9 months! August 16, 2010

hey fam,

How's it going guys? Sounds like the same old stuff back at home and that everybody is doing well! Wedensday we have changes which is kind of nice not being on a Monday now because it doesn't waste an entire P day. To tell you the truth I really have no idea what is going to happen... could be anything. Elder Brummond is going to for sure be training this next change so he is leaving, along with his companion elder Canaza. So BOTH the zone leaders will be leaving which is really rare. If I don't leave I will have at least 6 months in this area.... that´s a long tme! To tell you the truth I would be more or less fine with being here another changes just as long as I get a swich of companion. I dont know what is going to happen though, I´ve got a feeling things are going to stay the same way they are right now.

Other than that everything is going well here!! It was really cool yesterday in sacrament meeting my convert Miguel blessed the sacrament. It has been cool that he has progressed a lot and might possibly serve a mission. He is already 22 and would have to keep working at it but he could do it! Things are pretty good in the area, although I feel pretty burned out. I feel like i have knocked every door at least twice.. haha.

Wow that surprises me that Adam Jones in the office! You´ll have to let me know how that goes for him... everybody who is in the office here can´t wait to get out. Which reminds me, Elder Street is now in the office. But yeah keep me updated on him. That´s awesome that Shawn and Nate visted you guys.. miss those boys. Im so stoked that Shawn is going on a mission and SPANISH speaking. Although I hear spanish in the dominican is weird ha.

So thinkin about building a new deck eh? that would be sweet! Im sure josh would be down now that he´s going into high school, bringing over his teeny boppers for some hot tubbin haha. just kidding. (you know it´s true josh) But yeah the idea sounds good to me! Let me know if it happens or not.

Well if i stay here im hoping that I will at least get a different district. Man it´s so weird that so many people are going home this next change... it´s going to be weird for me. Some of my best buds will be gone! Time really does go by quick and when I look back to just a couple months ago. I can always see progress that I have made spiritually, with the language, and just regular life stuff. The mission is good stuff! Tough at times... but good. Well I love you all thanks for your love and support.

love nick

Almost 9 months! August 9, 2010

hey guys!

Well this week has been pretty busy. We had that training thing with president which was really cool. My president is a stud, terrifying.... but a stud. haha but while I was there to my surprise I saw Elder Dennis!! He isn´t a DL so I didn´t think that I would be seeing him but they invited him to come so I'm sure that means he´ll be going up this next change. It was way good to see him, we pretty much just hung out all three days. People came from all of the areas of this side of the country so there were about 24 elders all in my zone, so two other elders stayed in my tiny little house and went out to work with us in the nights. They were both way cool so it was a fun three days and nice to be with some people that I could actually talk to. But I learned a lot from the meeting and had a good time. We learned new ways of teaching that pretty much is competely different than anyone has ever done but i really like it and i think it will help the misson out a lot. I also got the package!!! thanks a ton i loved it! I´ve pretty much already read the book and that pillow is soooooo nice. As well as the food, good choice on the gold fish those tasted good! Other than that the week has been pretty good, nothing too exciting. One week until changes. Speaking of that, changes are now on wendsdays and not mondays just so you know. I´ll be able to write regular on monday. Yeah i wont lie im hoping i get changed, but I could very easily stay here. So I'm not getting my hopes up! Either way it´s all good, time is time haha.

So that guitar is sweeeeet! Man I have always wanted a 12 string I can not wait to play it when I get back. The office looks really good! Hey you should send me a picture of that ipad thing I really want to see it. Im glad everything is ok with Grandma R.. I bet that was scary! That´s awesome that grandpa k is actually gaining wait!! tell both sets of grandparents hi for me and tell grandpa reid that I have been getting his emails and I appreciate them. So why did Leesa have to have back surgery? that stinks... Leesa and staying down for two weeks... doesn´t go together haha. I totally didn´t realize that my birthday is coming up in while.... 20!! man that stinks... I dont want to leave behind the teenage years haha. Don´t worry about what to get me Im really fine with anything and there is nothing really that i need right now but if i think of something i will definitely let you guys know. I can´t believe nate naegle comes home in december! thats nuts.. went by way fast.

