Zone changes~ Staying in Wellsville

Hey guys!                                                                   January 27^th, 2015

Well this was an exciting week! We had all of the usual stuff going on of course, visiting less actives, meetings, cold, etc.... So I'll just tell you about some of the interesting things from the week. We are more in a finding phase right now trying to get new investigators so we went tracting a couple of times and we went to this one neighborhood which is the nicer one for around Wellsville called standards. Anyways, we went there and every single person said they weren't interested but for some reason everyone was super nice. Several people let us in or came out and talked on their door steps for ten, fifteen minutes, all super nice, had good conversations. They even thanked us for coming around and knocking on their doors! Which is surprising since some people threaten to call the cops on us but they were thankful! The downside is none of them were interested in having us come back.

Another good thing happening in the area is the college students are finally back in school so that gives makes our congregation a little bigger. So, there are two colleges in our area literally right next to each other. One side of the street is one college and across the street is the other. So there's I think five girls that are going to school there that come to Wellsville for church. Another plus with school back is there's institute classes once a week were we can try and get some of the other members at the school to go to. We now have lots more people to go and contact and they're around our age so that's a plus! They have a gym where we can play basketball some nights and try to contact people! So pretty much, Alfred opening back up makes it a whole new area and the Branch President really wants us to focus on working with people up there.

The only other thing from this week was transfers calls were today! So,

18 Elders are coming out and some Sisters so the whole mission pretty much switched. We got a bunch of new zone leaders, a ton of people are training, some areas are closing, they're flushing a couple areas, there's sisters in new areas now, and pretty much everyone moved....except for me and Elder Christensen! We're still down in Wellsville! It's crazy because literally almost everyone moved or changed! So, today for p-day the entire zone is going to Canandaigua to play basketball and stuff since everyone's moving so that'll be fun!

Love ya guys!

Elder Daugs

 Palmyra South Zone

Don't touch the chairs!!

Hey guys!                                                                                           January 18th, 2015

So this week we visited a few less actives but not as many as we've been doing in the past couple weeks. Five or six of them actually requested that their records be removed from the church so it pretty sad be cause they know what they're missing out on but it's just not that important to them. David had his missionary farewell this week and he's heading over to Japan so our huge congregation got one less! And the branch president and his wife came back to town so it's a little bit more organized at church now. It was kind of crazy and disorganized and none of the members knew what to do without them. We had exchanges this week and Elder Baldwin came down to Wellsville with me from bath. We had a lesson with three less actives but none of them can come to church at this point, which sucks. One has fainting problems where he just falls over at random times so be doesn't want to be in church and do that. The others don't have cars and one has an anxiety problem were he can't go to church so.... Don't know what to do there because they have pretty legit excuses. Then we went and found a new investigator who is super nice and asks tons of good questions and seems somewhat interested. She’s 20 so around our age and that makes it so much easier to talk to her than other old people,which is pretty much the rest of Wellsville. She's the best thing we have going right now so hopefully it works out!

Thursday, we had zone meeting in Canandaigua again and we had to drive two separate trucks up there so we both got to drive!

Friday, we had a lesson with Sierrah again (the 20 year old).  

Saturday, we were at the church and we started to set up chairs and we had it set up how we thought it normally was but later two members came and started to get mad at us and told us it was all wrong and yell at us and tell us how to do it right! You would've thought that they were going to excommunicate us for setting the chairs up wrong!! So apparently it has to be set up special or the church isn’t true or something?!?  Don't ask me?!  But anyways it has to be two rows of seven set up in the middle then a row of six, and the third and forth chair on the row have to be folding chairs because those people like them, then it splits to two columns of five chairs on each row and the third row back on the right side, second chair has to be a folding chair because that's sister Payne’s assigned seat! And a full row on the back and the chairs the people who pass the sacrament can't be the folding chairs! So pretty simple! I don think there's any possible way to do it!? Anyways these people are set on their ways!

Today, we’re hanging out as a whole district and we're going to play games, make pizza, and do whatever sounds fun! Have a great week!

Love, Elder Daugs

January 12th, 2015

Hey guys!                                                                                          January 12, 2015

This week was long and pretty cold! It was below 20’s for most of the week and the wind chill usually put it well in the negatives, so pretty warm. Only like three inches on snow but I know the rest of the mission got a lot more. We finished visiting all of the less actives and for some reason most of them don't want anything to do with the church anymore, which is sad! There are a couple of families who have some potential of coming back so we are going to focus on working with them. Right now I see it as there's no point in finding more people and baptizing them when the members don't come. It's not a very inviting environment to new converts with just the small little branch so we need to get more people coming. We only had 22 at church last week and 6 were missionaries! So, there is quite a bit of work to do. If we had only a couple families come back to church we would double the size of the branch. Another thing is our branch president has been gone for almost three weeks so we aren't able to coordinate with each other. Transfers are in two weeks, so hopefully we get to talk to him before then. Some people want to come to church but a lot of people down here don't have cars, which is problem because you can't get to church without a car. We have several people going around picking people up but I don't like to burden people by asking them to make more trips to get more people. I think if we get a couple families to come back then everything else will just fall into place.

