8/27

I know that it's a lot of money to fix a window, but that's pretty funny. I imagine that I would probably panic a bit if I did that too. 😉 I'm doing well. This week was pretty eventful. First of all, my new companion Elder Vaivai is fantastic, we get along great. The area's super cool too, people are really open and we've been able to have a lot of really great conversations with people. 

The other big news this week is that Elder Vaivai had surgery on Thursday for an injury he got in a bike accident a few weeks back. So we've kind of just been hanging around the apartment most of the time while he rests and recovers. I've studied a bunch, and cleaned the apartment quite a bit because the last elders left it kind of messy. The refridgerator looks really great now. That's about it. The first day in the Samoan sacrament meeting was an adventure, I didn't understand a word they were saying. But things are good, we're having a good time, and I'm super pumped to work in this area, things are really moving along great here.

Love you all! Tell Ammon not to break anymore windows! 😉

-Elder Clark

Learning a little spanish 8/13/18

Hello! It's been pretty good this week. I bore my testimony in the Spanish sacrament meeting. I think my pronunciation was probably pretty terrible, but they laughed when I told them I had been praying for them to have the interpretation of tounges so they could understand my bad Spanish, so I'm guessing people could understand what I was saying. ;)

We also had Elder Carlos Godoy (from the Presidency of the Seventy) come and speak to our mission. He was so awesome, he told us his conversion story and it was super funny and taught me a lot. It was really awesome to have him come visit us.

That's about it for this week. I'm learning new Spanish words every day, but still don't know nearly enough to have a decent conversation with someone. It's fun though, every day is certainly an adventure.

Love you guys!

-Elder Clark

Also I have a picture of something I found behind my pillow from one of the previous missionaries who lived in our apartment. I thought it was pretty funny

Samoan ward 8/20

We had transfers today. I'm not staying in the Spanish ward. They moved me to the Samoan ward. So good thing I've been practicing Spanish for the past two weeks. 😉 I'm pretty excited. And pretty nervous. I was really expecting to stay in Esplanade for at least one more transfer, so it's quite a surprise. My companion is Elder Vaivai, and he is also from the polynesian islands, but he's from Samoa, not Tonga.

In other news, the program that monitors our devices decided to uninstall most of the apps on everybodys' devices, including our planning app which stores all of the information for all of our people. For some reason Elder Vaivai's device was not affected, so we're one of about six companionships in our mission that still has information on the ward and the people we're teaching. Hopefully it'll get figured out soon, because I'm pretty confident that it's a pretty widespread thing, not just something for our mission. 

That's about it though, I forgot my journal again and since I don't have area book I really can't remember what we did this week at all. I'll let you know how things are going in the Samoan ward next week. Love you all!

Lost sheep July 30

Hi everyone! This week was really good! We had some great days with a lot of really good finding, and aside from the day we were in the doctors office all day waiting for them to look at Elder Talanoa's shoulder I was able to go out and work like normal the whole week. It's good to be feeling better. We had a cool visit on Wednesday night. Our ward mission leader came out with us to a lesson and just went with us to visit people for the rest of the night. It was a lot like the thing in the video from Elder Bednar where he's describing ways that we recieve revelation where he describes recieving revelation as being like a cloudy day. We had two people in a row that we felt like we should go to who didn't make very much sense at that time of day, and just like we expected one of them wasn't there and the other one was having dinner and told us to come another day. But, going to both of them put us in the area of someone Brother Barbour had gone with the missionaries to teach in the past, but they had lost contact with. He suggested that we try him, and he ended up being there and told us that he had just been wondering to himself what he could do to become a better person less than 15 minutes before we got there. He very readily told us to come back on Tuesday, it was super cool. Friday was super neat, I was on an exchange with Elder Jorgensen and we finished the night by teaching a two people I met with Elder Vaitai way back when, and they were super cool. We only made it through the first half of the restoration, so we came back again the next night and there was a third member of the family who sat in, so we ended up teaching three new people, and they're super cool! They said they're going to start reading the Book of Mormon as a family to find out that it's true, it was the best. Then, to finish off the week we had Leanne come to church for the first time. She even had somewhere else to get to, but she went a little late to make sure she had time to at least go to sacrament meeting, it was really awesome. Sorry the emails all over the place, but I have 0 time, so this is what you get. Have a good week!

-Elder Clark

Espanol? Aug 6

So things are about to become an adventure, one of the missionaries in the Spanish ward that covers the same area we do is going home mid transfer tomorrow, so his companion, who happens to be Elder Vanweerd from Sky View is going to be joining us and our trio will be covering both wards. So I'm in a Spanish speaking ward now! I'm super pumped, I've really wanted to learn some Spanish, and even though it's probably only for two weeks until the end of the transfer I'm hoping I'll pick up at least a little. 

The rest of our week was pretty uneventful. We met a couple cool people, but pretty well every one of our lessons we had scheduled this week fell through, so there isn't much to report there. 

I think the only other thing we really did this week is I made an oragami chess/checkers set one night because Elder Talanoa wanted something he could do to distract him so he doesn't snack at night. We've played a few games, I never realized how bad I am at checkers, but I'm getting a little better. ;)

That's about it. I'll let you know how speaking Spanish goes next week! Que tengan una buena semana!

-Elder Clark

Here's a picture of the chess set: