Week 13-14 Christmas!

This week was so fun! It was super fun to see my family on Christmas day and see how they are doing! I hope everyone's Christmas was good. I love Christmas time because it gives me such a great opportunity to really think about Christ and everything he did for us. I really wish everyone can continue that spirit this year. 

Every month the areas that have cars in them are only allotted so many miles. Our area has about 1650 per month. But we didn't do too hot on planning for where to go and using miles efficiently. So we just kinda sent it and did the best we could every day. We inevitably ran out of miles on Christmas day. Fortunately we got 100 extra miles because our zone leaders weren't going to use them. So we had 100 miles to last us one week. Which meant we had to walk for a little bit. We didn't want to use any miles on Friday so we didn't. We walked the entire day. And of course. It was pouring rain outside. And it was exchanges. So elder Nielsen and I got some rain gear and started tracking. We were completely soaked. We had a lesson in Middleton so we got a ride from our ward mission leader and drove for about 30 minutes so we could get there. She ended up not being there on Thursday or Friday. 

On Friday we went to the Amish grocery store where they pretty much make everything fresh. They are only open Thursday Friday and Saturday haha. But they make some of the best doughnuts ever. So we got some of those and we were pretty happy. Then on Saturday we also didn't want to use very many miles so we just did our best to not use the car. We ended up walking about 17 miles this week 10 of which was on Saturday. We ended today, (monday) the last day of the week. With 1749.9  out of 1750 haha. So we really cut it close. We are really excited to get more miles tomorrow. Maria was able to come to church on Sunday which was awesome. We are still fairly on track for her baptism on the 19th of January! I hope everyone had a great week and a happy new year. Love you all!

- Elder Dorrance

People are very generous

Jammies from ward members

Wanted to sleep out by the Christmas Tree

Christmas Breakfast

Week 12 - Monday 12/17

Brother David Klevis! Had a stroke 30 years ago and has been in the chronically ill home since. Kicks my butt in chess every time we play

Hello! This week was super quick! Nothing crazy happened, the biggest thing was zone conference which was super cool! it was fun to see other missionaries and get some inspiration from President Dunnigan. Other than that it was probably the fastest week we have had yet. Haha I don't understand why but it was! 

We tried making cookies. Now, I'm pretty new at this life thing. And I'm even newer at baking. But we decided to try and bake something easy! Snicker doodles! There were 3 major things that went wrong while trying to put these things together. A lot of little things but 3 major ones. The first one being that we didn't know the difference between baking powder and baking soda. We thought they were the same thing so we put baking powder in them. The second was that we didn't know how big the cookie dough balls had to be before you put them in the oven so we put them into baseball sized balls and threw them in the oven. The recipe told us to cook them for 8 minutes at 350 degrees. We cooked them for that long and for some crazy reason, the massive balls of dough were not cooked all the way! Haha so we ended up cooking them for 25 minutes which gave them just a little bit too much crunch. We screwed them up pretty badly. But we tried twice more fixing each thing we did wrong one at a time. We used so much flour trying to making good cookies. But we finally got them haha thank goodness. 

This week was really awesome we had a really awesome lesson with a woman named Millie who I invited to be baptized like 2 months ago who said "no, I've been baptized" and then proceeded to go to new York for a month. Finally she came home and we got to have another lesson with her. other than that it was a fairly slow week. But also really fast. Make sense? Awesome. 

Love you all very much and thank you for supporting me as much as you do. Please send me your addresses so I can write you guys and hopefully you can write me back. Much love. 

-Elder Dorrance

Week 11 - Good Week

This week was good! There was for sure some slow days but for the most part it was a super quick week. This week we got someone on date for baptism!!! Her name is Maria! She is super awesome and really excited to be baptized! She is from Cape Verde so her English is not super awesome but luckily we have quite a few Spanish speaking people in the ward. Which was a huge blessing. We teach and then the ward member translates for us. She came to church yesterday and we set her baptismal date for January 19th. She is already super ready so that date might be moved up. That has been super fun to go through. 

Our ward had their Christmas party this last Saturday and the Elders Quorum was in charge of everything. Unfortunately not many of the men wanted to come to the church on Saturday morning to decorate. Before Elder Jarrett left he volunteered the missionaries in Smyrna to come help. So Elder Pittman and I went to the church on Saturday to decorate! We played florists for a little while! We did the flower arrangements and washed some dishes haha. After that we got some Taco bell and went home to finish studies and do some missionary work for a while. Then It was time for the Party! It was super cool. The ward is pretty small so it was super different to be able to talk to every single person that was at the party. Unlike back in Utah it felt like 2000 people showed up for every event. The party was catered unlike any of the Christmas parties back in Utah haha. We had tons of really good turkey and ham. It was a good old time. It was finished and we help clean up and everything. Went home and went to bed. 

