Monday, February 11, 2013

Week 8 (2/4-2/11)


Barev barev from wonderful Glendale California!

where it has been mostly cold this week and we have actually woken up to ice on our cars most morning! And to think that people think this 50 degree weather is cold! what babies! I desperately miss snow but know it will be a while before I actually get to see it again. aside from pictures that is.

so anyways! this week has been a good one! so i'll get started on the highlights and whatnot. Last monday was a typical busy busy busy p-day. we had an awesome lesson with Hambarsoon that night and as you have probably guessed, he still isn't baptized but I straight up laid down our purpose with him and set him straight that he needs to put in the work. so hopefully he will have that conversion that we have been waiting to see in him.

Tuesday we met up with Mike and bridget which was strangely odd because we usually meet with them on Sundays because of Mike's busy work schedule. But in light of his uncle passing away the week before, and the funeral being on tuesday morning, we got to swing by and see how they were doing. It was acutally really good becuase he was asking a bunch of questions about where his uncle was and we gave a brief overview of the plan of salvation and told him more answers could be found in the scriptures. more incentive for him to read because he hasn't been too good at it. we met up with Minas and were stressing about finding another male to go with us to our dinner appointment that night with a member of the glendale first ward and one of her neighbors. Turned out that we had Elder Twelves come with us and Elder Crumrine went on an exchange with Brother Bradley for the time being. Long story short, the dinner was awesome. We had our recent convert, Christine from lebenon, come with us and she was a big help. the neighbor was Shakeh and she had a really hard life with losing her daughter in a car accident and her other son to colon cancer a few years ago. she was looking for a way to get out of the depression she was in and she really saw it in our lesson. it was awesome. we set up a return appointment to come back this next week to talk more about our lesson.

Wednesday was a really long one. most of our afternoon kind of was thrown off because our studies went long and decided to walk around our neighborhood which ended up taking about an hour and a half just talking to people! seriously forget I'm in california. so many Armenians to just run into. and when we start talking to one, one other person notices we are speaking armenian and want to talk to us to. we enentually made our way over to a potential and found out it was only his grandmother who spoke armenian but she invited us over to help the grandson find a job! but he was interested and we taught him the first lesson and he accepted a soft baptismal commitment to be baptized when he knows it is true. It was awesome. Then we had to race to meet with Hambarsoon at his house and let him know that we couldn't drive him to dinner like he thought we could. but he was understanding so he gave us money to go buy food and bring it back. so we did but it took so long to make that we had to rush through eating to make it to our bible study class. so we were only a few minutes late to find Minas and Anoush already there but Anoush felt sick so she went home so it just ended up being Minas. And he wanted us to just teach him English. so we did and it was fun. we taught him how to say "I am THE Man". and after all that we had to run over to Henry's house to give him and his wife Lacey a blessing. crazy day.

next day, Thursday, we had zone training and found out that our mission president made it a new rule that we can ONLY LISTEN TO HYMNS. Which is a bummer. but just for anyone who was going to send me CD's (Kiel), only hymns... but the rest of the day was just trying to contact potentials, rescheduling, dinner with the bradley's and going to a lesson with teh other Armenian Elders.

Friday morning we got invited to go to breakfast at Henry's mom's house who speaks a little english but mostly arabic and we got to learn some cool words like 'delicious' and 'i farted'. fun stuff! I guess there are very specific words to describe farts in arabic. really funny. but i found out that Henry is basically a rockstar. legitamitely he is. he put out cd's, went on tour, plays shows. everything! his name is Henry Ammar. go check him out and that is my ward mission leader! That night I went on an exchange with Elder Twelves for the day. He is from Seattle, went to UW before the mish. pretty cool guy. a little socially awkward but it's just elder twelves! but we visited with some members Haikus and Mariam, and Haik whose dad is Martin who we met a few weeks back but he I guess went to Armenian for a month with his wife so we taught Haik and he said we could come back and teach him every week.

Saturday morning we woke up and decided to play basketball at the court by our pad. twelves didn't have shoes and it was freezing but a good time. we lost :/ it was kind of a crazy day. I had to go and try twice to pass of Anthony the english guy with the armenian grandma to some other elders. but he ended up not being home all day so that was a dud. we then had to switch back twice and elder twelves and I taught this potential (who is now an investigator :) ) Edmond who is a very smart guy and knows his religion but is interested in the BOM. so we taught him and answered questions but had to hurry to teach Hratch and Armen our members another quick lesson on Missionary work so they will let us teach their family but they still won't let us for some reason... dumb. but after the lesson we stopped by our fav. armenian market to eat before we switched back to be with elder Dicus. it was a good split. but the rest of the night we didn't have much success becasue no one likes to meet at 8 :/

Sunday before church we had some waffles with the ZL's upstairs and then had a pretty non-stressful church meetings! it was odd actually! Hambarsoon showed up in a shirt and tie which was awesome but Mike and Bridget didn't show. 12's gave a talk in sacrament and then the rest of the day we met up with Minas becasue he was sick too, met some cops parked at our church building and talked to them for a bit about fun stuff they had seen this past week, including some guy that we know who is schizophrenic. met up with Samvel and Hambarsoon 2 with his family for a bit before we had to go home. Overall, a really good week! I love you all and thanks for all your love from home. I'll update more next week! Happy Valentines Day!

Elder Tanner DeBry

No comments:

Post a Comment