Hiking in the Mountains

Wednesday 4th of September, 2013

Yesterday Sam and his companion and the other set of Elders they live with, decided to go hiking. They left the apartment at 7am and hiked for nearly 3 hours, Sam thought it was really fun, it was just a straight walk north towards the mountains, everything around them was just dead or dying. 

They saw a lot of cacti. Elder John got jabbed by a jumping cactus, he said only about 1cm of the spine was sticking out of his leg, but when he pulled it out it was nearly 2 inches long! 

They found different spots where people go shooting and Sam found a couple of rifle bullet casings.

There's a huge city, then just nothing for miles.

Sam and Elder Ballard are getting on well together, the big challenge is just finding work to do. Their area is broken up into 10 smaller areas, and they usually focus on 2 of those areas each day, looking for less actives, or tracting to try and find new investigators. However they have gone over the less active list so many times that they now only have about 7 people who they can visit, the rest are either DNC (do not contact), have moved, or are never home when they try and visit them. They do have four investigators however, it's just meeting regularly with them that is the challenge.

They also have plenty of food. Members feed them every night, and one of the members (David Dorr) brings them big boxes of food every couple of months. 

They haven't had any more freaky weather, but it's starting to heat up again, it's going to be in the 100's and sometimes after the rain it gets really humid as well, and it's pretty tough for them to keep walking around, but the hot weather should be over by October/November time :) Then it will be nice, in the 80's and 90's.

Also, random story for today, the mission President showed up to their district meeting, and for one of the role plays Sam had to pretend to be a lady crying at a bus stop, and two of the Elders had to try and place a Book of Mormon with him. Sam found it pretty funny.