Adventures In Boardman

Hello One and All,

Well a big congrats to Whit and Cody and little baby boy. Looking at all the pictures I made a few observations: Cody's hair is getting pretty long, Mike seems to be getting a bit heavier (no offense, it's happening to me too), and the kids look great and sooo big.

It's been a pretty good week. This week's crazy act of service/priesthood use was burrying a dog, and then dedicating the grave. Fun times in a hick town. The young man in question seems to be coping fairly well at this point. The week itself was pretty productive and enjoyable. Our baptism did go through which was very exciting and now the rest of the family wants to be baptized so in another couple weeks we should be having another baptism. Hopefully I'll be around for it. But this being the last week of transfers anything is possible. The leading hypothesis is that I get transferred to where ever my last area will be, and that Hardy lives out the remainder of his days here in Boardman. Vamos a ver.

Friday night we got a call from a family in the ward who was having their 8 year old daughter Emily baptized on Saturday. Apparently Emily had asked for "the missionary that had been here before" to confirm her at the baptism. So I got to do that which was cool. She was the cutest little thing. Then that evening we had our own baptism that went awesomely, and afterwards we had a great discussion with the family at Mickey D's. The next day Maria (the girl who got baptized) did not have a ride to church because her mom had to work. So we rushed out to go get her about 5 minutes before the meeting started. We got back not too late and while I was scrambling trying to get the translating equipment passed out to everyone I realized it was awful quite in the chapel so I hurried and dashed up to the stand to give the opening prayer. Then afterwards I got to confirm Maria, so what started out a little crazy and hectic, ended very well. And now Maria is an official Mormon. Afterwards I got to translate for 2 hours straight and was left very drained for the duration of fast Sunday.

We also found a bunch of other people that we have started teaching so things are going pretty well for the work here in Boardman. I'm really excited for General Conference this next weekend. Always a good time. The sun staying out late these days is really weirding me out, a lot of the houses that up until now we've only visited in night time look like completely new houses.

Love,
Elder Richards

Hello One and All,

Well another week come and gone. Mom, I got the package, gracias. This last week’s service: Tear out a deck and start building from scratch. So far, so good. We got it out. We put in the new foundation, and this week we will probably finish it. Lots of manual labor that hopefully I can use in the future.

The week was good. We taught a ton of lessons. The best ones being with Kristyn and the Baker Family. Kristyn is realizing more and more that the choices she is making won't make her happy in the long run, her eyes are opening up a little bit. Then last night we taught the Baker Family at the Stake President's house. We taught them the Plan of Salvation, Dave (the father) is really starting to show some interest in this. At the start of the visits he was the most closed off and skeptical of what we were sharing, but now, and especially last night, you could really see the wheels turning in his head. The idea of eternal families seemed particularly important to him, that and how he'll one day have his leg back. Good good family.

We have Maria all lined up for her baptism this Saturday so we're pretty excited about that. Elder Hardy will baptize her, and I'll confirm her the next day. It should be way good, we have a pretty good program set up for it.

We went on exchanges this week, so I hosted the District Leader in our area. It went rather well, and we had a good time. Shared some laughs, shared some lessons, and he smiled and nodded a lot while I spoke to people in Spanish.

We also had a correctional lunch with the ZL's on Saturday. Nothing major, just to talk out a few things. In all actuality the correcting took up all of 2 minutes, and then after that they asked me to tell them the famous sting operation story from last transfer.

We also had a specialized training with President Greer that was way good. He had a role play in which he basically explained that he is giving up ...dollars in profits to be here for 3 years and how that is not what is important when compared to a testimony of the gospel. And I thought I was making a sacrifice. He also gave us a training on how important it is to be trusted,and how our lives will be infinitely better if we have the trust of everyone around us.

Well, hope everyone had a great week and that everything went well with Ben's baptism and Harrison's blessing. Don't be strangers; I'd like to hear from you.

Love,

Elder Richards

Hello, Anyone Out there?

Hello One and All,

Well another week come and gone. Mom, I got the package, gracias. This last weeks service: Tear out a deck and start building from scratch. So far so good. We got it out. We put in the new foundation, and this week we will probably finish it. Lot's of manual labor that hopefully I can use in the future.

