July 29- Life in Providence!

Whats up everyone?!

Hope life is treating every one well! I sure know mine is! Being a missionary really is an incredible thing. You get to completely forget about yourself and just go serve, teach,and try to improve lives in any way you can. Its awesome. The ward here in Providence is great! I told you a little bit about it last week, but I ran out of time before I could say much. The ward is all hispanic and they all speak spanish (some speak English which is a relief since I'm not very good at expressing all of my ideas or feelings in Spanish yet, but I do try to only use Spanish with the Members... its cheating if I dont haha oh and I could understand a lot more of what was said during church this Sunday, which was a HUGE relief! My ears are finally able to distinguish where words start and end when the native spanish speakers are speaking. The Dominicans are still hard to understand because they don't say their S's!). The ward also LOVES the missionaries. They want to have the missionaries over as much as possible to feed them and visit. We have a HUGE dinner of rice, beans, and some type of meat almost every night... sometimes we have two. Its a really good thing we are on bikes otherwise I would be getting FAT. We ride anywhere from 10 - 20 miles per day and its real good exercise because there are hills EVERYWHERE. The great thing about hills is that when you ride up.... you eventually have to ride back down and then you just fly haha its great. One other bad thing about bikes: when it rains, you get really wet. This past week we got caught in the rain like 4 times! One time we were supposed to go to a members house for lunch, but they forgot and weren't home when we got there. Then it started to rain but we had no where to go because we were in the middle of a big neighborhood... so we hid under a tree. I bet it was a pretty pathetic/funny sight to see two guys in white shirts and ties hiding under a tree from the rain. We had a pretty good laugh about it! Another time it was raining and we had 30 min to get to an appointment so we got smart and wore rain jackets... too bad rain jackets don't cover pants. So we showed up at an investigators house with pants completely soaked... we knocked on the door and she says, "Wait I thought you guys were coming tomorrow." Apparently she called the number on her phone titled "the missionaries" to cancel the appointment because she knew we would have to ride on bikes through the rain, but the number she had in here phone was a different companionship. She told them to come to her house tomorrow and those missionaries were just like "uh, okay". hahaha so we rode in the rain for like 5 miles to get to a cancelled appointment, but it sure was fun!

Alright, so right now we are teaching the missionary lessons to 4 people and they are all awesome!
-A man named Andres in his late 50's who should be getting baptized this month! (he has been coming to church for 2 years! Pretty crazy huh?)
-A 15 year old named Fernando whos Dad got baptized recently! He really liked the kindness and friendship in the church, and that made him want to learn more. He is the nicest kid ever, and he looks like he is at least 18! He's a stud =]

-2 teenage girls named Tuti and Editza. My companion actually baptized their grandma when he was here like a year ago and they have a cousin who just got back from a spanish speaking mission in North Colorado. We were over at their house for dinner one night and they had tons of questions about life and we were just like "want us to come teach you?" and they were like "Sure!" Tuti is really funny and has MILLIONS of questions! Its entertaining and very fun to teach them

Also, this next week we are meeting a couple more people for the first time who are interested in learning more about the church, so that will be fun! I love meeting new people and just talking to them about our lives and theirs and its just great. Oh I just remembered something! Last week I told you 4 of us Elders played catch with a football across 3 lanes of traffic with 2 guys last week, Well one of them decided to hear the lessons from Elder Richardson and Elder Berthelson (two missionaries from AZ) and he decided to get baptized at the end of the month! Crazy right?

Well I think thats it for this week! I love you all so much and I'm so happy to be out on a mission right now! Its different than anything I have ever done before and its sweet. Oh my, address here in Providence for the next 3 months is:

Elder Jonathan Stones
60 Valley Street
Providence, RI 02909

But if you send it to the Email that I put on Facebook, it will get to me too! Love you all!!

Love,

Elder Stones

 

1. Rain!

2.After hiding under the tree, we eventually got smart and hid under a porch instead

3. The kitchen is off to the right. There is a lot more room back and to the left. Its a pretty sweet pad haha

4. This picture is a little dumb haha but this is where we were trying to hide before we got smart.