Well guys everything is good here and im pluggin along. A lot of my buddies here in the mission are going into their last change so that kind of stinks....I'll miss them. El Salvador is its regular crazy good old self. Still raining pretty regularly in the nights but hot in the day. Maybe I'll get lucky and get sent to a cool area next change! There is one area called Berlin that is sounding preetttty nice. Well love you all thanks for all your prayers and support, I couldn´t do it without them. have a good week!!

love nick

Two more baptisms! August 2, 2010

Elders and Sisters serving in San Migel

Ivette's baptism last week

Ivette's sister, Lorena's baptism (and another boy he didn't name)

The elders working on houses (see the two at the very bottom of the pic!)

Dear Fam,

Well this has been a pretty busy week for the both of us sounds like! Tuesday we went as a zone to do service in a really really cool place. The church is paying for quite a few houses to be built down here. This house is the worst house that i have seen while i have been down here, it was really sad. Well we had to carry down all the materials down a huge steep mountain with huge rocks and cross a river to get the place where the house is going to be built. We carried huuuge pillars of wood that were wet, which made them really really heavy, as well as a ton of cinder blocks. In all, it took about three and a half hours.. needsless to say i was absolutely dead the next day haha. And my shoulder scarred! But it was really cool and the place was super pretty. Im going to send a few pictures from there.

Also I had two baptisms Saturday! The little siser of the girl I baptized last week, and a kid whose family was inactive but we activated them and baptised there son. I went on divisions with Elder Brummond on thursday so he could do the interviews, so that was really fun! In the interview with Lorena, he was just chatting with her and i wasn´t sure if she was going to pass. So they entered after they were all done and the challenge of getting her dad to sign the papers was still there. He said that she doesn´t know what she is doing and is too young. Elder Brummond then said "ok lorena tell your parents what you told me". She then said, "when i was at Ivettes baptism, I prayed and asked God if this is the true church, and when I did God told me that it is and that I need to get baptised too." chills when up my spine! It was awesome because I told her to pray at her sisters baptism and ask heavenly father if it was the right thing for her to do, but I didn´t think she really would. I didn´t know that she had until that moment. So long story short she got baptised and it was one of the best baptismal services I've had. Me and Brummond sang "para siempre Dios esté con vos", or God be with you til we meet again. Needless to say everyone loved it haha.

Well this Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday President Perez is coming to do leader training with all the DLs and trainers from all the zones out here. Im pretty dang scared because there aren´t that many elders that are going to be there so we will be working really close to the President which makes me nervous haha. It will be good though im sure i will learn a lot. Well the package didn´t come at the multi zone... but the ZL's are going to San Salvador tomorrow so im hoping it´s there and they can bring it to me Wednesday! I was way bummed. So i´ll cross my fingers! Well other than that everything is going well here. Changes will be the 18th of August (same day i complete 9 months :) so we´ll see what happens there. I would like to leave but if i dont i at least want a change of companion haha this kid..... somethin different.

Alright well everything is fine here! im feeling pretty good so dont worry about that. I´ll let you know how the training thing goes and all of that.- im going to send a ton of pics!

love nick

Busy, Busy! Last letters of July 2010

Wow, it seems like just when I get caught up on Nick's blog we go out of town again! Sorry for the delay, hopefully none of you read this faithfully enough to even know the weekly letters have been missing ;) All my summer trips are finished, so I promise to keep it updated every week from here on out. :) Nick, I'm sure you don't read this but I MISS you!!!! Love your sis xoxo

July 19th

Dear Kauai family,

Well your guys´ week has sounded AWESOME! Gosh I can´t wait to go again when i get back. This sounds like one of the best years that you've had in Hawaii, I know im not there but in terms of stuff to do and good conditions and all of that kind of thing it sounds pretty dang good! haha that´s sweet that you guys saw Pierce Brosnon again, you should have taken a sneaky photo, I wanna see the old James Bond!!