The week was good. We taught a ton of lessons. One of our investigators is realizing more and more that the choices she is making won't make her happy in the long run, her eyes are opening up a little bit. Then last night we taught a Family at the Stake President's house. We taught them the Plan of Salvation, the father is really starting to show some interest in this. At the start of the visits he was the most closed off and skeptical of what we were sharing, but now, and especially last night, you could really see the wheels turning in his head. The idea of eternal families seemed particularly important to him. Good good family.

We have an investigor all lined up for her baptism this Saturday so we're pretty excited about that. Elder Hardy will baptize her, and I'll confirm her the next day. It should be way good, we have a pretty good program set up for it.

We went on exchanges this week, so I hosted the District Leader in our area. It went rather well, and we had a good time. Shared some laughs, shared some lessons, and he smiled and nodded a lot while I spoke to people in Spanish.

We also had a correctional lunch with the ZL's on Saturday. Nothing major, just to talk out a few things. In all actuality the correcting took up all of 2 minutes, and then after that they asked me to tell them the famous sting operation story from last transfer.

We also had a specialized training with President Greer that was way good. He gave us a training on how important it is to be trusted. And how our lives will be infinitely better if we have the trust of everyone around us.

Well, hope everyone had a great week and that everything went well with Ben's baptism and Harrison's blessing. Don't be strangers, I'd like to hear from you.

Love,

Elder Richards

Still Tetanus Free

Hello One and All,

This week was pretty good I suppose. Our district got changed up. Me and Hardy got kicked out of ours and switched out with another companionship to be in the other district in the Hermiston Stake. Not the end of the world I suppose, but still a shake up in my otherwise nice routine.

We gave service at a dog shelter. Not as fun as it sounds. We took out as many dogs on walks as we could, that part was alright. It was the dragging them out of bathroom stained cages and forcing them back in that was not so fun. But at the very least we got to run around playing with dogs for a little while.

Another day we were having dinner with the Bishop out in the sticks, so we decided to go early and find all the secluded houses we could and see if anyone had some potential. We found a woman who usually is at work, but fortunately enough had taken that day off, sort of a 1 in a 100 circumstance because otherwise we would have never found her or gone back to that house. We taught her and she invited us back to teach her whole family, so we will see how that goes tomorrow evening.

We've been looking up a lot of my former investigators from a year ago which has been interesting. Some of them are basically right where I left them in their lives, but others are more open and willing to listen, so hopefully we can get some success out of them.

We put Maria Romero on date. She's the oldest daughter (15) in the family. Her mom wants to get baptized, but needs more time to get ready. So we'll be having a baptism in about 2 weeks which will be awesome. After she accepted the invitation, we celebrated by getting facials. Her mom sells Mary Kay supplies, and has lots of samplers lying around. Also it was Hardy's 21st bday so we had some fun. So Inez (the mom) gave us instructions and guided us through a facial. It was cool I guess. My skin was very soft afterwords.

Saturday was a day of service for us. We spent the morning throwing out scrap metal for a family in the ward. I cut my leg on some old piping, but my jaw has yet to lock up, so I'm assuming I'm in the clear. After that we went and washed the Romero's car (on a side note we did a terrible job and will be rewashing it tomorrow) and they treated us to delicious papusas afterwards. (Mom and Dad, if yall end up coming out that's one thing that must be experienced, the papusa truck in boardman. I missed it this last year...) While we were eating, two sharp looking satelite salesmen knocked on the door. And like most door to door salesmen, they were mormons that recently completed their own missions. So we had fun chatting with them for a little while.

On sunday we helped teach the 7 year old primary class. It was all about how to be missionaries. They all had some good comments and contributions, and afterwords we got cupcakes, that was my favorite part. Translating makes me very tired and very hungry, so usually we go scrounging after church trying to find as much food as possible. After a few more visits we went and had a big lunch at the Corpus' house which is always fun. I spent my first Thanksgiving and Christmas with them.

But yeah it was a good week. There are some big and exciting things coming up. Lots of potential, and lots of service.

