39th Epistle from Elder Kaleb Erickson serving in Brooklyn, NY

Happy Memorial Day!    written Tuesday May 28, 2013

The adventures never stop out here. Working in the city without a car is waay harder. Far Rockaway had its challenges, but transportation was never an issue. Midwood has a lot of those issues, but now with a transportation wrench thrown in the mix. We have two trains nearby that we use and maybe two main buses that we use. Which are helpful (if the buses are ever around), except we want to work close to the chapel, so we don't want to get to far away via train or bus. And whenever we want to bring a member to help us teach a lesson, it seems like they're forever away from where the lesson is and they're not always keen on taking public transportation. Not impossible to work around, but it definitely makes work here interesting. 

So the chapel in Brooklyn is way freaking cool. It used to be a Catholic church I think and we bought it and turned it into an LDS chapel. The area around it is full of Jews, so yes, it is super nice. Go about two blocks to the north, east, or west, and you'll find the Brooklyn that you usually think of. I'm not sure if the bell tower in the church is functioning, I'm still trying to get to know everything. It's way different to work in a branch than in a ward. 

My companion is interesting. He is a good guy and we get along fine. He just isn't very talkative.  I convinced him to try his first Big Mac ever last Saturday. He didn't like it. I didn't know that was possible. It was buy one get one free Big Macs all weekend (I don't know if you knew), so we definitely partook of that. 

The area around the church doesn't have a large center of Hispanics. We have to travel a ways away before we find any large groupings of Hispanics and we hesitate to go all the way out there because it will be less likely that they are willing to travel that far to go to church every week. I don't think these are unsolvable problems, but they are definitely problems that we need to figure out.

In the meantime, we have been having some awesome community activities to find families. Last week we had a games in the park day. We took a bunch of board games and played them in the park and invited people to come play with us. The sister missionaries were the real heroes there when they had a group of some 10 little kids playing various games with them. Then we were able to give the kids flyers to our movie night for that Friday. Two of the families ended up coming to that. We're doing games in the park again today and we're planning on bringing some chalk and some bubbles to get more people to notice us.

The movie night was an awesome success. We set it up in the basement of the church and watched Up in Spanish. We had four nonmember families and one member family. I think it's hilarious that more nonmembers come than members, but I'm happy with anybody coming to these events. And it was cool that I could understand a lot of the movie in Spanish. Everyone who came to that party, we invited to the ward party the next day. They were having a late Mother's Day party for the ward. One of the families from the movie night came to that too, so they got to meet some members. Which is always a plus. They didn't come to church on Sunday, but they gave us their number so we could call them about the next movie night. I'll take that as a start.

Our main investigator asked us to take a break for a month because she's really busy. So as of now, we don't really have any investigators. So this will be a fun week of finding new people to teach.

 That means meeting lots of new people and speaking lots of Spanish. It should be an awesome week.

I'm out of time, but I love you and I'll let you know how the finding goes next week!

Love,
Elder Erickson