Hamilton: My third home.

Family!

I am writing you from a library here in the Hamilton/Fairfield area to tell you that I will staying here for another transfer!  That's right, here comes transfer 3 in the Hammy town.  And Elder Elbaba is staying too!  That means this will be our 5th transfer together!  Almost every Spanish missionary is staying in their areas this transfer.  Elder Taylor is going home, his last companion is leaving Dayton 2, and Elder Bradford is leaving Dayton 1.  And this transfer we're getting our first new Spanish missionary in over a year!  Everyone's super excited!

This week was a week of firsts.  I met my first real Cuban.  I met my first real Nicaraguan.  I ate my first pupusa.  I had my first apartment check in over a year. (passed with flying colors by the way...)  I also learned how to make Mexican cheesecake, had a birthday party for a 69 year-old Dominican lady, and got permission from a less active to call him over and over and over until he woke up and came to church.  We gave up when he still didn't answer after 20 or so calls.

I also met with a few less actives who were really suffering.  It was very difficult to see them in such stressful situations, but it helped impress upon me that our actions definitely have consequences.  Sometimes we can't see it until it happens, but choosing to not obey God's laws always brings misery.  We can always trust that we will be the most happy when we follow His commandments.

We had a really good sacrament meeting yesterday.  There was a mix up with the program, so there ended up being no speakers prepared, so Presidente Maya changed the theme of the meeting to missionary work and had the 4 Elders, our mission leader and a Priest who recently decided to serve a mission bear our testimonies about missionary work.  We also had a full house: 108 people in sacrament meeting!  It was packed!

I also had two really great experiences that impressed on me the importance of following the direction of priesthood keys.  In the stake that I'm serving in the stake president has asked the missionaries to teach a very specific lesson to all of the members about how to invite others to increase their faith in Christ by the Spirit.  The lesson is a little complex, and so we were a bit worried that some of our members wouldn't be able to grasp it very well.  But we decided to do what we were told and teach the lesson.  We taught it first to a less active Guatemalan man who hadn't been to church in over a year.  The Spirit was strong, and it caused him to really think about his goals for his family, and rekindled his desire to come to church.  We next taught it to a pair of Colombian sisters who are very active.  Partway through the lesson they thought of someone they could invite to the upcoming branch family home evening, and the rest of the lesson we just watched as they came up with idea after idea of things that they could do to help this person they wanted to invite.  These experiences helped me realize even more that those who have priesthood keys really do receive guidance from the Lord.  If we will pay attention to what our Bishops, Stake Presidents, and other leaders counsel us to do, we will be blessed, even if the things they tell us to do don't make sense to us at the time.

Well, that's about it!  Hope all is well out there!  Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Foote

Elder Foote and the Big Boy

Elder Foote and a Spanish Family

Mystical Hispanic Cures...

Family!

Really not too much to report this week.  I got pretty sick during the first part of the week.  I got over it pretty quick, but for most of the rest of the week I had no appetite.  That normally wouldn't be a huge problem, but we get fed by people pretty often, and most of them get offended if you don't eat at least two servings, so I had a constant feeling of being way too full for most of the week.  But I guess having too much to eat isn't the worst problem I could have...

In response to me being sick, I received a few mystical Hispanic cures.  One was by a Pentecostal man we're teaching who believes he has a mighty gift of healing.  He got me a shot glass, poured in some apple cider vinegar, mixed in some water, then had me drink it.  Then he pushed on my stomach and told the sickness to leave...  Another family gave me four teaspoons of olive oil to drink.  I also got some super thick Dominican cough syrup even though I didn't have a cough...

We made empanadas with some members this week, I'll send you some pictures.

Other than that it was a pretty average week.  One of our investigators believes the church is true, and he wants to be baptized, but he just can't give up smoking.  We've tried everything, but he just hasn't been able to give it up.  Well he finally started coming back to church last week, and yesterday during priesthood we all introduced ourselves and he said "My name's Jose, I'm Dominican, I'm coming to the church because I know it's true, and hopefully soon I'll be baptized."!  Yeah Jose!  So we're working with him on that.

Hope everything keeps going well out there!

Love,

Elder Foote  

Elder Foote and the Missionaries at Church

Elder Foote

Empanadas

My New Dominican Haircut

Family,

This week was a really good one!  I'll put a few things that don't need much explanation down in a list:

·  I ate a lot more tamales.  I was sick of them, but the ones I ate this week were good, so it was alright.

·  I played hot potato with a member family during a family home evening, and when you got stuck with the potato (se quemo!), you had to answer a random gospel question.  The questions they had to answer were things like: "Who is the prophet today?" and "Who came to see Jesus when he was born?", while the questions I got were: "When was the Kirtland temple built?" and "Quote a scripture (in Spanish) from memory from the book of Acts."  (which really isn't even a question...)  But it was fun.

·  Elder Elbaba and I won a street-soccer tournament in a trailer park.  Pretty good 20 minute finding opportunity.

