MTC Photos

26 September 2011

Im just gonna give a run down of the ppl we've been meeting with:

 

Gary (60's): had surgery on his foot but wants to get baptized as soon as he is medically able. We like to stop by and visit him and his wife. on saturday we cut down a tree for them (that was way fun!) and then they fed us breakfast. they are feeding us dinner tonight :)

 

Brother Wood (60): has been investigating the church for 10 years. after a great lesson with him on Tuesday he now is to the point where he wants to be baptized! he just needs to come to church 3 times and then we'll be able to set him up with a baptismal date! problem is he works every sunday, so we've been fasting and praying for him to get a chance to go to church! God willing, something will happen soon, he'll get off work, come to church, and be baptized soon after! him and Gary are good friends.

 

Ray-T (18): Ive never taught her, she is hoping to get baptized on October 15. Her mom doesnt want her to get baptized as is pretty anti-mormon. we'll see how that goes.

 

Jessica (28): She is getting married on Oct 22 and will hopefully be baptized on Oct 29. she came to church for the first time yesterday and said she really enjoyed it :)

 

Matt (20's): we had dinner cancel on us last week, so that person found a replacement to feed us (very nice of them). when we got to dinner the y had their non-member friend there! We ate dinner, chatted about biology (hes a biologist), and then we taught him a lesson after! hes a born again christian, and so they are usually pretty hard core and somewhat anti. but he listened to us and agreed to read the book of mormon and pray about it. we called him about 5 days after we taught him and he was already half way done with the BoM! so he's gonna finish (which is sweet!) and then hopefully we'll get to teach him again. His friends that fed us dinner are pretty excited!

 

Chris (late 30's): elementary school teacher, looked into the church before. he is really interested in raising his future children in the church! we're really excited about teaching him! He agreed to work towards baptism.

 

Chris's wife (30's): Chris wants her to join the church with him. We've only met her once. we dont think shes very interested. we're kinda worried that shes gonna mess things up for Chris

 

Yuki (60's): we've only talked to her on the phone for the past couple weeks, shes been pretty busy. Shes gonna be out of town this week, hopefully when she comes back she'll still want to talk to us! She doesnt understand a lot of the Doctrines and will be a work in progress for awhile i think

 

Carey (80's): This is the sick lady we were teaching. She passed away this week. It's nice to know she is not in pain any more.

 

 

Transfers are coming up in about 3 weeks and all these baptisms will hit probably in 4 or 5 weeks, so Elder M is really hoping he gets to stay here next transfer. Hes already been here for about 7 months so he's pretty worried hes gonna be moving.

 

we're planning an big Luau and church tour for october 14th. it might fail though because our ward leaders are slackers and keep failing on their commitments.

 

I dont think i broke any laws this week.

 

We say this kid riding his bike with his friend riding on his pegs. they were about 10 years old. Marks and I were joking about how that wasnt safe and then they crashed into the grass. We laughed a lot. they were ok.

 

In testimonies meeting (i call it testimonies meetings now, because there are usually more than one testimony in it) yesterday a 16 year old girl got up and bore her "testimony" about how she was thankful she went to the church activity because she got to watch Jimmy eat 12 hot dogs and she ate a whole package of mozzarella cheese. that was pretty funny, we had to try and control our laughter b/c, as missionaries, we're supposed to behave ourselves lol.

 

Anyone who wrote me a letter, i'll write you one back asap :)

 

The temperature here has been close to 100 all week. one day we hit 104. I'm missin fall weather and changing leaves and football! I heard both BYU and OSU won on saturday, but they both got stomped the week before. Im glad I have better/ more exciting things to worry about than my lame football teams.

 

Thanks for all the love and prayers (im assuming yall love and pray for me :P)

 

Love

Elder Donovan :)

26 September 2011

Hey everybody! Hope you guys are all doing great. I love you guys so much. I was able to get the cheesecake. It was delicious! Thanks for everything.

Anyway so the most exciting news is that on tuesday Pres. Judd called to tell me that I'm going on transfer on friday. He asked me to come and be the district leader in Mamponse. So that's where I am now and I guess where I'll stay until I go home. On Tuesday we had a lot of struggle to help Joel Gyan get to his baptism interview. He stays about a 35 min bike ride from the chapel. We were waiting for him at the chapel when he called us that he didn't have any transportation there. So we had to ride to his house and take him to the ward mission leader's house and borrow a bicycle so that the three of us could ride back to the chapel. So I'm hoping on Saturday everything went well with the baptism.