Love,

Elder Richards

A Lung Full of Insulation

Hello One and All,

I hope everyone is doing good. I was sorry to hear about little Harrison's health troubles, hopefully he's doing better. This last week has been really awesome. Last night we found out that we led the zone in lessons taught. In all reality that's not all that impressive, because I'm pretty sure the rest of the zone just had a low amount of lessons. No worries though.

I can't remember if I mentioned this last week. But as I did mention the cop that pulled me over got baptized with his whole family, but also another woman I tried to teach that turned us away is now baptized. She's a real nice, spunky older lady. It's a lot of fun visiting with her, and she did remember running off missionaries, just not me specifically.

We continue working with the Romero family, they weren't able to make it to church this week because of a wedding, but they really enjoyed it last week and want to keep moving forward, hopefully they will be able to get baptized together soon, I think they will. We found this really sharp kid Kristen last week, she's 16 and has a lot of experience with the church, she's currently attending seminary and she has a super solid testimony of everything. But she is currently in a very transitional time of her life and is trying to figure out who she wants to become. She's a good kid, and hopefully we can help her make some of these decisions. We also went and found an old investigator I taught a year ago, Susana, she remembered me, but not much of the doctrine, so we are starting from scratch with her. Another one of her kids has left home now and is going to school in Salt Lake City (go figure, she wouldn't talk to us before and now she's in mormon capital). Susana seems a little bit more ready now, so things should be good. I also have a small stack of other people that we need to try that I taught a year ago, but I'm a little hesitant because not all of them ended on good notes, maybe a year is long enough for them to move on...vamos a ver.

This week we helped a member family out with building their house. First we were insulating the roof. So for a little while I was manning the machine and filling it with shredded up newspaper fuzz which was then sprayed up a tube and into the crawl space in the roof. After a few minutes of that the member shouted down we need a skinny guy up here. That's my cue. So I climb up there and army crawl all around the place spraying down insulation. I had to put all my weight on the three or four cross beams that I could reach so as to not fall through the sheet rock. Interstingly enough, despite my assumption I've had all me life, sheet rock is actually quite flimsy. Maybe we should change it's name....anywho. So skinnyness aside, I still managed to get wedged into some tight places a few times, but I finally got down out of the roof. Thank goodness for my face mask, it was dusty up there! After that we cut and hung up sheet rock. I'm gaining some valuable life experience out here. Speaking of, I've heard that we will be helping out with some cows soon...it's Pasco all over again!

Our member Sister Hoffman has been in Spokane for the last week, so naturally we party every night. Now when I say party, don't worry, we're missionaries, things don't get too crazy for us.

On sunday I translated again, (I'm pretty sure this will be a weekly thing), and afterwards we spent some time with Eloisa which was good. She's has a lot of tough times in her life. After that we got a ride with Arrow Corpus (the younger brother of Hopper who took us to Fossil every week a year ago and is now in Japan on his mission) down to Hermiston area to teach a family in the Stake President's house. It went much smoother this time, I didn't have any nervousness which is a plus. We focused on my favorite thing to teach, the Doctrine of Christ. The two sons are pretty open, but their father still seems like he is waiting to unleash some crazy question or anti stuff. We will see what next week brings. At any rate the Stake President thanked us afterwards and seemed really pleased with how we had taught.

After that it was about 6ish and we were pretty famished from a long fast. Earlier in the day the High Priest Group Leader had invited us over for dinner. Which we were greatful for because our original dinner had cancelled. We got to his house and they had quite the party going, grankids running all over the place. Apparently every sunday they have all the family in the area over for dinner, and they prepared a bountious feast of steak and barbq chicken. It was delectable. Point of the story being that after dinner Bro. Garrett was so gracious to us for coming over. It's next to impossible to leave that house with out feeling good about yourself, they truly love the missionaries.

Well, that is enough for now, I hope everyone has a great week. I love yall and look forward to hearing from you.

Love,

Elder Richards

Back in Boardman

Hello One and All,

So first off, to answer mom and Joy's question, no I am not living in the house with the fleas. That was in Vancouver, and we moved out of that into an apartment. My current address is:

Elder Stephen Richards
P.O. Box 786
Irrigon, OR 97844

Any and all mail or treats are welcomed and appreciated. We live with Sister Hoffman, a nice widow I lived with a year ago. The bishop actually talked to us about housing on sunday, so we may be moving in the future. We will see.

