Elder Tyler Jones week 35

I'm sorry you guys have been so sick. I hope you get feeling better. I'm glad Courtney and Hal are happy.  Sounds like you guys had a good family sick day. 

It's been a pretty good week. We were looking a lot for investigators in the Campbell ward. That's been going pretty well. Latinos are usually nicer to us, though. They were able to find a few more people to teach though. So that's good.

I translate in church some weeks. Sometimes they have high councilors, members of the stake presidency, or random other English speaking people that show up to the San Tomas branch sacrament meeting so I translate what's going on into a little head set and they have headphones to listen in. At first it was really really hard. I realized that in Spanish I wasn't really connecting the Spanish word to the English word. I just connected the Spanish word to what it meant. So I could speak in Spanish and English but mixing them was kind of difficult. So I'd often hear something and know what it meant, it would just take me too long to remember the word in English. But it's gotten a lot easier just through practice.

Transfers are tomorrow. I'm getting transferred to the Menlo Park stake in the Valparaiso 2nd ward and I'm going to be training again.  It's a pretty big Spanish ward apparently.  I've heard a lot of good things about it.   It should be good.  One of my good friends, elder Vaiia, a Tongan elder serving here in the Saratoga zone is getting transferred to the Menlo Park stake as well. So I'm pretty excited for that.  I've heard a lot of good things about the area.  Apparently The Menlo Park area has some of the richest people in the country living there.  There are still some ghettos all around it though.

I was really sad to hear I'm leaving San Tomas though.  It didn't feel real until tonight when I visited the Hernandez family for the last time.  Leaving an area kind of stinks.  The San Tomas branch is super awesome, it's like a little family.  I almost cried leaving the Hernandez families house tonight. But it'll be alright.  I tried to get photos with some people.  I wasn't expecting to leave so it was kind of short notice.

Anyway, I'm all packed up and ready to go.  It should be fun. I love you guys, I hope you have a great week!

Love,

Elder Jones

San Jose Cleanup

Elder Tyler Jones Week 34

Thanks for all of the pictures of the marriage.  It looks like you guys had a lot of fun.  Dan still looks super spiffy in his suit, and Nolan looks like he's getting really tall.  I'm glad everything went well with that.  I got the Subway gift card.  Thank you guys so much!  Sorry you're not feeling well.  I'll keep you in my prayers.

It's been a crazy week.  We had our preparation day today because we had a service project yesterday.  There was some heavy flooding and some houses got flooded out.  We went in and cleared out a bunch of garbage for people.  I got to do a bit of interpreting for them since a lot of the people spoke Spanish which was cool.  It was pretty muddy and the sewers were backed up so it was pretty stinky, too.  There were also a lot of news people there.  Someone found my picture by googling the flood cleanup in San Jose or something like that.  I'm wearing a gray hoodie and some black pants.  Maybe you guys can find me I don't know. 

We were working from about 9:00 to 3:00.  We were sort of just piling together a lot of soaked garbage so that the garbage trucks could come through and take it.  They had split us up into groups of about 9 people.  The mayor showed up for about 15 minutes in there.  He worked in our group.  It was a little annoying since his camera men kept telling all of us to get out of the way of their shot.

Elder Washburn had an incident with a skunk at the back of one of the flooded out apartments.  I bought some febreeze.  So now the apartment just smells like a skunk in the middle of a field of lavender.  

 Sing in a trio has been fun.  The Campbell elders have a small apartment so it's a bit crowded but it's alright.  It's nice.  They have a track right next to their apartment which is nice.  We've just been juggling all of our appointments together, so I'm trying to still go see Kristie and all of that.  Things are still going well. I 'm happy. We're coming up on the last week of the transfer.  Not quite sure what's going to happen with all of the people having gone home.

Anyway, I hope you have a great week!

Elder Jones and Companions

Helping teach Primary

Elder Tyler Jones week 32

I'm glad you guys are keeping busy. Sounds like life is staying pretty exciting for everyone. It's still so weird to think about Courtney and Hal and their marriages. It seems like a lot has changed in the months I've been gone.

It's been a good week though. We're still working with Christie. We found out this week she spells her name "kristie". She's still coming to church and everything's going well with that. She's probably going to push her baptismal date back a week just because a couple in the branch are getting married that day. But she's still really excited for that and enjoying church.

Our bikes were broken all of this week. So we ended up having to walk a lot. It was all right though. We just had to plan a lot of travel time. 

We're still working with Romiro. He lives with a less active family and so he'll only come if the family comes. 

I did some more cleaning around our apartment this week. When I came into this area the apartment wasn't in the best condition, so I've been slowly cleaning it up bit by bit. This week my big project was the bathroom. It didn't seem like anyone had done anything to clean it in something like a year. It was pretty bad. But two hours, one and a half rolls of paper towels, and a whole lot of bleach later, it looks pretty nice. So I'm happy about that.

It rained some this week. It seems to rain a lot in the winter time here. It didn't rain at all my first 4 or so months here. Now it rains all the time. But we have ponchos so it ends up being all right.

Anyway, it's been a good week. I hope you all have a great week!

Elder Tyler Jones and his desk