·  While we were teaching a lesson, a random wild street-cat ran into the house.  The parents watched it run in, looked at each other, then just turned their attention back to us and acted like it didn't even happen.  So we kept on teaching, and right before we were about to leave their little boy saw the cat a started crying and freaking out.  So we left the house in chaos with a rabid (I don't actually know if it was rabid or not) street-cat running all over the place and a little boy screaming at the top of his lungs for his parents to get it out.  And the parents were still sitting there like nothing happened.

·  It rained super hard, and a lake appeared in the parking lot of the apartment complex of one of our members.  The mini-lake was so deep that it covered the engine of a car and the owner of the car couldn't start it.  So we helped get it out.  

I ended up explaining a little bit more with each of those than I planned on.

This week we focused really heavily on getting people to church.  By Saturday night we had 8 people committed to come the next morning.  Everything fell through Sunday morning, and only 1 of them ended up coming.  It was probably the hardest I've worked to get people to church, and it almost all fell apart.  We were super disappointed.  After church we had nothing set up, and we were pretty discouraged, but we decided to just go out anyways and keep working.  We tried a lot of people, and caught no one at home.  We tried one potential, and he was about to leave, but he invited us in to talk to his parents.  We started talking with them and found out that they had met with missionaries before and that they had missed having them come by.  We talked to them about the Holy Ghost and how it feels, and the Dad told us that since the moment we had set foot in his house he had been able to feel the feelings we described.  He told us that the message we shared was exactly what him and his family needed right now and that we had come at the perfect time.  It was a very spiritual experience.  I know that the Lord will help us.  Sometimes it seems like everything has fallen apart and that there's no hope, but He has promised us His help.  Sometimes He waits to help us so as to test our faith, but if we are willing to push on a little further and trust in His promises, the miracle will come.

I know that this is the work of the Lord.  I know it more every day.  I know it more every time I read in the Book of Mormon and feel the Spirit testify to me that it is true, that it is from God.  I'm so grateful for the opportunity I have to be a missionary and to share this message with those around me.

Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Foote

P.S.  I got a haircut this morning at a Dominican barbershop here in Hamilton.  It was the most professional haircut I've ever had.  It's a little shorter on the sides than I usually go, but the Dominican guy who did it just kind of went for it, so it is what it is...

Elder Foote's Dominican Haircut

Ohio, Cincinnati Missionaries From Eagle Mountain

Elder Foote and Elder Elbaba at Dinner

Mini Lake Caused by a Rain Storm

Elder Foote's New Years Package

Feliz Christmas y un Happy Año Nuevo

Family!

Just in case you were wondering what language I speak on my mission, the subject line to this email is a great example...

Well, this week was Christmas!  We got invited to eat at a ton of places.  I was more full on after the 24th than I think I've ever been in my whole life!  I also got super sick of tamales.  I had a ton of normal tamales as well as some Dominican tamales made out of yucca root and platano.  Between the 24th and the 25th I spent Christmas with people from: Mexico, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and the U.S.  

It was good to talk to you all on Christmas!  I enjoyed hearing about all of the crazy stuff going on in Eagle Mountain, and it was good to be able to share a little bit more about what's going on out here.

I'm trying to think of anything out of the ordinary to write, but really it was a pretty average week other than eating way too much and trying to develop some better relationships with the members.  I tried to take more pictures than usual this week, so I'll send a bunch to you.

Sorry this is shorter; time is once again pretty limited today.

Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Foote

Best Tamales He's Ever Eaten

Christmas Skype

Elder Foote's Christmas Stocking

Christmas Tamales

Elder Foote and Elder Elbaba and a Dominican Family

Christmas Crab

Elder Foote's Family Photo

Elder Foote's Fierce Family

Elder Foote, Elder Elbaba and Luz

The Elders at a Member Christmas Party

Christmas Pinata

Lots of Rice For Christmas

Back to Dayton and Meet the Mormons

Family!

Preparation day is a bit shorter today because of Christmas later on in the week, so this will probably be a little shorter than usual.  

As you already know, we had our mission Christmas conference this last week.  It was awesome!  They had a bunch of musical numbers, then we got to watch Meet the Mormons!  It was really good; the Candy Bomber is awesome!  Great example of how the Lord can work through us if we follow impressions.

This week Elian's Mom (Yorleni) and younger brother (Aaron) got baptized!  And I got to go up to Dayton for the baptism!  It was really good to see all my friends up there and be able to see the baptism!  After she was baptized, Yorleni gave a very powerful testimony.  She said she wasn't baptized out of a sense of debt towards the missionaries or the church for what they'd done for her and her family, but she was baptized because she had read the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants (!!!!!), and she knew that the church was true.  She said "I know Jesus Christ is my Savior, I know that God loves me, and I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God who was called to translate and bring forth the Book of Mormon..."  The Spirit was there very strong.  I definitely expect this family to be sealed someday and to be a rock-solid family in the Dayton Spanish branch.

I'm excited to talk to you all this week!  It'll be on Skype, and I'll probably be on between 12 and 2 your time.  See you then!

