Hello from Provo, everyone!!
I'm so sorry I didn't get an email out last week! We only have until 6 to email, and my draft got deleted somehow, so I didn't have time to rewrite it! I'll try to talk about both weeks in this email.
The day we left the MTC, we had to be at the Reception building by 1:30AM! Then we drove to the airport and everything. The flights weren't too exciting, except that somehow I got put in first class on the second flight! I have no idea how that happened, but it was pretty cool. I fell asleep shortly after getting on the plane, and when I woke up, there was a bowl of assorted nuts next to me!
When we got to Provo, we all spent the night at the mission president's house. The next day we had a meeting and got assigned to our trainer. My companion is Elder Gallegos. He's been on his mission for 18 months! He's a very hard worker and a very cool guy.
Our first day here, we visited some of the investigators that the sister missionaries before us in the area had been teaching. We even got one of them on a baptismal date on the first day here! It was super cool. His name is Anthony, and he's a really great kid. His baptism is this Saturday, so I'm sure we'll have pictures then. It's going to be great!
We have a total of five people on date for baptism already, and at least one other that we want to have on date by our next lesson, which is tonight! There really is a lot of work to be done here, and, despite what we may think, not everybody is Mormon here! Because of the number of church members here, we get a lot of referrals from members, and we almost never just go knocking doors. We've had several new investigators since getting here!
Last P-day (Mondays now) we climbed a mountain! The mountains here are crazy! We've had a lot of fun just climbing. You can see three different temples from on top of the mountains!
On Wednesday, we went to the Provo City Center temple. It's really cool. The outside is interesting, because it's red, not white like most temples. And the inside is done like the 1800s. For those of you who don't know, it used to be a tabernacle. It had been there since the 1800s, but it burned down. Rather than just rebuild it, the church decided to turn it into a temple! It's really pretty.
Our area covers two whole stakes! (A stake is a group of wards, and a ward is all the people in a certain area.) Here in Provo, there are so many members that a ward is only a few streets worth of people. One stake we serve in English and Spanish, and the other is just English. We speak much more English than Spanish in this area. Because of that, it's been kind of hard to pick up the Spanish, but I think it will come. We attend several sacrament meetings on Sundays, and we have attended the Spanish ward twice. The Spanish church has helped a lot. It's hard sometimes because of all the different accents that people speak with! We have people from Venezuela, El Salvador, Chile, Mexico, and all over central and South America. It's really cool, but also hard to understand them sometimes. In Spanish, people often don't pronounce their "S"s, or they pronounce them like "h", which really makes it hard to understand them! I'm starting to get it down, though.
Anyway, that's about all I have for today. I hope you're all doing well, and I'll write again next week!
Elder Rowe
