9/1/14 Ice Bucket Challenge

So after a pretty exciting and hot week here in Hermosillo where we found 9 really cool new people to baptize... there were transfers and after only being here for not much more a month they moved me to another part of Hermosillo as Zone Leader. I was pretty upset at first because I had just finished really getting to know my area and workng with the ward but what Ive learned from all my super short transfers is that the Lord guides and directs this work so we should all just be happy for that and be dumb enough to think about what we think we want.

But yeah so this week aside from getting the members to host FHE´s and invite their friends (which was pretty cool) and finding some awesome new people we had a sweet lesson with Ruth (22). She was an investigator that my comp stopped visiting about 2 monthes ago but abunch of failed plans one day led us to her door, and we started bringing a member of her age to the lessons and she really started to progress. After teaching her the plan of Salvation I asked her what she thought her purpose in life was and she said... BAUTIZARME or BAPTIZE ME. So that was pretty cool and then she proceeded to tell about how she was doodling in her journal the day before the missionaries got to her door and out of nowhere she wrote ELDER without ever having heard pf the word or knowing what it means until the missionaries showed up to her house the next day. Pretty neat. 

And then so today I was carrying my super heavy suitcase down the worlds skinniest and steepest set of stairs outside our house and I banged my elbow on the cement wall that was right there. But the thing is that this wall has tons of broken glass bottles sticking out of the cement on top, kind of like teeth, probably to keep out cholos. So it cut me open pretty dang good. So I said goodbye to my comp, and me and an Elder from Chicago took a taxi to the hospital and they stitched me up. BUT Mom and amigos there is nothing to worry about, I am in my new area all safe and sound and everything at the hospital was good.

My new comp is Elder Maldonado from Guatamala, Guatamala and is finishing his mission here in 3 months so I will probably be the one to send him home :/ He was my district leader in Agua Prieta so I already know him and he is pretty cool. Our area is supposedly the nicest in Hermosillo so that is kind of cool but also pretty tough...but our house is sweeeeet. So all in all I am pretty excited to start working here!  

I cant really say I know what the Ice Bucket Challenge acually is but it definetly doesnt exist here probably because 1 it is so hot that ice cold water just doesn´t happen and 2 there was a huge spill in a mine in Cananea so the little bit of water that there was here, is now poisenous. So I guess the next time you dump a bucket of perfectly good ice cold delicious water on your head remember all the peeps here in Sonora grindin it out here and toss a prayer our way. 

Besitos,

Elder Mitchell

8/25/14 No he hecho un pupu en cuatro días

So apart for being a little sick of the stomach this week everything has been pretty good. We have really started working a lot more with the members but still waiting on the fruits of our labor. On Sunday I went to the ward cancel and about halfway through Stake Prez showed up (who is my good buddy who brings packages to us from AZ) and chewed out our bishop and the ward for not helping with the missionary work. So I thought this was the perfect moment to tell the bishop that we need a new ward mission plan and that we would make it and present to to him to help unify the ward and the missioaries in this effort and get everybody on the same page. And he went for it! So I am pretty excited about that and really plan on changing things around here. 

Also this week we started preparing Imelda to go to the temple and do baptisms by teaching her about family history and she was pretty excited for that. 

We found some cool new investigators but nobody came church :( 

We found a contact in the goverment of Hermosillo who is going to help us get Guadalupe and her husband married free ;) so her and her kids can get baptized hopefully soon in September. (Yay for corrupt government)

Tonight we are having FHE with Stake President and his super sweet wife and their neighbors and then Im taking Elder Diaz to get his Patriarchial Blessing... long story short, he is from Guatemala.

So overall everything is pretty great!

AND finally after a bet we made 3 months ago in Agua Prieta, Elder Gullien paid up. (Whether Japan was closer to Wasington State or Peru... Point US education system, Peru 0)

Les quiero machin,

Elder Mitchell

8/18/14 SPIDERS AND SCORPIONS

So things here in Hermosillo have been pretty normal, except it has been raining a ton which never happens so everyone likes that. Don´t have much time so I am going to try to make this one fast...

