Emergency Transfer..? - Mission Week 31

Buenos días hermanos y hermanas... como estanques? So some stuff has happened since last P-day...

Monday night after Pday was over we were all getting settled down. People who were getting transfered were packing and I was just chilling. Then we get a call from President and he asked to talk with me. I stepped outside and we had a mini interview thing and he asked me to serve as a technology assistant. I told him I would and he said that meant that I would be transferred to Pasco the coming Wednesday. 

It was pretty crazy because no one in the mission knew, since it was after transfers and no one expected me to be called since I'm so 'young' in the mission. It was crazy for me too because the whole day I was expecting to be in Hermiston for another 6 weeks! So.... yah I'm in Pasco now! My companion is Elder Ward and we cover the most southern part of the city, right up to the river. 

Sooo technology assistant or 'Tech Elder' is a leadership assignment like District Leader or Zone Leader or AP. We are kind of like assistants in the sense that we can go anywhere in the mission and we don't really have a mile limit on our car. We are presidents eyes and ears when it comes to cell phones in the mission. Since we all have smart phones we are in charge of making sure everyone's stuff is working and that they are being obedient with them. It's kinda a weird calling because we do a little bit of everything. Anyone in the mission calls us if they have questions about technology, including office missionaries and President. Funny story I actually had this assignment in the MTC but we didn't have anything to... do in the MTC... not even the branch president there knew what we were supposed to do. We have lots of responsibilities here though. Oh I also get my own Sim card which is cool. 

As you can imagine with this surprise calling and Emergency transfer my week was pretty crazy haha. 

First of all my Pday got moved to today because we went to the temple which was really good. President White showed up and that was a fun surprise so we go to go through the temple with him before he leaves at the end of the month. 

Back to last week tho... On Monday we said bye to the Fish-Mix family (some of E. Cogswells converts). Tuesday we had a bunch of lessons and said bye to a bunch of the people we were teaching. I got a lot of pics from this so I'll send those. We had one last English class to teach and afterwards we played soccer with everyone. It was suuuuper fun, I will miss all of them for sure. Then the rest of that day was just packing and cleaning. 

Wednesday was actual transfers but since mine was kinda a last minute thing they came down to pick me up later in the day. The last Tech Elder took my spot in Hermiston with Elder Webb and so me and Elder Ward headed back up to Tri-Cities. The new missionaries were arriving and Tech Elders have a presentation for all new missionaries so I was stuck right into the job! We did that and people said I did a good job so that's nice.

Thursday we spent most of the day fixing transfer stuff in the Church's system. We get to call whoever we need to in the mission so it was mostly just making a bunch of phone calls. We went out later that night and met a couple of the people we are teaching and we have some awesome people working towards baptism right now. Oh yeah it was my birthday too haha. I almost forgot we didn't have time to even eat until like 9:00. My family sent me an awesome package with a new tie that I love. I'm wearing it in the temple pictures I'll send :) Thanks fam. 

Friday we spent most of the day working on a new system we are building to speed up how missionaries report their numbers for the week. Saturday was a full, tiring day of missionary work. We helped a member move, his name is Jose and he is from Uruguay so it was fun to talk to someone who wasn't from Mexico or Guatemala. I love his accent, it's super awesome. He bought us tacos for lunch and the legends are true about Pasco's tacos.... soooo good. 

Pasco is the only place in the mission right now that has a full ward just for Spanish speakers! It's crazy cuz there are currently 12 missionaries in this one ward. They seem to be pretty excited about missionary work. Sunday was good overall even though we only got one person to come. 

Monday I forgot what we did... but Yesterday was a craaazy day. One of the main things we do in this assignment is drive around the mission and randomly show up at meetings and 'audit' peoples phones. We just go through all the apps to make sure nothing bad is going on. We'll yesterday we made the trip to Walla Walla. It's really pretty over there, a little bit more green than in Tri Cities. We did the audits for about 18 missionaries and then afterwards we call President White and report what we found and if anybody needs to be corrected. On our way back tho we were on the highway in the middle of nowhere and our tire popped! We got the spare on, no problems, then had to drive the last 25 or so miles on a spare. Fun stuff. That was pretty much our afternoon cuz we had to sit at the Les Schwab for a few hours since we weren't close to our area and we hadn't eaten all day. 

Finally after we got a new tire (the other one got wrecked so they couldn't fix the other one) we had to rush home and get ready for a wedding. The Hermanas had some people who were getting married so they could get baptized and they wanted all the Missionaries to come. That was really cool go be at. 

