Week 28 Santo Domingo: Centipedes and Waffle Cones

Family,

Wow, so here I am again. These weeks just fly by. One more week and we will be in July; it’s incredible! I love every minute that I am here. Here in Manoguyabo, things are really picking up, but I’ll explain more of that in the letter. I wanted to say thank you all for the support, especially my parents. You guys are the best! Elder B and I are working harder and harder each day.

So this week was fairly normal, but with a few funny stories. First off though, I want to talk about some of the new investigators that we are teaching:

F is a super awesome guy. He is 40 and owns a company where he makes waffle cones by the hundreds. It’s super awesome because sometimes he gives us free cones and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so many waffle cones in my life.  We are too poor to buy ice cream for them, so we just eat them plain. I love this guy! He is a super good investigator and really wants to learn. His mind was blown this last lesson when we talked to him about the great apostasy.

M. We were considering dropping her, but then she talked with her less active friend this last week and they both came to church!!! It was the friend’s first time at church in over 6 months and M’s first time too. She has a super hyper and guapa daughter. (guapa means angry or short tempered here)

J M: this guy is kind of tigre, or street like, but he’s a super mellow guy. It seems like nothing fazes this guy. We had our first lesson with him and then all of the sudden The Spirit was there and he asked about church and when it started and stuff.  Anyway, this Sunday we walk up the hill to the church and he’s outside waiting for us and says completely monotone, “Hey, you guys are late.” We were ten minutes early! Hahaha, I love this guy.

P should hopefully be getting married to his wife this week. I’m super excited because if we can get them baptized this transfer, I will be able to go to the temple with them and see them sealed!

Oh, so a really funny thing happened when we were at F’s house. He was making cones and we were just talking, when Elder B saw a centipede on the wall. Now, this may not seem like a big deal, but the centipede was literally longer than my shoe. And they are poisonous! So I jumped up and ran to get my camera and got a nice snapshot of it right before A, F’s sister, grabbed a pot full of waffle cone batter and hit the centipede with it. I was in the splash zone and got hit with the batter. The problem was that I thought it was centipede guts that I was covered with. I was super grossed out for a second! Unfortunately, it didn’t kill the centipede, so we spent the next hour looking for it with machetes in hand, but we couldn’t find it.

There is more I could write, but I’m almost out of time I. love you all and hope you guys are doing great. I’m praying for you all the time! 

Elder Stark

Week 27 Santo Domingo: I'm staying another transfer

Dear Family,

Wow, so work here in Manoguyabo has exploded! Like, holy crap! We are swamped. Sunday was the call for transfers and guess what, I’m still here in my home of Manoguyabo. This will be my fifth transfer here. That means I’ll be here when I hit 8 months in the mission. It’s pretty crazy and I truly feel like this place is my home. Before the transfer call, I told a few members and investigators that I might go, and several of them prayed and P even fasted that I would stay. So hey, our prayers were answered. I get to stay home for another 2 months.

I bought monopoly last Monday, but I went all out and got one with an electronic bank. Anyway, we have been having a really great time with that.  We also had a super funny lesson where we were trying to get a less active girl named A to church. She’s 19 and the sassiest girl ever. We have a fun time messing with her. Last week she said she didn’t want to go to church because she might get hungry. So I told her I would bring her cookies if she came. Anyway, she didn’t show up to church, so during our lesson with her, we pulled out the cookies and started eating them in front of her! She was freaking out saying, “Ustedes son malos” (You are so bad) It was super funny and her mom was even joining in on it. 

There is the Chikunguya virus going around. Santo Domingo has been slammed. It’s a virus that has hit here pretty hard and a lot of missionaries have it. The Dominican elder in our house had it and hasn’t been able to work for several days. He was sleeping 15 a day. It seems pretty bad and I get the bad feeling that either Elder B or I will get it soon. It starts out with joint pain and a high fever. Then as you are healing, you get a bad rash.  Normally, it only lasts a week though. It comes from some word meaning bent out of shape because apparently, you are contorted in pain. They say most everyone will probably get it.

We also had a fun little service project picking cherries at an investigator’s house. So there was a cherry tree with two well-dressed Americans in it for a while this past week, but it was a lot of fun. I got super dirty though, and my investigator made me put on a white lab coat so that she could wash my shirt.

So for some reason the work here has exploded and we have over 30 investigators 20 less active members we are working with. There are seven families, two of which should be getting baptized this transfer! 

That was my week. Hope you guys enjoy.

I love you all, 

Elder Stark

Week 26 Santo Domingo: 6 month mark

Hi Family,

Well, wow! My week has flown by. I can’t believe that I’m sitting here to email again. It feels as though I was just here. I also just hit 6 months in the mission. It’s strange that this part of my life is already 25% gone... 

This Tuesday was a really fun day. We had exchanges and I was in Elder E’s area. It was a lot of fun because their area is super poor and most of time you’re hiking through jungle. It’s pretty crazy! I took some pictures that I’ll upload next week, because I left my camera at home today. They have some pretty cool parts of their area, but they have to walk a ton. Their area is super far away. That day we had lunch at Hermana S’s house. She is a cool lady that lives in my area. She has super funny, twin daughters. One of them has 2 thumbs on the same hand and they are a blast. Anyway, lunch that day was great. Rice, beans and chicken.

