First Letter from the Raleigh, NC Mission

We received our first e-mail from Elder Compton since his arriving in the mission field in Raleigh, North Carolina.

wow so a ton of stuff has happened this week so we'll see if I can pack it all into this email.

So like you already know my companion is elder thompson and we are in raleigh right now more of in the suburbs, but our area is pretty big (I guess it is kinda hard to judge size when It's my first area...but it seems pretty big.)  My companion is really nice I think we will get along real well. 

It's been really great so far, and there are more people that speak spanish out here then you would really think.  Whenever we contact someone we also ask them if they know of anyone else that would like to listen and specifically spanish speaking people, and they usually know somebody that we can go contact.   Also there is a broad range of nationalities, we've eaten dinner at about 6 houses now and the food has been similar, but usually different each time.  I have had several times the fried bannanas like you had made for us a couple times from your mission dad, which I was excited when I saw them.   also I was talking to an elder in our apartment and told him that you went to Venezuela for your mission and he wanted to know which part because he has some brothers and sisters down there.

As far as the spanish is going it's getting there...some of the lessons I can understand what's going on the whole time (usually during the restoration/plan of salvation)  but other times we've gotten into a lesson and I have no Idea what's going on.  There's such a broad range of accents so you always have to adjust to the accent talking to different people.  Dad I think you told me once that the first time that you went to an appt. on your mission you didn't understand everything but you did keep hearing greenie and you could tell that they were talking about you?...well I understand now...I'm pretty sure that happens to every new missionary.

So a really cool story...kinda funny...but  really cool.  On saturday night we had just talked to an investigator who dropped us so we were kinda dissapointed, not to mention that we hadn't eaten dinner yet and only had about half an hour to go back and eat dinner.  I saw some people out in their yard and thought we should go contact them.  So I asked elder thompson if he wanted to go contact them.   However realizing that if we contacted them we would probably miss dinner.   We went up and talked to them (one important piece of info is that they were cooking dinner on a barbaque at the time)  and after about two minutes into the conversation they asked us if we wanted to buy some food (kinda joking)  my companion said no because we didn't have money available to buy and food at the time (which was the truth...groceries are expensive here)  and so they offered to feed us dinner!  so we ate dinner and tought them the first lesson and got a return appt..  So I'm kinda excited to see how that goes, but it was pretty exciting expecially since we got a meal out of it.
 
So the weather out here is awesome, it's kinda rainy today but all the other days it has usually been sunny and comfortably warm.

So I havn't actually had a chance to ride my bike yet, I'm a little dissapointed about that.  But we get a car every other week so I should get to ride it this week.

He also said that church was all in Spanish and so he must be in an all Spanish ward.

New Address for Elder Compton!

Jeff left the MTC this morning! Please note his new address to the side.

He flew out of SLC this morning at 7:05. He was able to call home about 6:00 am and talk to the family for about 30 minutes before he had to catch his plane. Sharee came home Sunday evening and spent the night so that we could all be here when he called. We put him on speaker phone so that everyone could say a few words.

He said that he was in bed for only 4 hours last night. "In bed, " he said, did not mean that he was sleeping. He was pretty excited and so really hadn't slept. Before they could leave the MTC they had to clean their rooms. Since they left the MTC at 4:00 am, they had to get up around 3:00 am or so. He sounded a little tired but excited to be starting the next phase of his mission. The kids all took turns telling him what they had been doing and we all took turns asking him about his experiences. It was good to hear his voice!

Jeff to Leave the MTC on Monday

Jeff is set to leave the MTC this Monday March 22. He sent some things home this week and is worrying about making "weight" with his luggage so that he doesn't have to pay extra at the airport. There has been a big group of Jeff's friends and acquaintances from Salem and Spanish Fork at the MTC all at the same time. They apparently all got together for some pictures in front of the world map.



Jeff and his companion, Elder Taylor, have been serving as the Zone Leaders for their zone in the MTC for the last half of their stay. It sounds like being ZL has kept him really busy.


Also, in preparation for their departure to North Carolina, They received their travel plans this past

So we got our travel plans this week. We leave the mtc at 4 am and our first flight is at 7:05 then we have a layover from 12:45-1:45 and we get to nc at 3:39.

There are often some funny things that happen, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident by virtue of learning a new language and trying to express yourself.

Here's a story to let you know what happens to a group of missionaries after having been in the MTC for 2 Months...we start to go a little crazy. So on tues. our distric decided to have an Hermano swenson day (hno swenson is one of our teachers). He always wears a sweater to class and glasses so we all dressed up like him and with the sweater and glasses. and we all made sure to be sitting down with our suit coats off so that it would be obvious what we were doing. I was funny watching his reaction to this. And I know...were weird.

So Here's a funny spanish mistake from someone in my district. "cree en una vida despues de martes?"

The translation of the above Spanish is, "Do you believe in life after Tuesday?" I'm sure what they meant to say was, "Do you believe in life after death?" In Spanish death is "muerte" and Tuesday is "Martes", leading to the confusion.

Things seem to be going good. They have changed the e-mail system at the MTC and for some reason the enter and shift keys don't work so the e-mails that we get from Jeff have no capitalization and no paragraphs. I went through and added some capitalization and paragraphs but if you noticed some missing, that's why.

Two weeks ago Jeff sent home four short sleeve white shirts that were too long for him. We had bought "talls" but the tails went down to his knees. They were really long. He had already written his initials in the tags so we didn't thing that Mr Mac would take them back. We tried anyway and not only did they exchange them, but they delivered them to the MTC as well. I was impressed.

Here are some notes from Elder Compton.

This week has been good for me. I've been trying to speak in only Spanish except during comp. study and other places where it's more important to speak English than to learn Spanish. It's gone pretty well, although I haven't been able to talk quite as much as I'd like to have in Spanish. I ended up speaking enlish whenever i didn't know how to say something, but even still i was able to talk most of the day in Spanish. It was kinda weird though at night when i was sick of speaking Spanish I decided that I would just speak English for the rest of the night. So I told my comp this but the next sentence out of my mouth was Spanish...kinda crazy.

On Saturday we went to the RC and me and elder Taylor decided to try making Spanish calls. We used a y jack so that we could both listen and one of us could talk so that we could try and understand the person who was talking to us better. I'm not quite sure if we were supposed to be making Spanish calls, because the rest of our class was doing English, but it was fun anyway. we only got to talk to about four people (each of us took two calls), and the first person I talked to I was actually able to tell him a little bit about our religion (that we believe in christ, and introduced the BoM), and then got him to agree to take the missionaries. About half way through the call elder Taylor gave out teacher the headset so he could listen and help, although several times when i looked at him for help with what they said he didn't help too much but instead let me give it a try on my own at first.

So Mon, and Tues the oldest district left and so now we are the oldest district...kinda crazy. me and elder taylor got to wake up at 4 am tues morning to sign their papers so they could leave.

The [picture] with light coming out from my hand was the lead to a scripture marking pen that we held close to the camera...we had a few extra minutes on pday a couple weeks ago.

So I had origionally thought that i would be leaving on the 15th of march but it's really the 22nd of march as far as Iknow anyway.