Imelda and Glenda were baptized on Saturday!!!! That was pretty sweet. 

Took a little 1 hour vacation to visit Alejandrina, convert from other area in Hermosillo, on her birthday which was awesome! She is staying strong in the gospel even though all her family members, that had baptismal dates when I left, have flaked out. 

After avoiding us pretty intensely for a week and a half, we finally decided to hunt down Francia and Margaret´s dad. So we called his taxi number and asked him for a ride and when we got in he was pretty suprised to see us, but even more suprised when I told him that we wanted to plan his daughters´ baptism... after that he just went on and on saying things that didn´t make much sense, zipped us to our destination and kicked us out and over charged us. BUT later when we went to talk to his wife she was pretty impressed that we stuck up to her husband and says she is going to work harder and be a better example for him by going to church EVERY sunday... but we´ve yet to see much results.

I woke up at 12 one night to go to the bathroom and found this huge creepy spider... so naturally I captured it and put it in the same box as the scorpion we found in the house a while back. We always feed little spiders to the scorpion but this spider was pretty big so i thought it might put up a decent fight but after watching for like 20 min and no action I went to bed. But when I woke up in the morning the scorpion was dead... and the spider was alive... so we assumed the spider killed him. But we left the spider in the box thinking maybe he would keep eating all the little spiders but the next morning the big creepy scorpion killing spider had escaped from our thought to be unescapeable box and probably is wandering waiting for me in my shoes or bed or backpack or something.

Other than that we have been focusing super super hard on working with the members to find new investigators. Although the members here are super super nice they don´t really understand how to work with the missionaries... we are supposed to be getting 24 new names from members each week but right now it is taking us about 3 visits per member to get one name...which is super slow and frustrating and it is pretty tempting to just go back to contacting people in the street but The Lord is pretty clear in how he wants us to do His work so in the meantime we´ll just be tryng to beat that into these peoples heads. Matthew 7.21

Love,

Elder Mitchell

8/11/14 Holis

Sooo this week was pretty normal as far as missionary life goes. Lots of work.

But this Saturday Imelda and her daughter Glenda are going to get baptized so that is super sweet. Just about 3 or 4 weeks ago Imelda told us she would be ready in about 4 or 5 months for baptism but we really challenged her to pray about it and since then has been progressing tons! We taught her te Word of Wisdom and she had just finished the last of her coffee and said she would never buy any more. 

Also this week we found 2 new families to teach. One was a lady we talked to who had been carrying around a book of mormon for like 16 years but never read it and her 4 kids and the grandma. The other is a 16 year old girl, Paty, and her mom. We talked to her on Saturday for like 5 minutes. We showed up to our planned lesson and it fell through but as we left I felt like I should talkd to the girl sitting on the curb. So we talked and invited her to church and told her to bring her mom. And in the middle of second hour on Sunday a hermana from the ward grabbed us and said there was a mom and daughter looking for us and sure enough it was Paty and her mom. They went to their young womens and relief society classes and afterwards were super excited for the activites that are coming up this week. Also they asked if we could say a prayer together because Paty is going to start la Prepa this week which is like between HS and college and so we kneeled in a classroom and said a prayer, basically like how we did as a family all my life growing up before a new school year except with just a simple prayer rather than individual blessings but this basically blew my mind. We teach so many people fpor so long trying to get them to come to church and so many never do, and then Paty just shows up and brings her mom after a 5 minutes contact in the srteet. Really shows how missionary work really is only effective when we act by the spirit. 

snip from district meeting this morning... What kept the original twelve apostoles so motivated in their missions and willing to dedicate all their life and even be jailed, stoned, bound, rejected and killed (most of them) EVEN when they all knew and prophesied by revelation that despite their efforts the church would be corrupted persecuted and fall into apostasy? The only battery that will never die or waiver, absolute love for our Lord, Jesus Christ... which is developed through te atonement and repentance.