Some bad news is our progressing investigators whose mom is a less active dropped us because they just didn't feel it was the right time, so that's a bummer. Every Sunday night we have a meeting with the Millers to talk about what we can do to improve the branch so we have a bunch of ideas of stuff to do but it's not really our jurisdiction, it's the branch presidents. Such as we think it would be good to set up a branch council, and a home teaching program to try and help the members so everyone can work together but that's not really up to us to decide. We'll bring it up with the branch president and see what he thinks though. That's pretty much it for the week!

Love ya!

Elder Daugs

January 5th, 2015

Hey guys!                                                                                                  January 5^th, 2015

So, we started this week off good! We went up to Canandaigua to play basketball with pretty much the whole zone! We played for a couple of hours, which was nice since I haven't really been able to play any on my mission yet! So it was great to play a little but I'm definitely out of shape to be running around the court! Also I forgot to tell you last week but we got to go to the temple again so that's always a plus!

New Year's Eve we went to some members house in the Hornell branch, the Seamans, with the Hornell Elders and the Dansville Sisters since nobody from our branch invited us over. We just had dinner, played a couple games and talked about the things we learned from the past year and what our goals are for next year. As for missionary work the past week we've been trying to go and contact all of the less active members in the branch, which is a lot! If everyone came it would be a ward but we're quite a ways off from that. We just went around introducing ourselves then just got a feel for how their relationship with the church is. We have a couple part member families that we are trying to work with and hopefully they will come back and we can reach the rest of their family! If all goes well with these families this small branch is going to grow quite a bit!

The Millers, the senior couple missionaries are awesome! They are great missionaries, who in my opinion work harder than some of the younger ones. They are bold and have this great vision of how to do things and are really going to help change this area! We have a meeting with them every Sunday night just to talk about missionary work and how we are going to work together and they feed is dinner, which is great! So that's pretty much the whole week, just going around visiting a ton of less actives. One cool thing was we went down to this town called Alma which makes me wonder what are the chances that it's founded by Mormons and all of the people in the town don't even know who he is! So I guess I'll have to go tell them!

Miscellaneous picture below: Not in order Chronologically

Trip to the Palmyra Temple back in December with the Owens family from his Springville area. The Owens are a wonderful family that love and include ALL the missionaries in their branch.  They have been such a great support for Elder Daugs.  They were so kind to include he and Elder Smith as they traveled up to Palmyra to go through the temple with their daughter Lynette who will be leaving soon to Brazil to serve a mission as well.  They currently have two other children out on missions.  What a wonderful family!

Elder Daugs in the Owen's home for FHE.  He was fortunate to go there for FHE many times during his time in Springville.

Shovleing snow in Springville

 Buffalo South ( Elder Jordan Smith, Elder Tyler Passey, Brother and Sister Snyder, Elder Cramer, Elder Austin Dean, Elder Wyatt Bennett, Elder Braeden Detlor, Elder Brandon Haws, Elder Brett Knudson, Elder Winsor, Sister, Morgan Miller, Elder Brinton Nielsen, Sister Ashley Petersen, Elder Jacob Fields, Elder Hayden Keller)

 Hornell District ( Elder Brandon Christensen, Elder Micah Bellon, Elder Buxton, Elder Joshua Hales, Sister Taylor Hunter, Sister Andrea Locher, Elder Mitchell Brown, Elder Derek Baldwin, Brother and Sister Jones, Brother and Sister Miller)

Palmyra South Zone (Elder Christensen, Elder Christopher Glenn, Elder Spencer Hamilton, Elder Rob Boatman, Sister Taylor Hunter, Elder Mitchell Brown, Elder Buxton, Sister Kylee Lund, Sister Andre Locher,  Elder Pedro Fierros, Sister Mia Lau, Elder Derek Baldwin, Elder Kyle Willis, Elder Joshua Hales, Elder Anthony Kelly, Elder Bryce Brindley, Elder Eric Clinger, Elder Micah Bellon)

 Visiting members close to the Pennsylvania border.

 Christmas tree 2014.  Two trees duct taped together.