Well i got that news letter thing it´s awesome!!!! tell Kaye thanks a ton. I'm going to have to print it off and read it later but it looks way awesome. Everything is going pretty good here. Some of my district can't right today because there work has been so bad... haha crazy huh. The president called them personally, but I think this week is going to be better for them. So this next week the president is coming to this side of the country to do training with all of the leaders of the zones including district leaders... I'm pretty nervous! Supposedly it is something that he is going to start doing every month, so we´ll see how that goes.

We had a good day yesterday we brought quite a few investigators to church and are working with a couple really, really good people so keep your fingers crossed. Well I dont have much time today but everything is going well it´s been raining quite a bit which is nice at night! I´ve been feeling fine, headaches pretty frequently but nothing I can´t deal with. Love you all thanks for all your love and support and enjoy Hawaii! Live it up for me!!!!!

July 26th

Hey fam! Well looks like you guys had a really sweet time in Hawaii. Thanks for the pictures I loved them! Before we know it all 7 of us will be there and I will retake my rightful place as master of the waves haha. Sounds like it is back to the busy life for all of you immediately! Good luck at the funeral, send kit my love and condolences. Mom I hope singing goes well, I love both of those songs I wish i could hear it! Also good luck with the doctor check up with Grandpa.......... I´ll be praying for him for sure. Haha it made me life thinking of Jim Hill at the viewing, and I did his impression right after that. "Well hey how ya doin!" and dadgummit HOW DO WE FIELD A BALL... from the ground UP! " haha good memories with that man.

Well everything is going well here. I actually had a baptism yesterday! it was really good. Her name is Ivette and she is 17. I have been working with her family since the first day I got here in San Miguel and I finally saw the fruits of it. I think it's my most spirtitual baptism yet. I´ll send you some pics! I think I will also send you a little voice clip if I have time. It rained super hard last night for about three hours, but other than that the weather hasn´t been too wild so I guess that storm missed us.

We have a multi zone meeting on Wednesday so hopefully I will get the package that you guys sent!!! I'm real excited. I don´t have changes until the 18th so I've still got a while. I have a feeling that I might stay here.. I dont know though. It would be kind of nice to have a new area and get to know other parts of the country. Just pray it´s not Soyapongo! That´s the most dangerous area, there is even a movie about it called "la vida loca".

Well yeah what else is goin on at home? Any cool happening in the world? How´s our boy Obama doing? People always ask me if I like him and I dont really know what to say I just tell them, yeah he´s really good! haha but I haven't even heard anything about him. Well sorry this is kind of short but im going to try and get those pics and voice clip sent off, so I´ll talk to you guys later love you all thanks for all of your prayers and support have a great week!

Nick

District Leader! July 5, 2010

mi querido familia,

well changes today.. everything is the same. I'm still with elder pelicó and still in my same area! its good though we´re working with some good people and I dont mind being with my companion so im happy. So just when Im getting in a comfort zone, in my area for a long time, and thinking that nothing as changed.. the Lord throws me with a curve ball like He often does. I've been made District Leader!! It´ll be pretty sweet, but I wont lie Im pretty scared. I´ll have to be doing baptismal interviews and give a district meeting every week, along with calling my district everynight and asking what they did, who they visited, blah blah blah. But I am excited for the challenge and it is a nice change of pace. So pray extra hard for me this week, I'm gonna need it. Elder Aiono had changes so he is gone... Im pretty bumbed about it. By far my best friend in the mission. But guess who is my new zone leader mom? Elder Brummond! haha funny huh. He´s a cool guy so Im excited to have him as my zone leader.

Well sounds like you all had a pretty sweet weeek! I actually was way bumbed not being able to celebrate the fourth of July.. it was pretty funny though me and Elder Aiono got a mini American flag, held it up in his room and said the pledge of aliegance haha. God bless the USA!! Man.. I can´t believe that you guys will be in Hawaii saturday... so jealous. I know you think it is bad to talk about and just makes me homesick, but don´t worry it really doesn´t that bad and I want you guys to keep me informed on what you do and send me plenty of pictures and all that good stuff. oh, and tons of video of course!!!

