Week 3 - Newfoundland

Good morning everyone!! I've arrived in Canada!

We left SLC about 11:00 am on Tuesday September 13, 2016 and I got in to Nova Scotia at about 2:00 am local time, and we didn't get to bed until around 3am. Luckily, President Pratt let us sleep-in for like an hour. That morning he took us on a walk around a lake by the mission home, and that was awesome. This place is so beautiful!

Anyway, I'm now in my first area, Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland. I flew  from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland - solo! That was really weird because I've had a companion or another missionary near me for the past 3 weeks. So it felt strange to be alone.

I was picked up at the airport by my companions, Elder Larson and Elder Hovey. I love them so much. They are probably some of the funniest people I've ever met. They're both zone leaders so they made me the zone secretary, even though that isn't a real thing. My responsibility as zone secretary is taking naps while they deal with all of their zone leadership business. It's a pretty sweet gig.

My area is very green and it rains a lot. Everyone here is really kind and almost everyone smokes. Also, almost everyone here is on some type of welfare program. The branch here is tiny, and we have about 3 or 4 active members in our branch. One of those members is Cathy Borden. She is so funny and she is really faithful, but we are pretty much her parents haha. I'll talk more about Cathy in a later email. I have some funny stories about her.

This Sunday, we had about 16 people show up to church!! That, apparently, is an amazing turnout here. Church here is interesting to say the least, as the actual church building is an apartment. We Skype into another branch about 3 hours away for our sacrament meeting. Everyone that comes is really old and they're all kind of crazy. But I love them all, they're so awesome. They're really fun to talk to.

A lot of people here have a heavy "Newfey" accent. They basically sound like they're from Louisiana but they talk a gazillion-kilometers (haha) an hour. Sometimes I wish that they had subtitles so I could actually understand them. Also, since everyone here is so poor, and there are so few members, we likely will never have a dinner appointment in this area. My cooking skills will be tested 😀 ! This past week I've mostly survived off Nutrigrain bars and vegetables. I'll get more food once we've shopped.

 We only have a couple of investigators, so aside from teaching them, we will be doing a ton of finding this week. I'll let you know how all of that goes.

I love you all so much! Talk more next week!

Elder Haslam