Anyways... super long email. I'm still all out of wack since I was expecting to stay in Herm Town, but here were are haha. Maybe I will probably be here for a while since we get our new mission president and I still have a lot of my mission left so wish me luck! 

Los Amamos, 

Elder Thompson 

Fotos:
1. La familia Martinez 
2. Pasco 5th Missionaries 
3. La boda (wedding) 
4. Flat Tire fun 
5. More Flat tire fun 
6. The Fix-Mix Family 
7. Our friend Leanna 
8. Birthday cake the Elders made for me in Hermiston :) 
9. Ruby and the Tri-Pan 
10. Elder Ward and I post-temple (super sunny day) 
11. Sister Geronimo 
12. Apartment C6 Squad 
13. Hermiston SP2 Tri-Pan. És. Thompson, Webb, and Cogswell 

A Text From the Mission

A random text message I received from the mission with this picture and note:

"Sharing a picture of having a good time with your son, hope you like it."

Híjole, muchísimos milagros! - Mission Week 30

Buenos diaaaas! ¿¡Como estais!?

This is gonna be a fat email....

Apparently no one sends emails home anymore...I'll still do it though, this is basically a journal since I'm so bad at writing in my real journal. 

This was a pretty awesome and eventful week! We started the week out with finding a new person. Sandra is from Guatemala and she speaks Spanish and Mam! Don't know if I have mentioned the language Mam yet but it's a dialect from Guatemala that we run into a lot. There's a ton of different dialects that we find because the language changes by the village they were born in. The dialects that I've run into so far are Mam, Quiché, Gangoval, and Mixteco! What's cool about these languages is that the Book of Mormon is actually translated into Mam and Quiche. What's not so cool about it is, most of these people don't know how to read or write Mam haha. But the point of all this was to tell you that Sandra does read and write in Spanish and in Mam so we had an awesome lesson with her and gave her two copies of the Book of Mormon in each of her languages! She is coming to our English classes super regularly as well.

Next in the week we did some service at a local thrift store, helping to sort through donations which was interesting haha. People around here have a hard time de-cluttering.

Another person we found this week was a mom named Ruby! She's going through some rough stuff right now but she has had a ton of miracles. The sister missionaries promised her that she would find her stolen purse within a week, and she did! We met her a few days after on 'accident' and found out she had recently lost her car keys. We promised her she would find them and she did! A few other miracles later that I can't share, she asked us for a blessing and as soon as we gave the blessing she said her headache left and so did her anger towards the world. We've met with her a few times and now she is preparing for baptism in a few weeks!

On Saturday of this last week I felt like our tri-panionship had kinda been slacking the last few days so I took it upon myself to make sure we had a solid, full day of work. Through street contacting and tracting we ended up finding 5 new people on that day and a few really solid potential people. We met our weekly goals and ended the week on a super great note!

I honestly can't believe that it's transfer time already, it feels like just a week ago I was leaving Basin City haha. President came and visited out apartment to give Elder Webb his Missionary debit card and to see how he had been re-adjusting to missionary life. While he was here he gave us a little sneak peak of transfers. He told us that E. Webb is staying here and either me or E. Cogswell is leaving. That could change of course but that is most likely what happens. As of right now we haven't got the call quite yet.

Quick funny story, a person in Basin City that I knew just got baptized and it blew my mind. The whole time I was there everyone though she was a member! She even told me that she was a member. The Hermanas there did some good investigating apparently and so she got baptized this last week. I'm still shook though because like 80 people though she was a member.

Our ward mission leader has a tradition of 'Pancakes and Puzzles' every transfer so that was pretty great. All you can eat pancakes and a stupid puzzle. We figured it out after a while but it was annoying haha. 

OK we usually find out about transfers by 9 or 10 but we just baaarely found out at lunchtime. Looks like E. Webb and I are staying and E. Cogswell is going to Walla Walla. Crazy stuff but I'm excited to be here for longer, things are starting to pick up and be exciting in Herm-Town! I'll miss E. Cogswell, he has probably been my favorite companion up to this point, it will be nice to have only 4 people in our apartment instead of five tho haha.  

I think that's it for this week and I actually have pictures this time :) E. Webb has a nice camera and so I'm stealing some of his pics

Los amo! 

