Down in the Arkansas

This upcoming week will be the start of a new transfer, and the Lord seeth fit to send me away. But just up the road to Benton, AR. Not Bentonville, AR where Walmart is headquartered, but Benton, a city just out of Little Rock. We helped move a member from Arkadelphia to Benton, so not everyone will be a stranger. My new companion is Elder Critchfield, a missionary that was in the Birmingham mission and got moved here with Tupelo. So I have never met him.  Interesting fact I learned from someone at church: Benton is the exact geographic center of Arkansas. Middle of my mission in the middle of Arkansas. I have loved my time in Arkadelphia. I loved the small town missionary work it offered. You see everyone you know at Walmart (the only time I have ever liked running into people I know at the store), and everyone knows each other, especially some of the members of the church. Almost without fail everyone in the town knows at least one member of the church. I liked being close...

Hope everyone's week was good! Ours was good. It's also the last full week of the transfer! Here's the scoop: School started up this week for the school districts in our area, which means I spent the full summer break here in Arkadelphia. And the universities will be starting their fall semesters this week, so the population of Arkadelphia has pretty close to doubled now, making the roads a little more packed, especially around Henderson, which is really close to our apartment.  We taught some cool lessons this week. We taught a mom and two of her children. It was really the first time I've taught a mother and children before, so we it was really neat. A very pleasant experience.  We also started (and stopped) teaching two brothers that we met completely separate of each other. They are part of the Buckley family. There are a few BIG families in Arkadelphia. Like where the parents had 10+ kids, and each of those kids had 10+ kids of their own. Not to mentio...

Hello everybody. The week has come and gone. The week had quite a few ups and downs. The people we are working with are going through tough times and we don't really know right now how to best help them. But we have also had some good lessons as well. We taught a pretty good Plan of Salvation lesson to the man from Cameroon we met last week, and he may make us some Cameroon food next week. He's way cool.  We had zone conference this week. It was really good. President Hansen's instruction was based on 2 Nephi 9 and we talked about priorities and guiding principles in our lives. I actually used that same topic in my talk I gave this week.  Also on Saturday with the Hope Elders we helped out at the Hope Watermelon Festival. Elder Hamblin and Andreasen helped out at the Camel Ride thing. Elder Rivera and I went between a few different tasks. It was a small fair primarily focused on different watermelon themed things. But there was also a car show. And camels. I gue...

It's already about halfway through the transfer. That's pretty wild. Anyways, things have been good down here. It's been drier, we've started to see sprinklers going for the first time. It's still hot and humid though.  It's been a fairly typical week. We had some lessons. One of our people is going through a rough time. We gave him a blessing. He felt pretty good afterwards. Definitely was thankful.  We did some service at a clothing store in downtown Arkadelphia. Its run by a woman from Jordan. She gave us some Jordanese food that day. Squash or grape leaves with rice and ground beef stuffed on the inside. They tasted good!  Speaking of squash, I had a lot this week. Two members fed us squash at meals this past week and a third a week before. I'm not saying that as a bad thing because squash are pretty good, it's just that before then I had almost none squash.  Also I had collard greens for the first time. They were also pretty good...