March 14, 2021 Grand Island

 Hey y'all! The first week in the field has flown by! I want to share a few experiences I've had and a few lessons I've learned, but I promise to do my best to keep it interesting. 

Well, first off, Nebraska is a pretty normal state at first glance. I'm serving right now in Grand Islands, which looks a lot like Homedale Idaho or Nyssa Oregon with small old houses made when extravagant roofs were popular. Everything is close together, the roads are small, the sidewalks are cracked, and there's political signs shoved everywhere. The houses are quirky. Some have bright red brick, some have peeling paint, while others have fresh coats of neon pink trim or the brightest lime green paint I've ever seen! The houses seem to have as much character as the people who own them! Speaking of, Grand Island is full of so much need. 

About 75% of the traffic lights are set up horizontally. And most of Grand Island is made up of lots of small intersecting streets. As a fun fact, there are almost no stop signs at these intersections. Everyone seems to think that they have the right of way when driving, but I have yet to see any crashes or close calls, so I guess it must work?...

So, in the town of Grand Island there is ONE ward. In this SINGLE ward, there are NINE missionaries!!! Which is cRaZy! It does help that there are over 800 members (only about 200 are active tho). Which leads me to another fun fact! In my whole zone of almost 50 missionaries, my companion and I are the only sisters! Also, all the elders in our zone are Spanish speaking! AND my companion was originally assigned to Brazil so she speaks Portugeese (and dabbles in Spanish). I'm the only missionary in the entire zone who assigned to speak English! So everyone has a lot of fun talking circles around me and I have no idea what anyone is saying. 

We live in an apartment directly across from a large 24/7 operating slaughter house. It slaughters about 70,000 head of cattle and 30,000 pigs a day! So we see huge stock trailers full of animals heading to the building pretty much nonstop. (I'm all for beef but 100,000 animals a day is heartbreaking). When it gets windy, the whole town smells like canned dog food.

Our apartment is also right along a train track which runs 24/7. I keep bolting myself awake at night when the trains rattle and toot by.

I pranked some of the elders! On my first day, I took off my name tag and walked up to their apartment door to ask if they would baptize me. It was pretty hilarious!

All of the missionaries that cover the Grand Island ward are pretty close. We see most of them everyday.

It was one of the elder's birthdays on Saturday so we drew pictures and notes on their car. They accidentally left a window open and I said I was going to climb into their car (I was wearing a dress). Immediately, the elders all formed a circle around me and turned their backs, so I had a chastity circle or something. It was very kind and pretty funny. Actually, all of the elders and my trainer are super amazing people. 

We're super close to the elders!  We all kind of trade off the people that we are teaching (we get the old single women and they get the Spanish speakers). Which, by the way, most of what we do is ministering to older single women who have a hard time living on their own. 

The elders knit! One trio companionship of elders is taking knitting lessons from an elderly lady in the ward! They call her their grandma and it's super cute to see them completely focused on their balls of yarn and their four inches of a scarf. Another recent convert gave me some crochet hooks and immediately the elders were over to demand that I share.

Also, the members that feed us are cRaZy! They feed all nine of us, so they buy everything in bulk. We had a huge bag of Hawaiian rolls PER companionship (4 bags) and multiple huge pans of casseroles and vegetables and multiple bags of apples and cuties and bananas. I guess they think that missionaries are bottomless pits? Four days later, we're still working off a woman's casserole...

As far as activities this week, I want to share with you one of my first experiences of service in the field.

My trainer Sister Spendlove (who is completely awesome. She reminds me of a shyer version of Katie McGregor if you have the pleasure of knowing my cousin, who is one of the sweetest and happiest people I know), two elders, and I went to an older woman's house. She had a tiny little dog who's back feet would collapse in excitement when it saw you and it drag itself for several feet back and forth between us. Along with the dog, she had four cats (and we found a fifth inside her house). This woman, whom I'll call Sister Chops, was a talkative woman in her mid seventies and about 100 pounds. She was baptized about a year ago and goes to church every week in bright lipstick, a fur suit, prom dress, and eight inch stilletos! She's super cute and has a vibrance that most young adults couldn't hope to match! 

She needed some help with a bedframe that had been put in lopsided. As we all tried to take it apart gently (it was broken too), I drew upon all of my construction knowledge (thanks dad for teaching me practical knowledge and common sense). Apparently, missionaries aren't allowed to use any kind of power tool, including an electric screwdriver...? Any ways, as we were trying to figure out how to pull apart the wooden bedframe, Sister Chops came in and sprayed the whole joint (and my hands) in cooking spray to lubricate. To clarify, it was a joint that very clearly did not need lubrication... When she left the room, we all had a good laugh. 

Well, we finally were able to fix her bed and helped her clean the basement of cat poop and lots of old bits and ends because she had a hard time with the stairs. There was so much cat hair everywhere- it floated down from the ceiling and bathed the carpet. It took us a couple of hours to get everything done, but Sister Chops was so grateful. She offered us dinner in return, and was heartbroken that we aren't allowed to eat with her, but she sent us a wonderful dinner to go (my first experience with fried porkchops, and then gravy and mashed potatoes which were all super good)!

There's another Sister, whom I'll call Alice, who I met. Just a couple of weeks ago, my trainer and her previous companion had found her in the list of less actives. She had only been a member for about a year, but that's fairly common out here for individuals to struggle to stay activated as soon as the missionaries focus on different people. Sister Alice had suffered a stroke several years ago,  

which left her paralyzed in her left limbs. Anyways, when my trainer and her companion opened the door to Sister Alice's house, they quickly realized that Sister Alice had not done any sort of cleaning in several months. Dirty dishes had accumulated throughout the house and once the roaches had started crawling up from her drains, she hadn't bathed or showered in many months. While Sister Alice visited with the sisters missionaries,  roaches crawled across her lap and through her hair... Just before I came, the ward and sister missionaries helped Sister Alice move into a new apartment and end the roach infestation. I had the pleasure of visiting this Sister just a couple of days ago and have had many conversations with her.  She is a bright trusting soul who truly delights in serving others. From the moment that we walked into her apartment,  she loved me even though I was a stranger.  She spoke of the many people that she had brought soup to that week and of the copies of the book of Mormon that she had given to friends. 

If my mission was made unto a comedy, so far it contains a whole lot of missionaries fighting over members and people to teach.    Missionaries stealing members, converts, and people being taught right and left!  Currently, my trainer and I have two people in date (Jasmine and Ronald) but neither of them came to church this week. Or the week before... Over in Nebraska, you can find service hours to last you weeks. The need is so great. But getting someone to listen to you or keep commitments? It's a bit like pulling out teeth. 

And then, I had my first meeting with someone who was investigating the church! She has been taking the lessons for several years now, and is slowly coming around but keeps finding very meticulous and obscure parts of the church that concern her. For this lesson in particular, she had lots of questions about racism in the church. We had a really good discussion on the subject and eased her fears quite a bit! And then I accidentally said something that offended her and she spent the next forty - five minutes chewing me out and basically telling me that I wasn't cut out to be a missionary and that I needed to talk with my superiors and change if I ever wanted to talk to people again (There was a LOT of crying on my end)...

So I apologized multiple times and turned to the Lord to repent. Luckily, the gospel allows us to do that every time we fall! What also helps a little is that my trainer told me that she is a very sensitive individual and did a similar thing to her previous companion when she pronounced 'Terestial' and told her that it sounded like extraterrestrial so she must be pronouncing it wrong and that she didn't want the missionaries to embarrass themselves in front of other people so they should probably talk to their missionary leaders.

I've got a long way to go until I become a good missionary but through Christ, I can succeed. 

Love you all, 

Sister Brice