And then catastrophe hit. Elder Pittman and I both got some kind of stomach bug either from taco bell or the  ward Christmas party. and we were both up at around 2:30. To put it nicely we were trying to get rid of the bug. Haha but the pains were there all of Sunday. And usually if I were in that much pain I would have just gone back to the apartment and get myself back together there. But unfortunately we had planned all sorts of sacraments to take to people and lessons to get to so we were extremely busy and didn't go back to the apartment until night time. Which was super busy. Let's just say it was the busiest day I've had in a while which would have been wonderful if I hadn't be suffering. But overall a really good week. I hope everyone had a good week. Don't forget to light your community this week. Love you! 

-Elder Dorrance

"I don't think it's going to look a lot like Christmas"

I tried to give myself a haircut
I didn't like how it turned out
Gave up all hope

Week 10 -Transfers!

TRANSFERSSS 

On Tuesday we had transfers and Elder Jarrett went home and I drove back to Smyrna Delaware with Elder Pittman. He is from Roosevelt Utah he is super cool. We have quite a bit in common. It's been a pretty slow week. Tuesday was pretty much just filled with us traveling back to our area. Wednesday was a rough day. We had nothing planned and what we did plan for was finished in about half the time that we thought it would take. Haha so by five pm we had run out of things to do for the entire day. Which was kind of the worst. 

On Thursday we pretty much did the same thing as Wednesday except it didn't seem as depressing haha we had a few things planned. We stopped by to see a guy named John. He was a Bible referral who started his own church when he was 22 years old. We pretty much got preached to for an hour straight. We kept trying to teach the restoration but kept getting interrupted and got thrown into really off topic subjects. 

Nothing really happened on Friday but on Saturday we saw God's hand specifically in our efforts. It was awesome. So it all started out with us planning on going to the Parade to do some street contacting and sharing a message about Christ. But when we got there we realized most of the people would be watching the parade and not wanting to be distracted by other people. Especially since it was rainy and cold, people Really didn't want to talk to us. So we ended up pulling off into a parking lot to see if we could make calls to get members to come to a lesson with us we had later in the afternoon. The person we are teaching is Maria and she is from Cape Verde. We talked to her earlier in the week and set up the appointment to teach her. So we made like 20 calls to members but everyone was busy. Finally we got a hold of Brother Phillips and so we set it up to meet at her house. When we got there and started teaching her we quickly found out that she didn't speak much English. We also quickly found out thank goodness that Brother Phillips went Spanish speaking on his mission and still was pretty fluent. So we taught her and her daughter in in English and Brother Phillips taught her in Spanish. It was so crazy how he was the only one that was able to go out with us. She is amazing and wants to get baptized. That experience just showed me how important it is to show faith and Heavenly father will do things for you. It was an amazing opportunity. 

That's all for the week. Thank you all so much, keep sending mail and packages and emails everything and anything helps. Haha love yall 

-Elder Dorrance

Only picture for the week - New Companion Elder Pittman

Week 8/9 Thanksgiving

Hello! 
It's been a long time since I wrote an email like this. Two weeks is a long time. I'm not gonna go into huge detail from the past two weeks because I'm lazy and don't want to type that much haha but since the twelfth nothing happened until the 16th which was zone conference which was super weird. It was super cool President made a cool analogy with being busy and being productive. You can take ten steps in place and go nowhere or you can do ten steps forward and go places. Pretty much told us we are doing things wrong and we need to fix them. Then we had interviews which was cool. 


After that  it was Saturday the 17 and we went to Brother Bob Young's who is an old man who is a convert to the church who has been bed ridden since the 13th of October. We go over there and read scriptures and talk about the gospel with him. He really enjoys it and asked for book of Mormons so he can give them to his hospice workers haha. Then we went over to a family's house for 3 and a half hours to try and bring a tree down. It was about 40 feet tall and they wanted to cut it at about 25 or 30 feet. We started out with trying to get his chainsaw started for about 30 minutes while Elder Jarrett and I chopped at it with a dull rusted hatchet. We got a rope hooked around the top half of it so one person yanked while the other one swung a hatchet at this tree thirty feet in the air. Nobody really thought that one through until after. After we couldn't get the chainsaw going and the hatchet wasn't making any headway on the tree. Brother Shahan climbed thirty feet in the air with a huge sledge hammer and the rusted hatchet and tried hammering the hatchet into the side of the tree. And told us to yank on the tree to see if we could break it. So while he was swaying thirty feet in the air hammering away at the rusted hatchet Elder and Jarret and I just kept pulling on the rope. When that wouldn't work he got his tractor and attached the rope to it and tried backing up to pull the tree down haha. After all that the tree still stood. Looking down at our stupidity. Finally after all of that, he remembered he had a second chainsaw and we got the tree down in about 10 minutes. 

