June 29, 2011

Family,
Ten fun facts about serving in Quincy:
1) Many nightly calls between missionaries are made for instructions on, "How to ship a turtle home".
2) I can eat one quart of ice cream in 5 minutes and 4 seconds.
3) When your less-active gets bored while you are teaching his wife, he could go buy 3 rats and feed them to the dogs.
4) If ever troubled with marital problems, take a fillet knife and cut out the tattoo that reminds you of that person out of your right peck. Then quickly call the home teachers.
5) Once you have been stitched up by your home teacher, put the said "tattoo" into a tanning solution in your kitchen to preserve it.
6) When 80 mph wind/storms create a danger for missionaries in your zone in the middle of the night, first, answer the phone, second, process the information, third, accept the fact that you are helpless to do anything and roll over back into bed.
7) When a tornado touches down at 1:30 in the morning, drive quickly and with purpose to the closest baptismal font.
8) Living the word of wisdom includes random missionary raids to confiscate all of the tea.
9) Days before your baptism, it is always best to shave your head into a mohawk and dye it pink.
10) DON'T EAT THE HOME MADE PIZZA!?!

This week has been really crazy, there is so much we have to do still. We need to get the baptism all put together still for this Saturday, have transfer planning, plan out our lesson we are teaching at church (it's a combined 3rd hour), and create a zone leader report. I think the 10 facts covered the craziness well. A couple of nights ago this whole area got hit by a huge storm. Over 20,000 people have been out of power for 24 to 72 hours. The library just got their Internet back up today. I think I heard 12 of the 13 substations were down throughout the city. There have been trees down everywhere. We went to the members' homes to help them with all of the damage. We cleaned out a flooded basement and helped remove a tree off of the Wilford's home. We went over to Sister Hufford's home and there are huge 3 foot in diameter trees snapped in half. Some of the city still doesn't have power today. It's been crazy. Our yard was pretty torn up, the next morning we were hanging out in the trees trying to pull out all of the broken branches. I have a few pictures. By the way, I am staying here for another transfer.

Roxanne- I have a missionary assignment for you. There is a recent convert here named E. She is going to be moving to Phoenix for school next month. She is going to start out at Paradise Valley Community College then going to ASU. She comes from a rough background and has been struggling recently with staying active in the church. She has no support from family, and the only thing that she has keeping her in the church is her friends. She needs a good friend to keep her on the straight and narrow. Could you send me your cell number so she has at least one person she knows down there? You might know more people that could fellowship her.

I LOVE YOU ALL -Elder Hale