Acts 21.13

PMG p.2

Les quiero machin

Elder Mitchell

7/28/14 AMPLIFY YOUR VISION

Highlights from this week include hitting 55 C or aprox 1,000 F getting to know my crazy little Guatemalteco companion and starting my first transfer as district leader.

Mi comp Elder Diaz just barely finished his training so he has about 4 months in the mission but he is a great missionary. He has this crazy little laugh and kind of reminds me of guatemalen Mr.Bean sometimes but we get along well which is really all that matters. 

I also did my first baptisimal interview which was super sweet.

We found this awesome family that wants to be baptized but the dad wont let his daughters or wife so we are have been trying to hunt him down to talk to him but havent had much luck in finding him. The family is super cool though. Francia, Margaret and I are actually already MAPS (mejores amigos para siempre) and we did some practices on how they can invite their dad to church and talk to him about the gospel. 

Sorry that's about all the time I have!!!!!!!

A quick thought from this morning's district meeting 

The dif between LamanLemual and Nefi is the vision that Nefi always kept of why they were working adn wandering in the desert (kind of like us in Hermosillo) which allowed him to be happy and productive versus whiny and a burden for everyone else. To Laman and Lemuel they were suffuring in the desert, to Nefi they were traveling to the promised land. 1 Nefi 4:22 (note the last line) our vision is to be able to be baptizing every week. What is your vision? WHy do you work?

AMPLIFY YOUR VISION. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE PRIZE. DON"T BE A WHINER

paz, amor, Jesucristo,

Elder Mitchell

(pic of the zone) (in my hand tailored shirt)

7/21/14 The heat never bothered me anyway!

¡CAMBIOS!

Just when I thought for sure I was safe from having tranfers (and had just bought 3 kilos of yogurt, ice cream and other easily perishible groceries) and ALL (almost all) of our investigators FINALLY come to church... they send me back to Hermosillo. And just in time for the hottest part of the summer. It´s supposed to be like 90 degrees at night and 115 in the day and could get up to 130 in August. So we´ll see how that goes.

But the highlights from this past week include getting our power shut off for 3 days for an outstanding debt of 2 pesos or about 15 cents, making friends with the neighborhood coke dealer, arriving juntos with the AG firefighters to the scene, and then bringing 11 investigators to church. And then if you remember from the MTC days when I made my own dress shirt out of bed sheets, I really stepped my game up and tryed to tailor one of my shirts and it somehow turned out pretty good.

It is pretty hard to leave an area and all the people you come to love so quickly, and a whole 10 baptisimal dates for August but I have learned to just trust in the Lord and just be happy out here.

So yeah this week is pretty short but here are at least some pics!

Besos,

Elder Mitchell

1. Elder Mitchell con los bomberos de APSON

2. Yessenia, Alejandro and the fam

3. Brinda,Gaby and their niñas

4. Piling into a taxi to go to church in true Mexican fashion

7/14/14 Cucaracha

So the crazy and most exciting part about this week (aside from waking up almost everynight swatting cockroaches off of me and then not being able to go back to sleep) was that we baptized AGAIN! When this week started we had no dates set but we witnessed a pretty sweet miracle. 

So on Tuesday we set out to find Lupita and figure what happened (the other girl who was supposed to be baptized with Magaly but disappeared) we went and talked to all her neighbors and the only thing we could figure out was that there was a family problem and her mom went one place, her dad another and all the kids to another, probably to their grandma´s house... but nobody knew what that was. So we sort of gave up and went to contact a reference that lived nearby but the parents weren´t home, just the kids and their cousins. We decided to ask the kids of this family if they had heard anything about Lupita and they said no BUT their teeny little 6 year old cousin piped up and said that they were with their grandma. I asked her how she knew and she was like ´oh she lives pretty close to my house´  then pretty much shouting I asked where the little girl lived, and she gave us absolutley terrible directions to her house which was way out in the middle of nowhere, where we had never been and where there are no missionaries. I tried drawing a map and asking her to show me where her hosue would be or how to get there but it was no use. All we ended up with was ´by a sign that says Yaqui there´s a white house on a corner in one of the 5 government housing projects built out past the rail road tracks´ (the invonabit government housing projects are these teeeeny little identical houses all pegged together in lines. Each project probably has about 300-500 houses and about everyother house is white)