The first week back was pretty cool I suppose. There are a few people we are teaching that have a lot of potential. The Ramero family is awesome, and they should be getting baptized in the next few weeks. There's a recent convert family the Tabonys. Brother Tabony and I had a fun run in the last time I was in town. He wrote me a ticket! So yeah, the cop that pulled me over a year ago is now a member. Crazy! I've seen a few other people I worked with, the ward was all pretty happy to see me and they all remembered me which was nice.

We ride bikes a lot. It's ok, backside pain aside. The only thing that is unpleasant about it is that there is some crazy hurricane force wind every day. Just blowing blowing blowing like crazy. It makes bike riding pretty difficult. But I am in 6 months to sexy, so I suppose all the exorcise will do me some good.

We had a 70 come visit us on saturday and do some training. It was Elder Carden, he gave a very good training and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was also a good opportunity to get to see some of the missionaries I have worked with before.

Elder Hardy and I continue to get along quite well, we teach a lot which is nice. With just a dash of tracting each day. I have a handful of people I taught that I want to go looking for to see if they're ready a year later.

On sunday I translated the first 2 hours of meetings which always leaves me pretty drained. In sacrament meeting several speakers called in sick, so the bishop called up a few members to bare there testimonies to fill the time. I was halfway through translating him calling me up before I realized that meant I had to go up and talk for a few minutes. Everyone was pretty happy to see me up there. Lots of smiling faces.

In short, Boardman is an area with a lot of good potential, and I am looking forward to the coming 5 weeks.

Love,

Elder Richards

Still Tetanus Free

Hello One and All,

This week was pretty good I suppose. Our district got changed up. Me and Hardy got kicked out of ours and switched out with another companionship to be in the other district in the Hermiston Stake. Not the end of the world I suppose, but still a shake up in my otherwise nice routine.

We gave service at a dog shelter. Not as fun as it sounds. We took out as many dogs on walks as we could, that part was alright. It was the dragging them out of bathroom stained cages and forcing them back in that was not so fun. But at the very least we got to run around playing with dogs for a little while.

Another day we were having dinner with the Bishop out in the sticks, so we decided to go early and find all the secluded houses we could and see if anyone had some potential. We found a woman who usually is at work, but fortunately enough had taken that day off, sort of a 1 in a 100 circumstance because otherwise we would have never found her or gone back to that house. We taught her and she invited us back to teach her whole family, so we will see how that goes tomorrow evening.

We've been looking up a lot of my former investigators from a year ago which has been interesting. Some of them are basically right where I left them in their lives, but others are more open and willing to listen, so hopefully we can get some success out of them.

We put Maria Romero on date. She's the oldest daughter (15) in the family. Her mom wants to get baptized, but needs more time to kick coffee. So we'll be having a baptism in about 2 weeks which will be awesome. After she accepted the invitation, we celebrated by getting facials. Her mom sells Mary Kay supplies, and has lots of samplers lying around. Also it was Hardy's 21st bday so we had some fun. So Inez (the mom) gave us instructions and guided us through a facial. It was cool I guess. My skin was very soft afterwards.

Saturday was a day of service for us. We spent the morning throwing out scrap metal for a family in the ward. I cut my leg on some old piping, but my jaw has yet to lock up, so I'm assuming I'm in the clear. After that we went and washed the Romero's car (on a side note we did a terrible job and will be rewashing it tomorrow) and they treated us to delicious papusas afterwards. (Mom and Dad, if yall end up coming out that's one thing that must be experienced, the papusa truck in Boardman. I missed it this last year...) While we were eating two sharp looking satellite salesman knocked on the door. And like most door to door salesmen, they were Mormons that recently completed their own missions. So we had fun chatting with them for a little while.

On Sunday we helped teach the 7 year old primary class. It was all about how to be missionaries. They all had some good comments and contributions, and afterwards we got cupcakes, that was my favorite part. Translating makes me very tired and very hungry, so usually we go scrounging after church trying to find as much food as possible. After a few more visits we went and had a big lunch at the Corpus' house which is always fun. I spent my first Thanksgiving and Christmas with them.

