Elder Brandon Haws. From Chandler, Arizona. He went to Snow College for a semester before coming on his mission. He has been out for just under a year. His cousins are Tyler and TJ Haws (BYU basketball players). He gets bugged by people about that a lot. Well, by Mormons who know who they are. He also looks like a German Nazi. Mainly the boy from the Sound of Music that sings 16 going on 17. He had multiple drunk girls in downtown Buffalo tell him that's who he looked like. He also had a 16 year old drunk girl hitting on him. She got up real close to him and looked like she was just going to try and kiss him. Which from my point of view was the most hilarious thing I had ever seen. I was kind of hoping that she would try to pull a move so I could harass him about it for the next 5 weeks. Oh well. She ran off with her other drunk friends.
MLC was this week. We got to drive a brand new car back. 2015 Toyota Corolla. It was super sketchy to drive though because I was afraid to scratch a brand new car. But it was way too nice for missionaries to drive... But however they do it, they've found the way that is the least costly.
Lots of street contacting this week. But after looking at the final numbers this week, we gave out more than 500 cards. Our total number of "Contacts" were 530ish. With that we gave out easily over 20 Book of Mormons. Also got a few people's numbers. Sadly, pretty much all except 1 promising one are people that we have to refer to the Buffalo Elders because they are not YSA. However, if we were to count contacts by the definition that our mission counts them as then we would have had easily over 1,500 contacts. The average area gets about 30 a week. So that was super exciting to show that we were working hard.
However... About 350 of those 500 come from the Book of Mormon musical! Gotta love it. Some super fun stories. We only ended up going 3 nights. Mostly because of schedules and stuff. But also because of President. But technically downtown Buffalo is our area as well (We cover the whole stake) So.... We went down to join the efforts. It was super successful! The first night we actually met the owner and managers of Shae's Theater. Also, we definitely got our picture taken by a newspaper guy. So that might definitely be in the newspaper this Wednesday. We'll keep an eye out for it. They also invited us to the cast's after party. So we poked in and grabbed some food that they had. Briefly talked to the cast. They were super nice. Also super flaming. BUT nice. They asked us some questions and we got the opportunity to correct them on some of the doctrinal things. They actually for the most part were doctrinally accurate. They also were telling us that they have some lines that they improv. So we gave them some suggestions of things we say a lot. And.... THEY USED THEM!!!!! Matt, our investigator, went Saturday night and he said they said "Wow! What a blessing!" Which is one of our suggestions that they loved. It is kind of an inside joke because President says it all the time when he doesn't know what else to say to missionaries. So all of the missionaries say it. So I got a good kick out of the fact that I impacted the Book of Mormon musical. Let's see... Some other fun stories from the nights.... One gay guy told me I was cute. So that was cool. I had a couple people take pictures with me. One was a girl that looked my age that was super attractive so I wasn't complaining. We handed out a TON of Book of Mormons. Like over 120 EASILY between us and the Buffalo Elders. So that was super legit. It would have been more effective if more missionaries had been there like we had planned. But oh well, President realizes that now.
The managers were super nice to us. They would poke their head out the door 5 minutes before it ended and say "Guys, 5 minutes! Almost show time!" They were super okay with us proselyting outside as long as we were a certain distance from the doors (Mainly to keep foot traffic flow). They also brought us cookies one night.
Elder Crowley and Durfee had a rough week. Durfee lost his wallet one day. The next Elder Crowley's bike got stolen while we were at the musical proselyting. It was locked up and only 20ft away from us. But they cut it and grabbed it while we were distracted talking to people. Super rough.
Our missionary activity this week was Water Balloon volleyball. Super fun. No one out here seemed to know what that was. We didn't get much of a turnout. But I think it'll help set the stage to help people know that we are really going to step up our game for missionary activities so they can bring their friends to it.
This week we planned on doing marshmallow guns (PVC pipe) but with these stick note dart contraptions. However, that might be getting shut down because of some really confusing reasons. We were talking about it at Branch Council and they were kind of shutting us down. It's mostly because our Branch Mission Leader is borderline Less Active lately. And they are struggling with him but were taking it out on us. We just are confused on what budgets are allowed to spend on activities. Our mission leader knows that but hasn't said much on it. And we are just trying to make things happen because when we let them just do it all, it doesn't get done. Kind of been a struggle.
Two of our Recent Converts are really struggling. Gerald and Anthoney. They are both drinking heavily and not coming back to church. Just lots of Word of Wisdom problems. And the one is threatening to leave the church. So that is super discouraging.
We are just trying to do a lot of finding. Because everyone either moved or are dropping us.
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