Thanks for all the updates about everything Brooke, I loved them. You'll be in charge of catching me up when i get back haha. ugh I want to keep writing but I can´t, I gotta go but love you and I´ll talk to you in HAWAII!!! Thanks for all your love and support.

love nick

Playing Catch-up! June 7th-28th

Don't worry, Nick has back-up!

Ana's baptism

Cleaning up the Bishop's house after the storm

Sorry its been awhile since I've posted any of Nick's letters. My Mom and I went on a trip to Paris and Rome, so I'm playing catch-up with Nick's letters. He has been hard at work, and is past the 7 month mark! He is having a little trouble with head-aches and stress, so any prayers you could send his way would be such a help! Thank you all for your love and support.

June 7th-

Well this week has been pretty good. The storm from last week absolutely destroyed a colony where my bishop lives, so on Tuesday our whole zone went and helped with the clean up. I feel bad for him, his family is living in the church right now unitl they can get there house cleaned up. The water went above my head in the storm, i´ll send you a picture of where the water mark is. So im working with a family right now named the Cruz family. They´re pretty awesome. they´re real young with two young daughters. We taught them one time but it was a real powerful lesson, and when we came back the first thing she said to me was, " so i prayed like you asked me too, and i don´t know if was just because i was thinking to myself i was going to feel this way before i prayed, but after i felt super super calm and peaceful.. what do you think that means".. so yeah it was awesome haha one of the more spiritual lessons i´ve had on my mission, it wasn´t a huge deal or anything but for some reason i was way moved. So hopefully they continue to progress and we can baptize them sometime in the near future!
Things are going fine with my companion, we don´t have much in common, but he´s nice and humble so it´s cool.

June 14th-

Well everthing is going pretty well here! Im going to be baptizing a women named Ana on Saturday!! Im not sure if i have already told you about her but she is 45, doesn´t have any family and just works for and lives with a different family. I found her about 3 weeks ago and told me that she was really lonely and sad. We started teaching her and as we kept coming back she said, "ever since you guys have been coming over I have just been so much more happy, and I know that you guys are sent from God because I can feel the difference from when you come and when you leave." She has also said, " I have had a lot of religions come to my house and none of them have been like yours, not even close! I know its true." So that was really cool. She kind of had a fear of baptism and first because she thought that you had to be absolutely perfect after your baptism and thought that she would be in trouble if she wasn´t able to go to church one Sunday or something, but we explained to her that isn´t the case at all. It was pretty cool we gave her a little object lesson with a bottle of water, cool aid, and bleach. We took the bottle of water and said this is what you are like when you are born, perfectly clean. When you get older you start to sin, gradually dirtying your soul (that sounds weird.. sounded better in spanish i promise haha) so then we would poor a little cool aid in until it was way red and asked do you a think a soul like this can live in the presence of God? We then said the bleach was baptism with authority through the atonement. We poured it in and the red magically went back to clear. She loved it! That´s when she accepted her baptism.
Well this Thursday President is doing "surprise interviews" in the actually houses of all the Elders... luckily my boy Aiono hooked me up with the info haha so we´ll be ready.. house spotless!

June 22nd

how´s it goin guys? Well I´m glad to hear Mom and Brooke made it back safe and sound. Sounds like an amazing trip that you´ll never forget. Those pictures are amazing! Maybe one day i´ll get to go there.. but as for now im content with my Salvadoreño homies haha. Well my week has been pretty good, a little stressful, but good. First off, I baptized Ana Matilde Sandoval Hernandez on Thursday. It was awesome! She was way happy and way excited to have friends in the church and to get going with all the relief society stuff haha funny huh. It´s funny that you guys were all worried Saturday, because it realy was one of the most stressful days of my mission. To make a long sotry short, we went to go visit ana to make sure she was going to go to church to be confirmed the next day, because as you know without the confirmation it means absolutely nothing. When we went there, the owner of the house said that she had quit working there all of the sudden, and went to visit her family in a place far away. Our phone isn´t working in our house right now, so i couldn´t call her or anything. So we ran out around literally for 2 and a half hours trying to find somebody to let us use their phone. All of the members we went to weren´t home or didn´t have minutes on their cells. We finally found one and when i called her, her cell phone was turned off!! I was freakin out. So I just left a lengthy message on her answering machine telling her how important it was that she was there on Sunday (i had already told her about 100 times), and just hoped for the best. Well we showed up on Sunday and she was already there ready to be confirmed looking at us like.. "do you really think i wouldn´t show up?" haha. So that was a relief.

