Wednesday, January 8, 2014

71st Epistle from Elder Kaleb Erickson serving in Patchogue, New York

Snow Day!        written Jan 6, 2014
It has been a cold week out here! It started on New Year's Eve with a light sprinkling of snow. Not too much. Just enough to welcome the way for the big storm on Friday.

New Year's Day is always an interesting time in the mission field. Because we're supposed to go out and work, but most people are still partying. We tried to organize both districts to do some street contacting on Main Street, but it was almost like a ghost town there.
We walked around for about an hour, talking to the few people who were around, at which point we decided to go knock some doors. After we finished a street, we were all cold, so we ended the event with a nice chill session at Dunkin Donuts for hot chocolate. Always a good time.

Thursday was another interesting day. Because there was a blizzard on the way. Which meant that people were busy trying to get settled down for the storm. We got both districts together again for some door knocking action. We figured it might be a good time to find people at home since it was so cold outside. It was a decent theory at least. We still met some very nice people though.

When we woke up on Friday, the snow was still falling. It was terrible. We got a call that we weren't allowed to drive because of the snow and bad driving conditions. So we hunkered down and waited for the snow to stop. The other elders showed up at our pad, they walked in the snow. We had some lunch together and chilled. When the snow stopped falling, we went out and shoveled our car out, then we headed out to go do some service for people. We picked an area where we knew there was a decent number of Hispanics. We walked around for about two hours. Not many people were willing to accept our help, but we were able to help out a woman from Guatemala that we knew. She was shoveling out a car that was halfway free already. So we helped her finish up. She lives in the same house as the members we visited on Christmas Eve. She was the one who made the tamales for us. I joked with her that this was repaying her for the tamales and she told me that she would make us as many tamales as we wanted if we helped her with the snow. We'll have to keep that in mind for the next snow storm.

Saturday was a sunny day with lots of snow on the ground. One of the missionaries in the English district organized a free hot chocolate stand, so we went and helped out with that in the afternoon. Everyone else was busy, so it was just the four of us handing out hot chocolate for two hours. It was a good time, we even managed to give out a few cards.

Sunday was the first day of our new church schedule. We now start church at 1 instead of 9. It is an interesting change. And with branch council after church, we left at 12 and didn't get home until like 6. Talk about a long fast Sunday. It was good though. We tried to look some people up in the evening, but had no luck. Such is life.

Hopefully now that the holidays are over we can get some things going. It's just a matter of time and patience, I figure. Love you guys!

Elder Erickson

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