So my comp was like yeaaah we´re never going to find her, which is really what it seemed like but I just had this really hopeful feeling that we could find her. SO I was just like Vamanos Elder, have some faith. And we headed off to the other side of the railroad tracks out into the desert and biked around not really knowing where to go for like an hour until we found this guy on the side of the road selling grapes and we asked him for directions and he was like ´Im not from here I just sell grapes but down this road you might find what your looking for´ a little confused we realized we had no better idea than him so we went down this road until we ended up at this old semi abandoned water park. We stopped there and talked for a little and my comp asked so how much longer do you want look for her, or where do we go now? And I didn´t really know how to answer him or where to go next but something kept telling me to keep looking. So we went back down the same road and as we were passing a little housing project all the stupid little directions the girl gave me started to make a lot of sense in my mind. Like what she said to us realy made no sense but all of the sudden I was like ´oh this is what she meant, turn here´so we turned and went down this road and then my companion was like ´NOO WAY, this sign (this tiny little street sign) says Yaqui´!!!! So we stopped amazed that we found this sign and looked around at proabably 100 identical white houses on this on street. We also didn´t even know her grandma´s name so we could ask around for her and were thinking about what to do when about 100 yards down the street a little kid ran out into the road and starting whistling at as. My companion was like ´Is that little Chito dude? NO way!¨ And then as we got closer the kid started yelling  HERMANOS HERMANOS and then out of the same house came Lupita and her mom. And me and Elder Ranger just looked at eachother and started laughing. 

Long story short after talking to Lupita and her mom and finally figuring out all of what went down, and then explaining to them how we found them, Lupita asked us when she could get baptized.

Saturday she was baptized and Sunday her and Magaly were confirmed members of the church. There´s actually a lot more cool parts to this story but I don´t have a lot more time to write. 

I know that this is the Lord´s work. He Himself directs it. If we are worty and willing we can participate and He will guide us, in the bringing of souls unto Him. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Elder Mitchell 

(Chito and Lupita)

7/7/14 USA!

Ya so right about 10 minutes after writing that email last week I was puking in the street in front of an Oxxo. Probably one of the lowest points of the mission so far. And then I spent the rest of monday tuesday sick in bed. Wednesday we left for like an hour and then returned home because we both felt sick,Elder Ranger and I and Thursday also we could only work for about half the day. So that was all pretty rough, one of the toughest and most boring parts of my mission. Also Thursday we went with the Zone Leaders to do the baptismal interviews with Magaly y Lupita who were to be baptized on Friday and we found out that the night before her dad got in a big fight with her mom, he got thrown in jail, the mom is 5 hours away in Hermosillo and Lupita and all her siblings are with their aunt, somwhere in Agua Prieta... but Magaly passed her interview and was baptized!!!! Yay! But none of her family came which was pretty sad because we planned the whole thing with them so they could go...

But we did do a little 4th of July celebrating here by going to the border to pay some respects to the motherland, watching the Douglas Arizona fireworks from our roof and lighting off some home made mexican bottle rockets. The Douglas fireworks were actually pretty sweet and right on the border but we were at our house like 5 miles away so it wasn´t as cool. 

But then on Sunday we had district (stake) conference and it was waaay cool. All the talks were about the temple and we given by district prez, husband and wife that were just converted and sealed, a kid leaving on the mission, Colonia Juarez Temple prez and his wife and Mission Prez and his wife (they actually talked about missionary work) but it was super sweet. Two things I liked the most was when temple prezident said that ¨the dead dont really exist¨ because a lot of times they are more alive than us if we arent fulfilling our duties here on earth AND his wife that said our futures are as bright as our faith. And that really struck me and made me think a lot about our investigadores Gaby and Brenda that promised theyd come to church but made some excuses and didn´t come. So I felt really inspired to go share this message with them after church and we went and I gave em a little bit of a wake up call and pep talk about what faith really is (getting your butt in gear and not making excuses) and we put tons and tons of goals and intermediate goals with them. One of them being a baptismal date for august 16th (Yay Carter!). And afterwards they we super grateful and expressed how they felt that is what they lacked and exactly what God wanted them to hear and I was like ya I know because He sent us here to chew you bums out. (in my head of course)

