Another week bites the dust!

It has been a crazy week… I happened to go from the most southern part of the mission to the most northern parts, and driving in the midst of early morning California traffic wasn’t the most fun thing but I made it safely 🙂 But boy it is different up here. We are up close to the “mountains” which are just hills… haha but everything is slightly slanted which is fun. There are also a ton of trees and stuff which is awesome. It reminds me of Utah every once in a while… Man it has been getting really cold here. It drops down into the sixties and boy its freezing. Thanks for the sweater Mom! It has been put to use the last couple days. Thanks for the birthday package… It was awesome!!!!

So if you want to look up where I’m living my new address is 7636 Bright Ave #B (but don’t send stuff here just to the mission office). It is a nice little apartment but it was super dirty… I don’t know how missionaries can live in such filth lol… Which doesn’t make any sense because growing up you never really made us do too much chores but we kept the house decently clean. But I got the place cleaned and organized and it looks pretty good now… haha.

So the mission is putting a huge effort on justserve.org and here in Whittier there are a ton of opportunities to serve which I love. We go every week to IFC which is an Interfaith Food Center, and we do service there once a week, we do random stuff for them like unboxing, packaging, storing, and sorting food to give to families who are struggling. It is really fun to do and its great to help people. They also give us some food to take home… but you have to be careful because it is always really close to expiring or it already has… But its food and its free so you can’t really complain. haha. We also vounteer at a library and help there with stuff

So some of the people that we are working with:

A______. She is from Honduras (I think) and she just had a baby like a week ago) but she is married to this white guy (who doesn’t speak much Spanish) who is a fairly recent convert. She barely speaks any English so I don’t really know how that worked out. But she wants to get baptized and loves the church. They are struggling financially and they have been fighting on how to take care of the baby. Its pretty tense so we are kinda acting as marriage counselors right now helping them get through some of there problems. She has been progressing a ton though spiritually and she said her first prayer out loud with us which was AWESOME!!!

Then we have this guy named J______ who just got baptized right before I got here on the 1st of Nov. He is super cool, really humble, and just golden. We are working with him to first get confirmed next Sunday and then get the priesthood.

We are working with a less active / recent convert girl named M_____ who is 17 to try and get her to come back to church and to receive her Patriarchal blessing.

We have a couple other investigators but I forget their names. I haven’t met all them yet but yeah. More updates to come!

So yesterday there is this really cool young couple who are both from Mexico who found out it was my birthday and they made a cake and they told me it was a Mexican tradition to eat the strawberry off the top and when I went in for the bite they dunked my head into the cake… So that is apparently a tradition in Mexico… haha. It was fun. They are super nice and really humble. The G_______ family.

One big part that I love about this new area is that we actually have a Spanish ward here. Not like in HB where it was English. We also get to eat with the Hispanic members which I forgot how much I love Hispanic food. I just love being immersed in the culture it is awesome.

My new companion is awesome. We served around each other for a transfer when I was in the Ximeno branch in LB. He is awesome. Really funny, really smart. Great Spanish. He is from Provo Utah, and it like half Samoan (doesn’t really look like it haha) We are going to have a great time together.

So that is pretty much it. I love all of you and hope y’all have a superb week!!!

Con amor,
Elder Bryce