Back at HQ

Hello One and All,

So before I forget my new address is: 3030 west 4th avenue, i 206 (apt #) kennewick WA 99336. Also the mail box is 189, I don't know if that's important or not. And yes mom, I could read your little insert. Thankfully the mission has gotten me to the point where I'm virtually asleep with in seconds of lying down.

So, what is new. Well I'm in Kennewick now, and besides frigid mornings and evenings the weather is beautiful. We went to the temple this morning which was great. I learned a lot. One thing I did not know coming here was that the giant Spanish branch in Pasco split 2 weeks ago, and Elder Anderson and I are opening the area here. I'm a little baffled as to why I was chosen for a big important job like this, but hopefully all goes well. The branch is great, and everyone is super excited to help us out. Us and the 3 sisters cover it. The Branch President invited us to his office for a word and told us about how great the sisters are, but that he was so grateful to have elders to open up the new branch. We spent last week fasting a lot, but this week the branch answered the call of our stomachs so we are being taken care of again.

My new companion is Elder Anderson. He is awesome, and we've already gotten to be really good buddies. That's probably our biggest struggle right now, that it's so easy for us to get distracted cracking jokes or swapping stories. But we work well together and good things should be coming. He's from Tulsa Oklahoma, and was originally called to Mexico, but 4 months and several parasites later he came to the good ol' WKM. He's been out about 10 months all together. He came here from Toppenish (the Yakima area) the same time I came here. So we are both brand new here in the branch. Because we are the first missionaries in this area we are starting from scratch which means we do a lot of tracting and searching. It's already yielded some fantastic results and we should have some baptisms coming up real soon.

We are living in the Sisters' old apartment and they were moved to a small mansion in the area. All five of us cover the city of kennewick, so we work with them a lot to determine who teaches any given person. Those Sisters really cleaned out the apartment. Seriously, anything that wasn't bolted down was taken, including every last square of toilet paper. They were efficient. Our district is made up of us and the Sisters so there's five of us in the district. I'm still district leader and we do meetings in Spanish which is nice.

Yesterday we found two really good baptism potentials. Jorge we found while we were looking for his sister who we had helped bring in the groceries and were invited back. He told us how he almost got baptized a long time ago but moved to Mexico right before and disappeared. So we told him how we wanted to baptize him for real this time, and he was very responsive to it. We also found a part member family that we are going to try to get reactivated and baptized. This is a really good area and there is a lot of great potential.

Well, thanks for everything everyone. I love all of you and am seeing miracles here in the field. The church is true and God loves all of us.

Love,
Elder Richards