Week 10: Hello From Nampa

I am officially in Nampa now and its been really good.

So here in Nampa, we live in a big red barn. It's actually a garage and
we live on top but it looks like a barn. We have our own bathroom,
kitchen, kitchen table and a couch plus our beds, so it's much better
than our last place. We cover half a stake here. We cover the Nampa
South Stake, the 5th, 10th, 17th, 22nd and 28th ward. The 28th ward
is a singles ward so that's cool to go there, but that ward is dead. We
have had no work there in months, mostly because the ward mission
leader has been engaged and isn't really going anymore and they
haven't called a new one yet. We do have some investigators in the
other wards. I got put here because one set of elders used to cover
the whole stake, 9 wards, but they just split it up so that 2 sets of
Elders cover the stake now. Elder Mintoghe was here before and he
said that most of the work and investigators went to the other Elders
area so we spent a lot of time this week tracting and going through
former investigators and other potentials. We had success! We found 
3 investigators! That is proof that if missionaries can find people to
teach through tracting, no excuses for members to not give them
people to teach. My request is for you to find people for the
missionaries to teach. If we get referrals we won't have to spend the
30 hours of tracting we did this week. 

We teach a boy named Tyler Gregory here, his mom is LA (less active)
and he's 13 and decided to take the lessons. Last night we taught him
and I challenged him to be baptized and he accepted and is gonna be
baptized on August 29th! It was awesome, it was the first time I
challenged someone and it was scary to be honest! But it was so
rewarding. So out here we have 2 others that we are gonna 
challenge to baptism this week. One is Saundra, and she is a 20 year
old single mom, her friend is Mormon and she has been taking the
lessons. We've only taught her twice but she has been coming to
church every week and loving it and she said she has felt such a great
peace ever since. She is so GOLDEN! The other is a little girl named
Sara, she's 12 and all her family is LA and she is the only non-member.
We call her an OAY (over age youth). She is so smart and I think next
week we'll challenge her. We actually have one more you wants to be 
baptized but she lives with her boyfriend and we told her that she has
to move out, break up, or get married to be baptized and she doesn't
like any of those choices so it will be a while before she gets baptized
I think.

Elder Mintoghe is so awesome. He's been out 18 months. His story is
that he was born in Gabon, a country on the western coast of Africa.
He moved to Washington DC when he was 6 and lived here ever since.
He's a convert, he ran into the missionaries when he was 17. He's
such a power house and has taught me so much!!! I'm going to learn
so much from him this transfer, it's going to be great. We are in a car 
share here. We share with 2 other sets of missionaries. How we do it
is we get it four days, then they get it 4 days, then the other set gets
it 4 days then we get it again. It's kinda different but our area is
smaller so its ok to be on bikes. We have a lot of restaurants here too,
we have Panda Express and Qdoba! It's awesome but its expensive
so we get stuff to cook at home. The members here are great and
feed us every night and feed us a lot! We take the Priests out on
splits with us a lot which is really cool. We are the Nampa Zone, and
our Zone Leaders are cool and there are like 3 other Elders I know
that are cool. So my last zone was amazing I guess. We played
beach volleyball this morning which was fun, about 10 of them
showed up, which I guess is really unusual. Then Elder Mintoghe and
I went with a member to IOU Sushi, it's this all you can eat sushi
place, it's so good!

One more cool note about Brent, (one of our investigators from Kuna),
Elder Stepherson called me the other night and told me that Brent
told him that he had a dream that he needed to get baptized, he said
that he loved Elder Stepherson and me so much he wants to do it
before we go too far away and wont get to come to his baptism. He
is trying to figure out a date that works before September 9th
(that's the next transfers) BRENT'S GETTING BAPTIZED!!!!!!!
Man I was so happy to hear that!

The pictures from Top Sail look like some fun!

My e-mail and p-day will never change...ever. Neither will my mailing
address @ the mission home. Don't worry about that...you will always
have contact with me lol.

Well I have got to go, we have an appointment in a little while.
It looks like we do emails in the afternoons here, not the mornings.
Well I hope everything is going good! 

I love you guys!