But yeah it was a good week. There are some big and exciting things coming up. Lots of potential and lots of service.

Love,

Elder Richards

A Lung Full Of Insulation

Hello One and All,

I hope everyone is doing good. I was sorry to hear about little Harrison's health troubles, hopefully he's doing better. This last week has been really awesome. Last night we found out that we led the zone in lessons taught. In all reality that's not all that impressive, because I'm pretty sure the rest of the zone just had a low amount of lessons. No worries though.

I can't remember if I mentioned this last week. But the cop that pulled me over got baptized with his whole family, but also another woman I tried to teach that turned us away is now baptized. She's a real nice, spunky older lady. It's a lot of fun visiting with her, and she did remember running off missionaries, just not me specifically.

We continue working with the Romero family, they weren't able to make it to church this week because of a wedding, but they really enjoyed it last week and want to keep moving forward, hopefully they will be able to get baptized together soon, I think they will. We found this really sharp kid Kristen last week, she's 16 and has a lot of experience with the church, she's currently attending seminary and she has a super solid testimony of everything. But she is currently in a very transitional time of her life and is trying to figure out who she wants to become. She's a good kid, and hopefully we can help her make some of these decisions. We also went and found an old investigator I taught a year ago, Susana, she remembered me, but not much of the doctrine, so we are starting from scratch with her. Another one of her kids has left home now and is going to school in Salt Lake City (go figure, she wouldn't talk to us before and now she's in Mormon capital). Susana seems a little bit more ready now, so things should be good. I also have a small stack of other people that we need to try that I taught a year ago, but I'm a little hesitant because not all of them ended on good notes, maybe a year is long enough for them to move on...vamos a ver.

This week we helped a member family out with building their house. First we were insulating the roof. So for a little while I was manning the machine and filling it with shredded up newspaper fuzz which was then sprayed up a tube and into the crawl space in the roof. After a few minutes of that the member shouted down we need a skinny guy up here. That's my cue. So I climb up there and army crawl all around the place spraying down insulation. I had to put all my weight on the three or four cross beams that I could reach so as to not fall through the sheet rock. Interestingly enough, despite my assumption I've had all my life, sheet rock is actually quite flimsy. Maybe we should change its name....anywho. So skinniness aside, I still managed to get wedged into some tight places a few times, but I finally got down out of the roof. Thank goodness for my face mask, it was dusty up there! After that we cut and hung up sheet rock. I'm gaining some valuable life experience out here. Speaking of, I've heard that we will be helping out with some cows soon...it's Pasco all over again!

Our member Sister Hoffman has been in Spokane for the last week, so naturally we party every night. Now when I say party, don't worry, we're missionaries, things don't get to crazy for us.

On Sunday I translated again, (I'm pretty sure this will be a weekly thing), and afterwards we spent some time with Eloisa which was good. She has a lot of tough times in her life, but a lot of it is her own doing. After that we got a ride with Arrow Corpus (the younger brother of Hopper who took us to Fossil every week a year ago and is now in Japan on his mission) down to Hermiston area to teach a family in the Stake President's house. It went much smoother this time, I didn't have any nervousness which is a plus. Last week I felt like the Stake Prez was evaluating me the whole time, and that the audience was a little hostile. But this time around was much smoother, we focused on my favorite thing to teach, the Doctrine of Christ. The two sons are pretty open, but their father still seems like he is waiting to unleash some crazy question or anti stuff. We will see what next week brings. At any rate the Stake President thanked us afterwards and seemed really pleased with how we had taught.

After that it was about 6ish and we were pretty famished from a long fast. Earlier in the day the High Priest Group Leader had invited us over for dinner. Which we were greatful for because our original dinner had cancelled. We got to his house and they had quite the party going, grandkids running all over the place. Apparently every Sunday they have all the family in the area over for dinner, and they prepared a bounteous feast of steak and barbq chicken. It was delectable. Point of the story being that after dinner Bro. Garrett was so gracious to us for coming over. It's next to impossible to leave that house without feeling good about yourself, they truly love the missionaries.

Well, that is enough for now; I hope everyone has a great week. I love yall and look forward to hearing from you.

Love,

Elder Richards