Monday, October 14, 2013

"...keep an eye out for a Scottish guy...he'll be easy to spot driving on the wrong side of the road and wearing a bright red kilt."

Hello wonderful familia!
This week was quite stupendous. It all started off with last Monday, when we went and played "chair football" at the church. (From here on out, "football" will mean "soccer" because that's what they call it here ya know.) 
That's where we each have a chair, and the goal is to hit other players' chairs with the ball. If your chair gets hit, you sit down. If the person who got you out gets out, you're back in. 
So it goes on for a while, until one person has gotten every other player out. It's way fun. We also just played a 3v3 match in the gym (us, the zone leaders, their trainee, and a member of our ward). Probably the best p-day so far.
Now before I move on to the missionary work part of this week...have you guys heard of the movie "Sunshine on Leith?" It's a Scottish movie, from what people say here it's set in Edinburgh and the plot revolves around songs by The Proclaimers, who are Scottish (kind of like Mamma Mia is based on Abba songs). 
I've heard it's really good. Not sure if it's made it to Utah yet, but you should all watch it somehow and tell me how it is. And tell everyone in the theatre that I'm basically one of them.
This week I went on two exchanges, both in trios. Conclusion: Trios are awkward when trying to talk to people on the street, but a lot more fun when hanging out together during down time.
Elder Winn's birthday was on Thursday (21). I tried to make a cake, but apparently I put the oven on the wrong setting so it burned the top and left the inside all runny. It was ok though because we just ended up eating the raw cake batter. 
The senior missionary couple Elder and Sister Bylund and also a family in the ward made it a successful birthday for him. So that was nice.
We've been doing a lot of street contacting. From my conclusion: It allows us to teach more "lessons" each week, but as far as finding people who are interested in investigating further it's not that effective. I think a mixture of tracting and street contacting is good.
In our attempts to contact inactive people on the ward list, we found quite a strange coincidence: We were looking for a lady called Carol, and at her house we met a guy named Paul who is a member, but Carol had long since moved out. And apparently he might be moving to Riverton soon...weird! 
So tell the Wests to keep an eye out for a Scottish guy in the next few months...he'll be easy to spot driving on the wrong side of the road and wearing a bright red kilt.
Yesterday was pretty cool; the sister missionaries in another ward in Dundee met a guy from Chad who speaks French but only a bit of English, and he lives in our ward boundaries, so we took an returned missionary who went to France with us, and he just taught the first lesson to this guy in French. 
We just sat back and listened, quite content that the member was re-living the glory days of his mission and the African guy was happy to communicate with someone who he can understand better. So we're excited to keep working with him. 
Next time we'll probably teach in English, and the member will be there to translate if necessary. Fun fun!
That's it for cool stories this week. Lots of street contacting in the City Centre, tracting, visiting less active members, etc. 
Oh wait, one more; in the City Centre we had split up so we could talk to as many people as possible (still within sight and sound) and I saw this guy sitting on a bench crying.
I went up and just asked what was up. At first it was awkward because he was embarrassed to be crying in public, but then we got talking and he just told me about how homesick he was and how it's even worse because his mom was in the hospital. 
Didn't really talk much about the gospel, but he was really happy by the time we were done talking. His girlfriend walked up to him kind of confused as to what was going on, but in the end they said they might both be interested at a later time. So it was kind of cool to see someone positively affected by just a short conversation.
Hope yous all have a fantastic week! May the road rise up to meet you.
Love,
Spencer

Photos: Trio exchanges!