Hey so I'm in Hermiston, Oregon now! "Land of the
Strange, Home of the Watermelon" according to a missionary here. A lot of
things about day to day life are different and so far it has been super great.
We don't really have as much access to computers as we did in Basin City so for
the most part, I'll be doing this from my phone. If it looks a little different
or there are typos, that's why :)
The week was kinda crazy.
I packed all day Tuesday and we went around and said goodbye
to a lot of the members and people we were teaching in Basin City. It was
pretty sad to say bye to them, but it was good to go around and see them all
one more time. I got some chocolate covered cherries from one of the farmers we
were pretty close with :) They are suuuuper good.
Wednesday was transfer day so bright and squirrly Elder
Harmon and I headed into Pasco. The Hermanas that we worked with in Basin City
were also affected by transfers and they put our area 'catch phrase' on their
car and drove the whole way to town. apparently people were looking and waving
and stuff as they drove. (pic included). We piled in a 12 man van and made the
rounds around the mission. 2.5hr later we made it to Hermiston!
Elder Cogswell is my new companion and he is freaking great.
I can tell we are gonna get along and have a blast in Herm Town. he's a really
good singer and I'm already learning some accompaniment for a song he's gonna
sing in sacrament! E. Cogswell was in Umatilla doing English and Spanish work
last transfer, and because the Stake got reorganized here the mission's areas
changed too. E. Cogswell left English work in Umatilla but still covered
Spanish and then we gained half of Hermiston for Spanish only. We're the first
missionaries in this new area so we are doubled-in and we have a completely
fresh start.
We live in an apartment with 2 other elders, E. Nordin and
E. Skinner. They are the English elders of one of the wards in Hermiston. I've
only lived with my companions up to this point and with 4 of us here it's a
party. We also have a nice kitchen! I haven't had a kitchen or even a sink in 5
months and it's super great. In our apartment, everyone is from Texas, except
for me... I've already heard about why Texas is the best state multiple times
haha :)
The first two days were mostly moving/setting up stuff.
Since we were new to this area and apartment we had to move beds and other
furniture into the new apartment. Problem was, we were also getting new
flooring in our bedroom so we had to do some crazy stuff to get 4 peoples stuff
and beds into one room so the floor was clear. It was kinda annoying not being
able to unpack for 2.5 days but it turned out alright. Thursday afternoon we
were able to start setting up the apartment and now we're all settled in.
We had 0 information about our area for the first 4 days so
we mostly just visited people tjay E. Cogswell already knew about and also all
the apartment setup stuff. I won't go into it but basically because of some
weird stuff with the app we use for keeping track of our area, 4 areas in the
mission ended up not having any info, but it's fixed now :)
It's really exciting to be in this area at this time because
they just announced that there will be a Spanish congregation soon in
Hermiston. Currently, the missionaries have to translate in the English
sacrament meeting, and it's pretty rough to live-translate a meeting.
We are pretty busy today, getting haircuts, cleaning,
sports, stuff like that.
Thats pretty much it for this week, we're going to go hard
this week and find some people to teach! I'm really excited about this
transfer, everything is different, but it's going well.
Love y'all!
- Elder Thompson
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