 days in the year of 2013.

Have a good week,

Elder Sanchez

Email Semanal 3 de Febrero 2014

Hey everyone. Here's February. 

This week was a crazy week, we finally finally met the goals we meant to do, 20 lessons and 140 contacts, it was finally met. We are happy.

So over this past week, we went working really hard out there, we worked on talking to everyone, and we did just that, no matter what we were doing, no matter where we were heading, no matter how fast we were pedaling, we would stop and talk to the people, in their yards, in the street, and just talk about their lives. When talking to someone, a point that they bring up about their lives will always be related to a point of the gospel. It’s been fun and we have found numerous potential investigators this week alone. It’s been a lot of fun.

Monday was a good one, we were able to spend our preparation day with the other elders, we went shopping at Costco, and did all of this stuff. It was fun. After p-day ended we had a chance to have dinner with our bishop and his wife. That was cool, it was the first time we had a chance to get to know him a little bit better, and his wife as well. That was a great appointment and it was an opportunity to get their focus more on missionary work more in their daily lives.

We had made a new investigator the previous week, that was living in the same house as Luis Santos another investigator that we have been teaching, his name is Leo and he is 14. We taught him an intro into the Book of Mormon and talked more about the restoration of the gospel, and he said to come back and share more, so after Bishops dinner we headed over there, our appointed time of 7 pm. But he wasn’t there, his Aunt was there (she’s Luis’ wife) and she was like “I don’t think he was interested much in your message, he just has these bad ideas in his head about what life is, and so he doesn’t want to listen right now” so instead we met with her, and her son, they are both non-members, and so that was good. She isn’t interested in joining the church right now because she has her roots elsewhere when it comes to religion. That was that.

We had to quickly bike up to Redwood City to Cesars house from there in East Palo Alto, because we had an appointment with him at 8, so we got there, and it was the first time we were going to meet with him to teach him the lessons again. Cesar is the husband of the primary president of our ward. He is awesome, and is really friendly with us, we told him we had to teach him the lessons in Spanish even though his English is nearly perfect, so we did just that. It was a great lesson, and he seemed to know a lot more than he puts off to know, and so we asked a lot of questions in order to gain an understanding of his knowledge of the gospel, and most importantly we invited him to act, just as we are called to do. He had a question about why don’t we revere the Virgin Mary the same way that Catholics do (he is Catholic) and so we explained that we revere her and a chaste virtuous daughter of God that was worthy to bear the very Son of God, but that we don’t worship her, because she is but a mere human, and that we worship God and his son Jesus Christ only. He seemed to have took that answer well. We will be finishing the first lesson tonight at 8.

On Tuesday night, we had a great night, we were able to work in East Palo Alto primarily, we were able to meet with the Zamora family, they are a little less active in the church, and they are the ones that have 11 kids. So it was a really great to see how they doing and to see what we could do to help them out right now. They are moving to another house (which is long overdue) and that was good that we were able to lift their spirits some since they are going through a lot of trials right now (all in the game of 11 kids right?)

After that we had a chance with visit with our ‘investigator’ Edgar, he is the son of one of my favorite families here in the ward the Alfaro family, he just turned 8, but his parents want him to have the whole missionary lessons before he gets baptized in order to make sure that he understands the gospel as best as he can to make the proper decision to be baptized or not to be. We have to teach him really slow, and with a lot of visuals of course, and we can not take more than 15 minutes to teach. Teaching 8 year olds is hard work. But we manage to help him understand, so it’s good. We were fed some by the Alfaro’s as we always are, this week they had homemade chile rellenos (they were really nice mom)

After that we had the Ruiz family (as we do every single Tuesday) for dinner. This week was delicious, it was catered (he has some catering points with another restaurant so I think he got this food for nearly free from them) it was from another restaurant called Paradise, and it’s Persian/Iranian food. Basmati rice, beef kebab, chicken kebab, seared tomatoes, and seared jalapenos. It’s quite amazing. Brother Ruiz had taken us there a few weeks back, and he loves that restaurant. He tells us in the 20 years he has lived here in the US he has never eaten commercialized food in restaurants like McDonalds or Panda Express. He’s a boss.

Some other highlights from this week is that we have been able to get to know a lot of the members in the other areas this week, and had dinner with 3 of them. It was awesome, but the downside of that is, is that 3 members took us to Panda Express 3 days in a row this week. It was interesting to have that much panda express.

We did a lot of work, and we had 7 non-member lessons. The most interesting non-member lesson this week was on the street last night(Sunday night) on University Ave in Palo Alto (it’s basically about a mile+ of really expensive stores and restaurants, right down the street from Stanford) their names were Kevin and Shannon, and they looked visibly… under some influence, but still at the same time, normal enough to listen. I was with Elder Terry temporarily, and so we taught them about the basic tenets of the church. They understood, but they somehow took what we talked about, and brought into how drinking is bad and drugs are okay. So we heard their 10 minutes about how drugs are okay for your body and mind since they were put on the earth. We then kept bearing testimony about the church and the gospel, and asked them if we could leave them with a prayer, they then asked if they could kneel because that's how they pray, and so at 9 pm on University ave, on the sidewalk we knelt and prayed with them. Pretty weird and cool at the same time haha. After the prayer, he was like “This is going to sound super weird, but I want to give you a momento for this time we spent together this evening, and he pulled out a mini pink lighter, and signed his name in it with sharpie, and so did Shannon, and then they walked away. Super weird.

I know I’m supposed to write about my experiences on my mission, like about lessons and stuff, but I love writing about food experiences (I should go into foodblogging?... nah) anyway there’s always a best meal of the week, usually it’s with the Ruiz’s here, but this week it was different. Elder Phillips my companion has been wanting to go get sushi like for the past 3 weeks. Just non-stop nagging “Let’s go to Little Madfish and get some sushi” so finally on Saturday, we got 2 other Elders to come along, Elder Payne and Terry, and we went to this restaurant in Redwood City called Little Madfish, and we all got sushi, it’s basically selling sushi by the roll, and so I must say I have had sushi a few times on my mission, and have never really liked it a whole lot, just kind of like “Well okay, I can see why people would like it, but…” but this time was a lot different, this was really good stuff. I thought you needed to pay 40 dollars to get full at a sushi restaurant, but this place, 10 dollars and I was satisfied. I got the Philadelphia roll and the California Roll. From what I have here it’s http://www.littlemadfishrwc.com/Menu/menu.html

Email Semanal 27 de enero 2014

1/27/13

Time flies past so quickly, and in the mission it's like a time warp. Elder Perez which is the other spanish elder serving here in the area, are going home at the same time in August, and we were talking about how we don't have any time left at all. 4 transfers after this one, and then that's it. It's crazy to think about it, but I really am getting sucked into this time warp which we call the last 6 months. I was talking to an Elder named Elder Lambdin around April of last year and he said the same thing, he was talking about how he was going home in September and how he has like no time left at all, and then next thing that I knew... he went home. It's been a great mission so far, now lets make the last 6 months totally awesome.

This week we had great success, and we nearly (barely almost) made the standards of excellence for the mission. I realized Elder Phillips and I need to work harder on asking for information and a return appointment from people while we contact on the street, and we also need to work on our teaching skills in Spanish.

We had a chance this week to go with our investigator Luis (finally) to a courthouse to receive his license to be married to his wife, in order to be baptized. We went to the Palo Alto courthouse and it didn't work out, because Luis and Cecilia live in East Palo Alto (which is another city) and Palo Alto only does residents stuff. So we found out we had to go to Redwood City to do it, so Luis said we have to do it another day. We showed up to his house the next day and he wasn't there unfortunately. We will still keep trying.

Our investigator Oscar and his member wife Sylvia and doing really well, Oscar wants to be baptized pretty bad, and quite honestly is ready, but he has a pending divorce in Chile that needs to go through. We had dinner with him this past week, and it was really good. I enjoy being them, they have a lot of great stories to tell.

We had Elder Perez with us for 2 or 3 days this week as a trio, his companion was down with President Watkins because he needed to receive knee surgery. His new companions name is Elder Harouny and he's from Utah. That was fun to be in a trio for a few days, we definitely covered a lot of ground while we were all together.

The biggest moment of the week for sure was Saturday. Saturday Elder Phillips went into Elder Perez area with him, and Elder Olsen (one of the travelling assistants to the president) came with me for training and things like this. Elder Olsen is from Utah/ New Jersey and he's Dominican. He's a cool guy. He came into the area to show us how to contact more efficiently for spanish people, and how to invite to meet with us and stuff. He did a lot of training and roleplaying with me, and it really helped a lot. That day we got 12 addresses, and 11 of those said to come back. We got 2 new investigators that day, and it was awesome. It showed me really how to talk to people and invite people in this culture, since i'm not used to this culture in missionary work. Elder Olsen is awesome.

I really don't know what to say besides we really had a really great week this week, we are going to see great things in the next 5 weeks, and I am determined to leave this area better than I found it.

 Well have a great week everyone