Well as you guys already know we had a multi zone conference yesterday and Elder Clark (area 70 president of Central America) was there to speak. It was sooooo sweet! Powerful guy. Really funny too. He was crackin jokes the whole time and often the jokes were directed toward President Perez and his wife haha so of course all us missionaries loved that. He served his mission in Argentina so he talked for a total of 3 hours or so completely in spanish, and the man is around 60 years old so it was pretty impressive! We received a ton of good instruction. And I dont want to say the highlight of the meeting.. ok i´ll be honest it was definitely the highlight of the meeting, was getting the package you guys sent me!!! Soooo awesome. Thank you so much i loved every little thing that was in it. It was amazing to see your guys faces and all of the family. I loved all the videos from the family home evening with all of the Reids it was sooo good to see everyone! I enjoy listening to Nichole haha it was awesome that i could understand someone actually from my family speaking spanish. But yeah it made me super excited to talk with Dad and all of my buddies in spanish when i get home it´s gonna be sweet. Josh is looking way way old and Adam and Justin look older as well. Tell Grandma (both sides) thanks so much for the letters and money i really enjoyed their letters and that im glad they are feeling better. Tell the rest of the family thanks so much for the letters it was soo good to get them it´s comforting to know how many people support me.

First Tropical Storm- May 31, 2010

The River outside his house!

Miguel Rafael Parada Ayala's Baptism

Nick's cook and her family

Hey fam!!
Well this week has been a pretty crazy! As you guys heard, there has been a huge storm here, and that eruption in Guatemala. The eruption hasn´t affected us here, but everybody has been talking about it. My comp has been a little worried about his family, cause I guess he lives semi-close to that volcano, so hopefully everything is alright. So it had been raining pretty much all week long, but not way hard up until Friday. Saturday in the morning the president called my zone leaders and said that a big storm is heading this way and make sure all the missionaries have food in their houses. So we went and bought a bunch of emergency storm supplies (hence the chunk out of my card), and waited to see what was going to happen. Sunday morning I woke up to water dripping on my face from the ceiling! My whole house was pretty much drenched and it had been raining very hard all night long. I looked out into the street and it was literally a river up to about my knees!! My zone leader called me and told me that church had been canceled for everybody, and that we weren´t aloud outside for the whole day. So I spent all day inside bored out of my mind eating canned beans haha.

But other than that it wasn´t really a huge deal,everything is fine today and all the water is pretty much gone. It was so cool to see that much rain though, I never never seen anything like that in my entire life! What´s new about the volcano in Guatemala? I heard it was realllly big.

Well Saturday I had a baptism! His name is Miguel Rafael Parada Ayala and he is 22. We found him a while ago but he had some problems with his work and his girlfriend..so we couldn´t baptise him. But we kept working with him and he actually quit his job and dumped his girlfriend just so he could get baptised! It was so awesome. We have a few other really positive people that I think should end up getting baptised in the next few weeks.
Well Mom and Brooke are you ready to leave?! I still can´t believe you are going to Europe... that´ll be so much fun. I expect plenty of pictures! So you are going to be gone what like 11 days or so? Mom have you been brushing up on your French?

So hopefully I get that package pretty soon because I can´t wait to see all those videos of Reese!!! And all the other good stuff that´s in there. Hey you guys haven´t got the card i sent yet right? hopefully that gets there....
Well Im kind of short on time today but love you all Mom and Brooke be safe on your trip!! Hopefully I get to hear from you guys.
love nick