Week 46 San Juan de Maguana: A bit of a maggot problem??!

Hey everybody,

Everything is going good here in San Juan and we are working really hard. We had a good p-day today. We stayed home this morning and cleaned as usual. It was a little different today though, because this last week I bought a giant trash can for the house. Normally, we just put our garbage in blue shopping bags and make a pile of it in the kitchen, but it always stinks really bad and we ended up with a bit of a maggot problem. So I was sick of the smell and went out and bought a huge trashcan for around twenty dollars. I bought it from this really cool, sketchy market. I also was tough with the guy and argued the price down like 300 pesos. Just some good third world experiences. Then we walked all the way home with a huge red trashcan on our back. It was quite and interesting sight. So we got the trashcan back to the house, but the other elders in the house forgot to buy the trash bags that were the right size for the can. Anyway, we ended up throwing all our trash into the trashcan without a bag. Today I ended cleaning out the trashcan because, once again, we got a maggot problem. It was really gross. Afterwards, we went and played some baseball, which was a lot of fun. We were worried about using a real ball, so we ended up playing with plastic bags rolled up with a sock wrapped with packing tape. It worked surprisingly well!  We got back to the house, ate, took a nap, and talked and now I’m here at Internet. It was a pretty good p-day

As for our investigators, we just got a new one named R. He is nine years old. I assumed that he was a member because his mom is super active, but we visited their house because the husband is less-active, and the mom told us she wanted us to teach her son so that he could get baptized!  He’s a super good kid, so I’m excited.  The other is an 18 year-old girl who is a reference from a recent convert. She is progressing really well with the exception that she likes to drink. But she promised to stop. (We think there might be a law of chastity problem because she is a model, but we will see.) Her name is J. We have take a member with us to go to her house because the last time when we talked to her, I was sitting in a chair talking to her mom and she came up and greeted me in the typical Dominican way, which is by kissing me on the cheek. Not a real kiss, but it’s sort of like a cheek bump and you make a kissing sound. Guys do not greet other guys like this, but girls greet most people that way. Then at the end of the lesson, I held out my hand for a handshake, but she gave me a hug instead. Sooooo, we are going to take a member over there to explain the rules.

This week we also started doing a Preach My Gospel class for the youth. I know that before my mission I didn’t have tons of interest, but now I’m super pumped for it every week. I love working with the mission prep youth group!

As for everything else, I am coming up on a year soon so I’m going to live this year to the max and leave nothing behind. Also next week is transfers so I’ll let you know what happens!

Love you all, 

Elder Stark

Week 45 San Juan de Maguana: "Matando la vaca!"

Dear Family,

Well this week has absolutely flown by!  Friday we had a super awesome zone conference with our zone and the zones of Azua and Brahona. We had to get up at 5:00am to get ready and go.  I fell asleep on the way there for a bit, but we got to the conference and I met up with tons of friends. It was super cool because I got to see Elder E and Hermana S and everybody told me that I look a lot skinnier. Anyway, they had a scale there so I stood on and it showed me weighing 170. So I was thinking, “hmm, that’s not so bad.” But then I realized two things; one that I was wearing my giant eccos, and two, that I had my backpack on. I took off the backpack and ... 160, still with my eccos on! I’m probably around 155 pounds now. It’s crazy! I think I entered into the mission at 190ish. (I was a fatty before)

The area president Elder Cornish was at the conference and he gave a super cool talk that I wish I had recorded. He told us a story about a poor family that only had one cow and they depended on the cow to live. Because they were so poor, they asked a wise guy to help them out and he went and took the cow and pushed it off a cliff and left! Seems crazy, but then the wise man came back 10 years later and found a huge mansion where the poor family used to live. So he asked the guy who lived in the mansion where the family that used to be very poor was. Obviously it was the guy who was once poor. The wise guy responded that’s what I thought and left! Elder Cornish later told us that the cow represents our limited vision of what we can do and if we kill the cow, we will be able to do great things in our areas. It was really cool and I very much enjoyed it. It was a very spiritual and very powerful meeting. So this whole week my comp and I have been talking about “matando la vaca!”