Love,

Elder Foote  

Baptism in Dayton, Ohio 

Elder Foote's Christmas Packages

Elder Foote and his good friend Raul

Elder Foote at Church

Elder Wells, Elder Foote and Elder Garcia

Elder Foote, Elder Prach and Elder Elbaba

President and Sister Porter

Keeping The Sabbath Day Holy!

Family!

Another long, busy week.  I did a better job this week of keeping track of everything that happened, so I'll just go through the week chronologically and put down anything of importance.

First off, thanks for the package!  It was awesome!  Our apartment is now super festive thanks to that tree!  And I did get the other one from the Keller's yesterday.  Thanks!

We helped a member finish painting their gazebo this week.  It's been an ongoing project for awhile now, so we decided that it was time to finish it up once and for all, even though it was only 40 degrees outside...  Afterwards he took us out to eat at a really good Mexican restaurant where I ate my first ever chile relleno.  Another noteworthy thing I ate this week was a seafood soup that had whole crawdads in it.  You had to pick them out and shell them by hand as you were eating.  It was pretty good.

We found a lot of people this week.  One was a super intelligent Guatemalan man named Jairo.  He knew the bible better than most people I've met on my mission.  Usually when I teach I have to explain things very simply and assume that the people haven't ever heard anything about this stuff before, but with this guy I was able to be more straight up with what I said instead of only saying the bare minimum.  It was kind of weird to be honest.

This week almost everyone we tried to visit was sick.  We were really surprised; we'd never seen so many people sick at one time before.  I got sick as well, but luckily it passed in a few days.

A member told us a super cool story this week.  He used to work as a manager at Skyline.  He made pretty good money, he had a decent schedule, and he was the boss.  The only downsides were that he had to work Sundays, and the work environment wasn't very good.  After working in that job for awhile, he finally felt like he needed to quit and find a job that would allow him to have Sundays off.  So he quit his job and took a job doing maintenance in an apartment complex for a lot less money.  Over time however he was able to learn a lot, and he soon took over the management of the entire complex, as well as a few other complexes.  He now makes better money than he did before, he has better hours, he doesn't have to work on Sundays, and he has a very relaxed work environment.  He was definitely blessed as he took a leap of faith and did all he could to obey the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy.  Mosiah 2:41.

We went to try a former investigator in an old trailer park, and it turns out the trailer where they used to live didn't exist anymore.  We started to leave and were stopped by a lady wanting to talk to us.  She said that she had met with the sisters before, but that her husband never had because he was Hispanic.  We told her we spoke Spanish, she gave us her info, and now we have a new person to contact.  I felt like we were definitely led to be in that place at that time.

I tried White Castle for the first time!  70 cent sliders!

That's about all for this week!  Have a good week!

Love,

Elder Foote   

First White Castle

Second White Castle

Third White Castle

Elder Foote's Christmas Tree

Parking For Elders?

Elder Foote's Christmas Package

Christmas Decorations

There's no place like Hamilton for the Holidays....

My Family!

First off, transfers are in, and I'll be in Hamilton for the holidays!  Elder Elbaba is staying as well, this will be our 4th transfer together.

We had a pretty good week this week.  We've been sharing the gift with everyone (christmas.mormon.org or navidad.mormon.org). If you haven't seen the video or shared it yet, now is the time!

We've been focusing a lot on some of our investigators that are very close to baptism, they just need to get married!  It's a super complicated thing to do with them not being legal and all.  They have to go to a different state where the marriage laws are less strict, they have to have a passport.  One of the couples we've been dealing with doesn't have any documents at all, so in order to get a passport they need some documents from Mexico, but they can't go back there, so yeah... super complicated.  My mission has taught me quite a bit about immigration law.

We've been doing a lot of service for a less active lady recently.  She used to not let the missionaries in or even really talk to them, but in the last two weeks or so we've developed a pretty good relationship with her.  We helped her translate today when she took her kid to the doctor, and we also ordered a prescription for her over the phone.  We're going to try and help her get back into church.  Also, another less-active has started coming again.  We visited her a few times, then all of the sudden after over 8 months of not coming, she started coming!  She's now come two weeks in a row, and she bore her testimony yesterday about how she's had a change of heart and has decided to make an effort to come every week from now on!  Go less-actives!

I spent some more time with Dominicans this week.  I can understand them a little bit better now, but it's still a work in progress.  I ate tostones with them, which is basically fried plantain.  It was pretty good.  I also ate a type of meat I've never eaten before with a Mexican family.  I won't say what it was, but I'll include a picture...

Really there's not too much else to put down.  We've been super busy, which is really nice, because the worst times are when you have nothing to do.

The lights look super good!  Hope all is going well with you all at home.  Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Foote  

Elder Foote and Elder Elbaba at Church

Elder Foote and a Hispanic Couple

Elder Foote's Holiday Mug

Elder Foote

Elder Taylor, Foote and Elbaba at their Zone Conference

Mystery Meat

Pasqual and I

The Familia Zamora