I hit 6 months in the mission this week. So to celebrate, I grabbed a crappy tie, bought some sort of dangerous chemical that smelled super strong from a sketchy street store, and went to a member’s house and soaked my tie and burned it ;) Classic missionary party! It was pretty freaking fun! 

Then Thursday we had a freaking, great day. We visited the B family that we had contacted. They are a young couple and they just had their first kid, A. They are very nice people and super funny. Our lessons with them are always a party. We had a really great lesson where we talked about the pre-earth life, and E just kept asking the best questions. Anyway, it led into a really good discussion about our life on earth and we popped the baptism question. He and his wife accepted baptism! So all they need to do is go to church 4 times, and we will be having a baptism. It was a great lesson and we walked out just super pumped!

The next day was another great day. We had a first lesson with a mother and daughter. Elder B and I were just teaching in sync and we talked to them about following the example of Jesus. They were like, “How can we follow him?”  We talked about baptism and set a date with both of them. It was great! Hopefully they will progress. On the way to our next lesson, I was walking next to a person’s house and yeah, they had a dog and, well, it wasn’t very happy. So yeah... it bit my hand. Hahaha. Luckily it wasn’t bad at all. It barely even broke the skin and healed in two days. So lucky for me, it wasn’t bad. We talked to the owner and stuff and found out that it doesn’t have rabies. It was a fun experience.

Saturday we had another lesson with the B family. We had asked a guy in the ward to come with us. He was phenomenal in the lesson. He really understood his role in the lesson, and shared his conversion story with them. At one point, he said, “I plead with you to do what these two elders say. I promise you that your new family will be blessed in the best way possible.” Wow, it was really powerful and they couldn’t deny it. E said that there is no way the Book of Mormon isn’t true. 

Anyway, that was my week here in the DR. Thanks for all the emails and support. I love you all!

Elder Bailey Stark

Week 25 Santo Domingo: I love being here on a mission!

Hello,

Wow, so this week really flew by! I seriously cannot believe it’s Monday again, but this week has been really good. I love being here on a mission!

This week has just felt super great, but it’s hard to put my finger on what has made it so great. Monday, we went to this park in the zone leader’s area and roller-bladed. It was a lot of fun, but I only roller-bladed for a bit and then decided that I would rather not come home early in a cast. So I just chilled and talked to some other elders. Afterwards, we went to a cool sandwich shop. I ordered chinola juice and a ham and cheese sandwich, which was super good. I think chilola juice, which is passion fruit, is my favorite. 

Wednesday, I went on an intercambio (exchange) to the zone leader’s area, which was pretty fun, but I still think I like my area better. My area feels like home. I was with Elder M. He’s a pretty cool guy, but he is going home after this transfer. Anyway, it was a good intercambio, and I learned some new stuff.

So this week my comp and I have been working especially hard to support the ward and try to get more references. We have contacted this area a ton, but none of the contacts progressed, so it’s a bit discouraging, but we are working to try to find more references. That means we need to start visiting members, which I don’t like doing... I feel like we should be out in the street more. But the only way to get references is to work with the members, so we have been doing more of that and it’s starting to work :) 

We also started working with the ward mission leader to arrange nights of friendship so that the investigators can make friends with members. Also, they can get to know the leaders of the ward. Plus, it’s just fun! But yeah, we think that every investigator and less-active member should have a friend in church. So this is our idea to help get the members more involved. We had our first “noche de amistad” this Wednesday, but I wasn’t able to go because I was on the intercambio. I heard that not many people showed up, so we will have to work to make it more popular these next couple weeks before the next one!

One of my favorite things here is learning the gangster talk. When I talk with the street Dominicans, sometimes I’ll throw out a couple Dominican slang words and watch them freak out like ¨Wooo! He know how we talk!!!! He is a tiger!!!!¨ But anyway, I learned this one, “tu ta hamón”, which literally means, “You are ham”. But here it means, “You’re the awkward guy that never gets a girl”. So I’ll have to figure out when I can use it. I already told the Dominican elder in my house that he is ham, but he just laughed and said that we are all ham!

We did a special fast with P, so that he can hopefully get married and get baptized. We are hoping that everything goes good with that. We are waiting for him and his wife to get to the hospital so that they can get their son’s birth certificate figured out and get married. 

Also we had a zone conference with our new mission president! He is super tall, like 6’6’’, and seems like a fantastic guy. His name is President Knuckles and wow, he is a really inspirational guy. During the zone conference he told us about how we can work with the members better, which was super helpful. Then his wife spoke and told us about her family, and yeah, they are super nice. I like them a lot! During the zone conference we had a practice and I took a bunch of photos of one elder while he was doing the practice just to be funny. Then afterwards, I showed him and he was like ¨Paparazzi!!!!!¨ But I’ll upload those. After the zone conference, Sister Knuckles was talking to my comp and asked him if he had lost much weight on the mission and he told her no, but that I had lost like 25 pounds. So she then talked to me, asking if i was eating enough and drinking water and stuff. It was kind of funny, but it’s sweet of her to worry about us like that. 

Anyway, that was my week.

Love you all, 

Elder Bailey Stark