Then this p-day we went to our chapel and played some different sports, which was pretty fun. There is this one elder in my house that is super cool. His name is Elder T and he is from New Zealand. We are really good friends and we had a fun time playing sports; the sisters in the zone even showed up! When you play sports with elders it gets pretty competitive, but sisters makes it a little calmer. In the other branch of San Juan, two of the sisters are fluent in both English and Spanish and neither of their comps speak Spanish. Hermana F is Mexican American and is training an American sister from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and the other companionship is Hermana M from Honduras and her comp doesn’t speak English or Spanish fluently. She is from a pacific island. Anyway, both Hermana M and Hermana F asked me how I learned my Spanish so that they could help their comps during sports. It was pretty cool! I guess my Spanish isn’t too bad. 

Anyway, I love you all and hope you have a super good week.

Elder Bailey Stark

P.S. My address is: 

Elder Bailey Stark

C/ Hatuey #73

Urb. Los Cacicazgos

Santo Domingo

Dominican Republic

Just in case you want to write me a letter.

Week 44 San Juan de Maguana: Walking in the rain might be worth it

Hey family and friends,

So this has been a very wet week here in San Juan de la Maguana. We are in the middle of hurricane season and it rains hard almost everyday. As missionaries we walk in the rain a lot, but that’s alright because there is a saying here in the mission field that the more you walk in the rain, the more beautiful your wife will be. So yeah, for some missionaries that’s what keeps them walking through the hurricanes. Personally, I don’t mind the hurricanes except that even though it’s probably like 75 degrees when it rains, I get really cold! I have actually become a total wimp when it comes to the cold. I sleep with my sheets and my blanket and I still get cold! I’m fairly sure I will freeze when I get home to Idaho. Mom, dad, my first meal back home might be in the hospital. I’m just kidding.

But anyway, this week has been mildly successful. We have been doing lots of contacting. My area is very rich and all the houses are really big and hard to contact, but its kind of fun. A lot of these people are really interesting. Like one time we were in this super rich neighborhood and this guy runs out of his house and goes on a 20 minute monolog about how we shouldn’t be out at night in the neighborhood because it’s dangerous. The whole time I just kept thinking that this is the nicest neighborhood I have been in during my mission. We also recently started teaching an English class here in our chapel as an idea to find more people and we have had a little bit of success with that. This last week we only had one guy show up, but he was super cool and had an interesting background. He said that his university went to New York City for a trip and he and a few friends decided to stay for the six months that their passports allowed them to. And he said that he was working this super crappy job where they paid him 40 dollars a day for like 10 hours of work and he and his buddies lived like that for a while. It was an interesting story and this guy left the country a month after his visa expired and he doesn’t know if he is in trouble with the US government or not. Cool guy. His name is W. We also found this one guy who was super cool named B. We have only taught him one lesson, but he came to church this week! It was super sweet. I really hope he progresses because this ward needs a lot more priesthood.

So other stuff in my life is that I’ve started learning new ways to eat cheap and healthy. For example, normally, I always buy cereal and milk. But I found out that yogurt tastes a ton better, and is only a little more expensive. Plus, the healthy cereal is actually the best deal, so I eat cereal with yogurt a lot, and I’m going to start putting oatmeal in the cereal so that will fill me up more! Also I’ve been eating lots of popcorn because its super cheap. But yeah, that’s my life here in the DR. Take care everybody and I’ll see you next week!

Elder Stark 

Week 43 San Juan de Maguana: General Conference

Hey mom and dad,

How’s everything going?  I like the car, Dad! It looks super cool! I too am on a spiritual high from conference. This week has been a big spiritual week and I learned a lot from conference. I have set a bunch of new goals to help learn and grow. Unfortunately we worked really hard this week to try to get people to come to conference, but nobody came. We only had a few less active people come, but hey, who knows? The Lord works in strange ways. But I know that even though my investigator’s testimonies didn’t grow, mine certainly did! I especially loved the talk by the seventy that spoke Portuguese. I thought that his talk was really good. It was also cool to hear some talks in Spanish that didn’t come from a translator’s voice. For a special conference treat I made the cheesecake mix you sent! It was great and things are going really well here in the DR.

There is a new mission rule about only using Internet for an hour, so I’m struggling trying to figure out how to obey that and write enough. Let me know if you have ideas. I love you both.

Elder Stark