And then nothing really happened until the next week when we went on exchanges with the zone leaders on Tuesday. It was so fun I went up into their area and met tons of cool people! Wednesday night we had a baptismal interview with a guy named Matt. He is a super cool guy who has had some heart issues and was a federal interrogator. He has been investigating the church for about 20 years now and finally made the decision to be baptized which was super awesome. Then it was Thanksgiving! It was super cool I had two Thanksgivings and ate soooooo much haha but it was a good day I got to go to the turkey bowl the ward was having and played some ultimate Frisbee and football. We had to play ultimate because nobody remembered to bring a football. Then it was Friday which was so awesome. Elder Jarrett got to go to the Philadelphia temple for the last time because he is going home this transfer so I got to go on exchanges with two other elders in Philadelphia. Which was sooo fun! It was cool to talk to the people on the subway and on the street. We passed this guy that was just straight up rolling a joint on the subway haha it was awesome! You definitely don't see that kind of stuff in Smyrna Delaware. Haha after that nothing else really happened.

It has been a pretty good two weeks with a few ups and downs but I'm excited to see what transfers bring. This first transfer was really hard but really worth it. I learned a lot about missionary work and about my testimony. Thanks for everyone's support! Love you! 

-Elder Dorrance

My District

Thanksgiving Pork - Boiled for an hour and then baked for 6 hours

This is a balut.  It takes about 22 days for a duck egg to hatch.  They cook the fertilized egg at about day 19 or 20.  

"It tastes like an egg - with a little bit of duck"

Philadelphia Skyline

Subway

It's like a tiny grocery store with guys in the back making Phillies. Best Philly Cheese-steak!

Made a really good pancake

Week 7 - Yooo

Emma Hale Smith Family Home  ("Hale Mansion")

Okay so this week's email is going to be a little bit different because typing what i do every day of the week is so long and i mean if you really want me to i will but it just takes forever. Anyway I think I am just gonna put some highlights from the week.

It's been kinda slow this week. Nothing really exciting happened this week except I got a cold Wednesday and Thursday which were two really fun days! Wednesday started out with some really light service for the second counselor in the bishopric who bought us chinese for lunch which was super nice of him. Lots of different stop bys of less actives until we drove up to Broomall PA to sleep at the assistants apartment because on Thursday we were heading up to Harmony PA to checkout the Priesthood restoration site which was awesome. While we were getting ready for bed on Wednesday night there was an elder that wanted to flip a knife around and see if he could catch it after flipping it but ended up just stabbing his hand. He went to the ER at like 10:30. haha that was like the most wild thing that has happened in a while. 

On Thursday! we went up to the Priesthood restoration site which was amazing. It was so spiritual to see the grove and Joseph's and Emma's houses. I thought I knew pretty much everything about when Joseph was translating the plates. There was so much that went into that. I didn't know that when he got the plates he had to run 3 miles and fight off 3 guys. I can barely run one mile and i don't have to fight anyone or carry 50 pound gold plates. But yea, if anyone is ever close to Harmony PA for sure check the restoration site out. it is so spiritual. After that we headed back home and got back at around 9 PM. It was also so fun to see all of my MTC friends at the site.  

On Friday the biggest thing we did was go to this referral we got. It was an old preacher who wouldn't let us talk at all haha he just kept going on about how bad sex was and pretty much told us about all of his past sins  which was really scary. We left him with a pamphlet so he could read on his own. HAHA we will see how much he got from that when we visit him this week. 

That's pretty much all i got this week. its been crazy this week it went by pretty fast.  I suggest reading the book Saints,if you can. it tells about the history of the church but not informational it tells it as a story. I have been reading it and it is so cool to see the history of the church. 

That's all!

 Love you very much

-Elder Dorrance

Priesthood Restoration Site -Harmony PA

Joseph and Emma Smith Home

This whole house was so weird. It was for sale it was built like 134 years ago and it didn't have any hallways just rooms