West Bank, Tracting, Gators/Crabbing

Hey everyone how’s life?

Things are going well over here in the West Bank. It is for sure the blessed bank, just looking at our meal calendar alone proves that. I am starting to see how missionaries in Utah feel, since here we cover more than one branch. We cover both Spanish and English work, so we have to go to both branch’s meetings and we get to get fed by both of them. I mean I guess it isn’t as intense as the Utah missions where they cover like 10 wards, but still. I’m loving it over here, the people are awesome, the district it awesome, and doing Spanish and English work is keeping us pretty busy, which I love! Haha one of the anti-perks of covering two wards is the fact that this Sunday when we came in, they had had one of their speakers cancel on them in both the Spanish and English ward; so that meant I had to come up with two talks on the spot to share since they thought choosing the new guy was a good idea.

This week has been the start of the building phase for this area. It had been closed down for around 3 weeks last transfer from missionaries going home a little early for school. But we are back at it, and we are tracting a ton. For the first few days here we didn’t have much success tracting. We would talk to people and they would either not be interested, or they would tell us to come back later. But eventually we found a super awesome trailer park full of Hispanics that let us in and teach a few of them. One was named N and he is pretty new from Honduras.  Apparently he had the missionaries visiting him down there, so it was pretty lucky for us to run into him again up here. We are planning on teaching him more and trying to bring him to church. We also met a man named I, he was pretty cool and we talked to him about the restoration and how it can help solve some of the problems in this world, and some of the questions people have. We had an awesome lesson with him, and by the end he was asking where the church was and told us he wanted to come and worship with us there.  That was super awesome! 

We also ran into a few Cajuns that were fun to talk to.  It was the first time Elder Hansen has met a true blooded Cajun, so it was a fun and new experience for him. 

This morning we had a fun time going and crabbing. For those of you who don’t know - you catch crabs by tying a chicken thigh to a rope, and dropping it into one of the bayous down here. You wait until you feel the crabs tugging on it and you pull them up. So we did that for 2.5 hours hours this morning and had a lot of success with it. We probably caught like 6 or 7 crabs each.  We even had a Cajun man come and give us some that he had caught, since he could obviously tell it was our first time crabbing. But one side effect of throwing chicken into the water is that it attracts other animals as well. Just like shark to chum, we had a few gators that started swimming  pretty close to the dock while we were crabbing. Some of us would distract them and try to scare them away, while the others were crabbing. And then at the end of the whole fiasco we had a guy come talk to us that had friends that are in the business of giving swamp tours down here; those guys will just play with gators during the tours and they will touch them and all that jazz. He grabbed one of the chickens and lured a gator in right to the dock and started feeding it. We were all so close to it we could have touched it (and I might have actually touched it...... don’t tell my mom! ) it was crazy!

But yeah that is what has been going on down here. I hope y’all have an awesome week!