Nyob zoo,
This week's email will be a little shorter because of a lack of time due to other things we have to do today which you will find about later in the email. :)
So this week we had a couple great days of finding. We finally got bikes and bus passes since we are in a car share with the other Hmong set. We are super excited for that since we have been waiting a while for that. Every other day we will be riding bikes and taking the bus which I am super excited about since I have always wanted to ride bikes. We got all the bikes fixed up, and the funny thing is, the first day we were super excited to finally have bikes and after only 1 hour, one of the tires popped already haha. So we've got to fix that.
Tuesday we went to Kelly and Shaun's farm and we helped them to prepare for planting. We used these super sweet knives and whacked the old flowers down and dug up the roots for planting next week - Super fun. I still remember helping Kelly plant the Tulips last year so it was really fun to help again this year.
On Wednesday we went to Mai's. We had dinner and painted pumpkins with her kids. It was really fun and I do have to say mine was pretty good. I am not very artistic, but I am pretty proud of what turned out. Afterward, we shared a message with her about Patriarchal blessings. She was very interested and is working on getting one. Pretty awesome!
On Thursday we had dinner with Kelly and Shaun. They both are doing awesome and that was really fun to talk with them.
Friday was one of the worst days of my mission. We were trying to go to the libraries to get access to the A-Z databases to look up Hmong address and then put the file into our Google maps on our phone so then we can find Hmong people more effectively. We decided to do that and we thought it would only take an hour or so, but it seemed like everything just went wrong. We went to 5 different libraries and by the time we found one that worked we were in a city called Oregon, Wisconsin which is a super small town in the middle of nowhere. I don't know why they had it there of all places, but they did. By the time that was all done it was 6. And we were both pretty mad because we felt like we wasted a whole day. I mean we did a little, but it was just a lot of bad luck. We went online and messaged the workers for the A-Z databases to find where the nearest library was that had access and every time they told us a place we would go and they wouldn't have it. It was a little frustrating. The 4th library told us they did have it so we were super excited and then we went and tried it and it happened to be that they actually didn't and he was confusing it with the other library they worked at, so that is why we drove all the way out to Oregon. We were able to get over 3000 Hmong addresses. So after, we went to eat at a barbecue place called Ziggy’s which was really good. We treated ourselves with ribs and brisket because we deserved it for that awful day. So now we had a full stomach and drove an hour back to our apartment and we find out that our Google maps on our phone doesn't even work so we can't even access it. We were so MAD!!! Stupid MaaS360 which prevents us from doing everything. What is the point of having a smartphone if we can't even use it? Hopefully, that will get fixed soon. Sorry, that was a long rage.
Also, another thing that was a bummer this week is that we found cockroaches in our apartment. So we spent 3 hours last night killing cockroaches and cleaning up. We assume they are coming from our neighbor's apartment through one of the cracks. So today we are gonna be continuing to clean our apartment really good and getting rid of food. We really don't have much food anymore since we found some in our fridge too, so we basically chucked everything because we thought it was gross. Better be safe than sorry.
This past week it seemed like everything was not going right. I swear we had the worst luck with everything, but we decided to be positive throughout all the situations. I mean I would never have had the opportunity of going to Oregon, Wisconsin. I would never have had the opportunity to make funny videos of us attempting to kill cockroaches, or getting scared like 3-year-old girls from the cockroaches. Overall it was a pretty frustrating week, but we chose to stay positive and happy, Well as much as we could haha.
Love,
Elder Rich
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| Painting pumpkins on Wednesday with Mai's girls |
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| Pretty proud of my pumpkin |
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| Elder Giddings, me, Elder Lo |
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| You can see the capitol in the background |
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| Helping at Kelly and Shaun's farm |
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| It was fun to be able to help them again this year |
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| More matching Hmong ties |
