August 24, 2020 Hello!! How are you all doing? I am doing pretty good! This week was really awesome because we had our first IN PERSON District Council, so I finally got to meet the people I have been leading for the last 4 months haha. It felt so great to be around real people! Also, as District Leader, I am supposed to go on exchanges with every elder in my district each transfer, but they were quarantined for the first 2 weeks, and then I was quarantined for the next 2 weeks. Now I am scramming to fit in all the exchanges before the end of the transfer! It's not that big of a burden, though, because exchanges are so much fun! I had 3 this past week, and 2 this upcoming week. Guys!!! Nazareth was supposed to get baptized yesterday, but HE GOT THE CORONA VIRUS!! Such bad timing! He sent us pictures of him in the hospital, and we are praying for him so much! Don't worry, I have never met him in person, so we know it wasn't our fault. Luckily, he said he is already improving...

August 17, 2020 What's up everyone! I hope you all had a great week! Our week was pretty interesting because we got really creative on how we approached finding new people to teach. A missionary in our mission suggested "singing finding", which is where you just call people and sing to them, and hopefully they feel the spirit enough to want to talk again sometime! We had our doubts, but we tried it because Elder Chavez is pretty good at singing. Surprisingly, we were able to find 7 new people by just singing to them! It worked really well! We decided to sing Christmas songs, like "Silent Night", and "The First Noel" just to spice it up a bit. We were shockingly surprised at how receptive people were! I guess online Christmas caroling in the middle of summer is an effective finding technique haha! For those of you who have seen the movie 17 Miracles, the actor who played Levi Savage is the uncle of one of the missionaries here, and he joined us in a Zoo...

August 10, 2020 What is up, gang! Elder Chavez and I received a reassigned missionary that used to serve in Mexico, Elder Fullmer. In 10 months of serving my mission, Elder Fullmer is my FIRST companion from Utah! He is awesome! It has been super cool learning about the similarities and differences between our mission and his old mission. It's not every day you get to serve with someone with COMPLETELY different experiences than we are having here. Its been fun! But, it has felt a bit stressful because I feel like I am basically training 2 missionaries at the same time haha, since Elder Fullmer doesn't know how to do missionary work online, and he forgot a lot of Spanish during his time at home. Because Elder Fullmer is new, we have to be in another really strict quarantine for 2 weeks. This past week has been really tough (mentally and physically) without fresh air or sunlight, not much exercise, and having 3 people in our small apartment. We have been going a little crazy, bu...

August 3, 2020 This week we got to have our first in-person lesson! It was my first one in almost 6 months, and it was the first one EVER for Elder Chavez! It went really well! We had to wear our masks, and the lady we were teaching sprayed my entire body with some sort of hand sanitizer before I could enter her house. That was fun. We weren't planning on eating with them (because I am pretty sure we aren't allowed to), but they ordered us pizza and chicken wings... so what were we supposed to do? Say no? We didn't want to be rude and reject the food that they bought specifically for us! So, we taught them about the Law of Chastity, told them they needed to repent, and then dined like kings. President Teuscher organized a bunch of mini testimony meetings over the weekend so that we could get together and share our spiritual experiences from being in self-isolation. We couldn't gather in large groups, so they organized a bunch of sessions with about 15 missionaries in ea...

July 27, 2020 Guess what! WE DID IT! The New York City Mission is no longer quarantined! FREEDOM! 19 weeks, or 130 days of pioneering a new method of missionary work all ended on... Pioneer Day! God is so funny. You could see the entire mission's jaw drop in unison when we heard the news over a zoom call, it was crazy. We still need to wear masks if we are within 6 feet of anyone, and we still can't knock doors or start up conversations with people on the street. But we can finally teach people in person, go on exchanges, and all that other normal missionary stuff we used to enjoy. Sadly, though we are authorized to teach in person, many people are hesitant to let us into their homes, so we still don't have many opportunities to leave the house haha. I think it will take some time for things to become completely normal again, and we will continue to use the internet for missionary work because it's honestly way more effective than getting doors slammed on us. This week ...

July 20, 2020 Hello everyone!!! This week honestly felt really slow. Not too much happened other than the transfer call on Saturday. I am staying here in Olmstead for 6 more weeks to finish training Elder Chavez, and I am continuing as District Leader. So, nothing new. But, all the missionaries that are staying in my district are becoming trainers!! So now the district is just full of people that don't know what they are doing, which is fun. I have a story I want to tell but it requires some background information. So, I haven't written much about this because I don't want to talk negatively, but for the purpose of the story I want to share, I have to preface with the fact that Elder Chavez is not... the best missionary. I won't go into detail, but his desire to be obedient is not very high, and I have been working so so so hard to try to whip him into shape. One thing he struggles with is Facebook. I noticed he has been checking up on what his friends from home are pos...