Also this past 2 weeks we found and have been visiting the coolest family ever that reads the book of mormon like everyday and also has baptismal dates...the only thing is that they don´t come to church either... YET. Jesse Alejandro and their 3 kids are way cool though. They actually live right by us and brought us tons of rice and food when we were sick and ask tons of questions about Lehi and his family and Moroni and all that. 

Also this week it cooled off a ton and rained a lot so that was sweeeet.

Anyways thats about all the time I have for this week!

Love and miss you all tons,

Elder Mitchell

 

4th of July at the US Mexican border with Elder Ranger and our sweet USA ties.

And Magaly and her friends from the branch at her baptism.

A tough week is nothing Agua Prieta´s biggest and best burrito can´t solve

Also AMERICA!!!

6/30/14 barf

So about a few hours ago I puked more than I ever have in my entire life and then conked oout on the couch of some other elders. I think it has something to do with heat exhaustion. But other than that this week was good. 

Sorry I have to go. Still feel really sick.

Love Elder MItchell

Enjoy the now! 6-23-14

So this might have been the hardest week I have worked in the mission but it was great! We found tons of new people to teach and things are really starting to look up here in Agua Prieta! Right now we are in the process of planning Laura and Lupita's baptism for the 4th of July! And in the process of putting lots more baptismal dates. 

Some of the highlights from this week include an Investigator who brought us chocolate milk from Douglas Arizona (I could barely keep myself from crying). 

An Hermana chewing me out for saying that there are 7 continents. Here they count America, North and South as 1 and don[t count Antartica. I explained to her that we divide the American continent into 2, North America and South America and she exploded saying that we think we are so much better than everybody else and always have to separate ourselves from everyone else and that it's all one America and we're all Americans and that The United States of North America can't make itself one continent. And I explained to here that the name of our country is The United States of America and that Canada, the US, Mexico and all those little central american countries are part of North America but she was still pretty upset. 

I have been getting real good at riding my bike with no hands.

I gave a talk in Church.

We had a branch talent show.

Mexico tying Brasil.

We actually had a FHE with a less active family and talked about this this past week. The dad cheated on the mom and there is just a huge gloom in their house, And i was like jeez how am I supposed to be able to help them? so I shared Elder Uchtdorf's talk from this past conference about being greatful in our circumstances. And then this same talk was used on Sunday as the basis for our lesson in Preisthood. But it really got me thinking. A lot of times, people are working and working super hard looking ahead to something and forget to enjoy each day. Each day is a blessing and we should never lose time we could have spent being happy because we are waiting for what lies ahead. So many people don't realize we are living RIGHT NOW dreams we once had. Like me for example, almost all my life I dreamed of being a missionary and here I am, living that dream. But it is SO easy to complain about the heat, or the companion, or the lazy people who won't come to church, or all the things we aren't allowed to do, and waste this once in a lifetime opportunity looking foreward to the day I go home. And tons of missionaries do it :/ Just living in general, is a dream we once had as spirits in the pre-earth life. We rejoiced when God presented us his plan and told us of the all the things we could do here on earth, and we waited and waited and prepared TONS to come to earth. And, here we are, living this life. So yeah, don't ever waste any time not being happy. Give thanks everyday. Take a moment to realize that you are living your dreams (being in college, being married, being a mom or a dad, being able to have a job, being able to drive, being able to date, ect. ect. all these things we looked foreward to for so long) but then keep working hard to accomplish the dreams you still have. 

We taught so many lessons this week, I wish I could write more but I am almost out of time!

I hope you keep me and the people here in Agua Prieta in your prayers!

Love and miss you all!

Elder Mitchell 

(Us hiding from the rain last week and me riding a crazy tall bike with some neighborhood ninos)