Feeling Transient

Zone Training Conference - #PlanB

This week has been pretty crazy! For starters, it's been HOT! I'm pretty sure that the daily high hasn't been below 110 all week! And the daily low has been in the 90's! Suffice it to say, it's definitely summer in Vegas again. But the heat doesn't stop the missionaries in the Nevada Las Vegas mission! Some of you have asked me if there are any guidelines on when our mission president says it's too hot to go out and work. After asking around, basically what I've heard is there's not really a set temperature. The guideline is basically that if one of you starts to get lightheaded or dizzy, you're supposed to take a 1/2 hour break, drink a lot of water, and then get back at it. Luckily though, the heat does seem like it's going to let up this week, and the daily high's will almost all be below 110. Which (it's kind of sad that this is now true for me) isn't that bad!

So, I don't know if I mentioned this last week, but a large majority of one of our wards is made up of students who attend a medical school located within our ward boundaries. This means that a large percentage of the people in our ward are young married couples who have a kid who is under 2 years old. This has definitely been kind of weird for me, haha. It's really bizarre to see so many people who are pretty much where I'll be in the not too distant future. It has done one thing for me though! It's made me really excited for when I get home. Not for the reason you're thinking though, haha. I'm just really excited for the chance I'll have to serve in a calling back home and really do everything I can in it. I meet so many people who are such great members of the church and really magnify their callings, that it makes me excited to do the same when I get home. I also think that a part of it is I feel really transient right now. Especially after making so many close relationships in Dolan and then being uprooted. I see all of the people in the ward who have such close relationships with each other and it's hard to think that I won't really have the permanency that allows relationships like that with other people for quite a while.  Pretty much everything just comes and goes every couple of months for now!
Elder Leakehe & Elder Excell -- Looking cool, feeling hot!

Kind of a unique thing about the area I'm in right now, is that we cover two different wards that meet in two different buildings at the same time. Normally if you serve in two wards, you go to church twice on Sunday and go to both wards, but that's not really an option for us. So what we have to do is we go on splits with our ward mission leaders and we each go to a different ward. It's definitely weird!

Another crazy thing that happened this last week is that a young man in one of the wards we're covering passed away. It's been amazing to see how the ward really wrapped their arms around the family. He was 19, and although he was kind of sick, it was really unexpected. I happened to be in the ward of the family that had their son pass away yesterday, and it was an interesting experience. It was a very spiritual, love-filled, and personal sacrament meeting. Being so new to the ward, I almost felt kind of like a stranger intruding on an intimate family moment.

Elder Leakehe

Last night, Elder Leakehe randomly got really sick! We're still not positive what it was. He basically had kind of a fit where he couldn't see for a while and was shaking. We think it might be an ear infection he had before the mission resurfacing. He's ok now though! It ended pretty quickly, and then he just had a bad migraine. He was ordered onto bed rest by Sister Snow for the rest of the night, and after a lot of sleep, he felt much better. Anyways, as a result of us having to stay in last night, our apartment is now VERY clean, I'm all the way caught up on my journal, and I even had some time to knit!

Anyways, this has been a pretty scattered letter with lots of stuff in it, so hopefully it made sense! I love you all very much and hope that you're all doing well! Have a blessed week!

Elder Excell

Q&A - 06/27/16
1.) Next Monday is the 4th of July. Does this mean that your p-day will change to a different day or stay the same? --Still on the same day. I think there's going to be something happening, but I don't know what yet.

2.) Picture requests: apartment inside and out, picture of you and your companion together, and whatever else you want to send me!! :) --I'll try! 
3.) What is the best thing about your new area? --I'd have to say the thing I'm grateful for most often is that we're not on bikes! ;) 

4.) How far away from the mission office are you now? How often do you go there? --We're pretty close, but it's not in our zone, so we don't really ever go there.