Hey Family!
Well, I've officially made it through my first week here in Texas, and all is going well. Just to get some stuff down so I don't forget in this email, my current address for mail is:
Elder Roland Wood
1308 E. Miller Ave., Apt #2,
Donna, Texas 78537
My P-days are on Mondays here, and today is my first one out in the field. A lot of stuff has happened this week, and it's been a bit of a shock coming from the MTC, but I think that I've been doing all right here. I got here and got through the orientation, and now I'm out in the field with my companion, Elder Nevarro. He is a great Elder who works really hard and speaks pretty good Spanish. I guess I can relate just a few stories of my first days here so you can get a feel of what it is like here.
I guess first off, though, I should talk a little bit about Donna. Donna is a town East of McAllen about half an hour, and is bordered by the towns of Weslaco and Mercedes, which are a bit bigger. You might be able to find them on the map. Donna is the poorer part of the area here, with lots of people living in motor homes or factory homes, but it has its nicer areas as well. There are TONS of dogs here, many of which are just stray ones that roam around. Since there are lots of dogs here, normally what we do when we walk up to a house is stand on the edge of the yard and tap the metal fence (which everyone has here) with our tags. It makes a nice 'ping' sound which normally wakes up any sleeping dogs and then we can decide if it's good to go in or not. On our first day here we walked up to a house, pinged the fence and nothing happened, so we went up. However, when we were about to walk up the steps to the house, a giant German Shepherd jumped out from underneath the house like it was gonna rip our heads off. As this was like the second house I had ever knocked on, it scared the crap out of me. I fought the reflex to run, pulled off my backpack and held it between me and the dog to give me some room as we backed out of the yard. So it turned out all right, but I will say that got my heart beating pretty fast.
We've had trouble finding investigators since we've been here, although we've been out contacting quite a bit since I've been here. We've only had a few investigators to meet with, many of whom have stopped progressing or want some more time to learn before baptism. Laura, who is one or our investigators, has a baptismal date, but we've had to push it back because she wants to be baptized, but feels like she needs to learn more before she fully commits. It's hard for us to meet with her because she's in band at the high school and her day starts and ends basically the same time ours does, so we can only see her once a week on Sundays. We had a good lesson with her, yesterday, and hopefully she will continue to study and pray and soon be able to really commit. Her brother, Ramiro, however, is progressing well and wants to be baptized. He will probably be baptized on the 26th of September.
Anyways, we did a lot of contacting this week, and we've found some good potential investigators. Hopefully, we'll be able to follow up with our return appointments with them and get them to progress. Speaking of our potential investigators, it's been interesting because I've managed to find two potential investigators who are Hispanic copies of our family. Roy, one investigator, is just a Hispanic version of Nathan. He looks really similar, talks the same, and does IT work here for an electrical company. He has two twin boys and a one year old daughter. Also, I found Ana, who is just the Hispanic version of Rose-Ellen. She talks really similarly to Rose-Ellen and is wholly devoted to and focused on the well-being of her young daughter. It's weird how I keep running into everyone here that reminds me of my family.
So, I don't have too much email time left, but just know I'm doing well out here, and everything is going fine. My companion is great and we're working hard. I was going to send some pictures home but I haven't taken too many yet and I forgot my camera. I have some good pictures of when our car got stuck in the mud here, though. I had to spend a good hour or so cleaning my shoes after that, yesterday. We got it out, but it was a struggle. Anyways, I hope everyone has a good week. I was very excited to hear about Sarah's baby! Congratulations! The Wood grandchildren are starting to be dominated by the girls. Who knows, maybe that will change soon =).
Love,
Elder Wood