-Elder Thompson

Washington Kennewick Mission

8202 W. Quinault Ave, Ste D

Kennewick, WA 99336

Fotos (Since I have So many It's making me do it as a Google Drive link thing...Hopefully it works)

1.   Most of our zone doing laundry in Umatilla
2. Pic of me
3. Silly Pic after a District Council
4. E. Webb wanted to take pictures
5. We spent forever making this map
6. Us after a day of work at the Church
7. x2
8. A baptism we went to for E. Cogswell in Umatilla
9. E. Cogswell Driving
10. E. Skinner teaching us about the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse 
11. E. Webb Asleep
12. Picture post-pancake puzzle palooza 
13. More District Pics
14. x2

Mission Instagram Pictures

The mission Instagram page had a couple pictures with Elder Thompson in them this week!

Borrachos y Tacos - Mission Week 29

Oye como le va?

I was so drained at the end of this week. I'll tell ya why in a sec haha. 

At the beginning of this week we had game night (not sure if I've mentioned this already) so we play board games with some recent converts cuz we have permission. We played this horror game thing that supposedly is different every time you play it.

Wednesday I had an exchange with E. Nordin our DL and it was pretty good. We tried to find some people and met a nice family or two. The rest of our time was finding and painting signs for English Classes. 

Thursday we were working on Umatilla and we felt like we should go visit a dude named Mario that comes to English Classes. We found his house and invited him to have a lesson with us after classes and he said he would! We had a super awesome Restoration lesson and put him on date to be Baptized! He's super cool and played soccer and basketball after with us. He destroyed us at soccer haha.

Saturday was a crazy day that made me tired. We got invited into this apartment for a taco and to chat and there were like 7 dudes in there. At first if was fun, we were kinda joking around with eachother and then eventually they got pretty drunk. We tried to talk about Gospel stuff but we had a hard time understanding them and apparently said some things that made them upset so we had to get out of there haha but it was just super draining. we all got out of there just beat tired from trying to understand borracho Spanish.

After that we stopped by one last person for the night and she talked at us for like an hour. Just vented all her personal struggles and relationship drama at us. Idk what it was but that just drained me too haha.

Mothers day was good! It was fun to have some set time to call home and we had a good chat! I was telling my mom how grateful I was that she taught me how to do basic life stuff. Happy (late) Mothers Day to all the Moms out there :)

Love y'all!

- Elder Thompson

The Three Amigos - Week 28

Buenos días!! Tuvimos una sorpresa esta semana..hay tres de nosotros ahora! Recibimos otro misionero el miércoles porque regresó a la misión después de algún tiempo en casa.

Good Morning! We had a surprise this week... there are three of us now! We got another missionary on Wednesday because he came back to the mission after some time home.

His name is E. Webb, and his story is that he was on the mission for about 3 months in 2016 then he has to go home to get his gallbladder out. Then after some time he came back to the mission for about 11 months in 2017. He got sick again and went home for about a year and a half and now he decided to come back again. Pretty crazy stuff. We got the call about it probably less than 3 hours before we were supposed to be in the Tri Cities to pick him up so it was a pretty crazy surprise haha. He's pretty cool and he has really good Spanish since he lived in Mexico for a few months while he was home. He is from Highland, UT and his parents own Rocky mountain chocolate factory and a few coldstones. 

OK, as for the rest of our week it went by really fast. We had a few lessons this week which was good. Met some really nice people and got a little bit of food :) 

We did some service this week too, mowing lawns and weeding for old people mostly. One of the lawns we mowed was for this old lady that was in the hospital for a little bit. While she was in the hospital, her granddaughter-in-law came to her house and sold all of her furniture and took a bunch of money from her house. Crazy stuff, she was such a nice lady too so we were mad when we heard that haha. 

Just yesterday we found this guy named Angel. He was super funny on the doorstep so we started messing with him and joking around. We ended up talking with him for more than an hour which was funny because he said he didn't have time haha. He taught us a bunch of Spanish sayings and new words that we could use. While we were talking, E. Cogswell dropped his plastic cup that used to have some water in it and this guys said, "Ohhh este muchacho está borracho de agua?" (Is this guy drunk from water? and we were dead laughing. There were quite a few times where we were rolling because of this dude. If he ever said something that we didn't understand he would say, "me entiendes Mendez o te explico Frederico" which is kinda like "You understand or do I have to explain" but it rhymes in Spanish. Good times :) 

Colorín, colorado, esta cuenta se ha terminado. 

We just got word that converts can go to the temple as soon as they are ready and worthy to get a temple reccomend! The work is progressing! 

We found out as well that we just got a $20 increase on our food budget so that's super nice too. 

Love y'all! Hope everyone is having a good spring. 

- E. Thompson