 This week I also had a lot of great experiences teaching with the Book of Mormon. On Wednesday Elder Sesay and I were tired and by 8:30 we were feeling ready to go home and have dinner. We decided to call our last appointment half hoping she'd cancel on us. When we called her the call was cut and when we tried to call back the phone was off. We decided to go ahead and see her anyway. When we got there she had had a pretty rough day and was feeling sick. We were inspired to share 2 Nephi 4:15-35 with her. She was reluctant at first, but as we read she really got into it and was cheered up by it a lot. I really felt the spirit strongly myself as I read vss. 27-29. They were really important to me. The second experience was the day I was leaving Teshie. We went to see a woman who we had taught for a long time, but we had to stop teaching her because she couldn't come to the church on Sundays. Since I was saying goodbye to her we told her we'd read Nephi's farewell from 2 Nephi 33. The scriptures really touched hey and she was a bit choked up by all the spirit. She told us that the other day her husband had said if she wants to start coming to the church it is ok. She promised that she'll start coming. She was so happy that day and said she was sorry that I'm going to miss here family's baptisms.

When I came here to Mamponse I was really encouraged by all the Elders in the apartment. My new/old companion is Elder Maloni (if you can remember he was my companion on my birthday last year in Alajo). I'm really excited to be back with him. He is a hard worker, and that seems true of Elder Succo and Elder Treu as well. They are both from Utah, and they are both new missionaries. Elder Succo is 3 months and is training Elder Treu who is 1 month. All of us are teaching mostly newer investigators. We had a baptism for one woman on Saturday. Her husband is a recent convert and as a priest he did a great job performing the baptism. Her name is Theresa Azumah. We had to fill the font for her twice. When we filled it on Friday night we forgot to close the drain and the water escaped. I love you guys and I'm excited to finish my mission strong. President Judd is always asking us to sprint to the finish.

Love you guys.
Love, Elder Chambers

19 September 2011

Everything is going well here! not a lot happened this week, but we're on the brink of greatness :) Im missin fall weather for sure. the high for today is about 95 degrees and the desert is not very exciting, but thats ok! we dont tract very much, maybe about 45 min a day, just to fill time in between lessons. hopefully soon we wont even have time to do that. We taught 14 lessons this past week and hopefully soon we'll be up to about 22. We missed a few of our investigators last week and we've got a couple new ones that hopefully start progressing. P-day has been pretty lame today so far. We tried to play football today (side note: today is the 1 year anniversary of me breaking my leg, woooops! dont worry, it was touch football today and i wrapped my ankle), but our zone isnt very athletic and no one knew what they were doing. and then like 45 mins into the game, the park got evacuated because of a bomb threat. LAME. so we havnt done anything too exciting. haircuts and shopping later probably. Im not very happy with BYU of Ohio State and im almost glad i dont get to watch them, because they are failing me hardcore. good thing is, i have much better and more important things to worry about! I hate shaving. Thanks to all of you who emailed me this week, you got more updates than everyone else lol. Sorry I dont have more to say, it was kinda a building week, this next week will hopefully be more exciting. All is well tho! i have no complaints and things are going quite swimmingly! I enjoy hearing what yall are up to. Funny story for the week: Me and Elder M went and helped this old lady in her yard by picking pears for her. after we picked about 65 lbs of pears we talked to her for awhile. actually, mostly we just listened to her talk and we just threw rocks at each other lol. we did that for about an hour and she didnt notice what we were doing until Elder M threw a pine cone that almost hit her lol. it was reeeeally funny and we laughed pretty hard. Anyways, love you all! thanks for the updates! keep them coming :) yall are in my prayers, be safe :) youre favorite missionary, elder donovan :)

19 September 2011

Hey everyone! I hope you guys are all doing great. Happy BIrthday to mom! I hope you guys were all nice to her. For us this week was very interesting and productive. There were no transfers in our district except for Elder Collings who received a new missionary to train. The new missionary in our apartment's name is Elder Beaufeaux from Arizona. This week we did a lot of teaching with two of our investigators who have baptismal dates for this saturday. We also went with our ward mission leader to find some more of the members houses and get some referrals. On sunday we had a couple of investigators that came to church for the first time. One of them, William Jappong, really is understanding everything we are teaching. He's had a hard time the past couple of years. He was investigating the church in a different town and was about to be baptized when a car hit him and shattered his arm. He moved to teshie and a couple weeks ago he saw us as we were going to a new place we hadn't been to search for a referral. He called us and we started teaching him again. A funny thing happened to me last week when we were on exchanges. I was in the other area with Elder Boadu when we stopped to see some members. Some of the kids there carried out their small 3-year-old sister and put her in my lap. Do you know what sweet 3-year-old kids do when they just wake up? They pee. And she peed all over my lap. They told me that means I'm going to have twin girls when I get married. If that's true then I guess it's worth it? I love you guys so much. Love, Elder Chambers

Pictures From Las Vegas

I found these photos on the mission blog

12 September 2011

first of all, i have been severely lacking on mail, and emails. so step it up :) anyone can write me, or email me, or even DearElder me. there are lots of options. so hit me up, i'll write you back :)

other than that im doing really well :) elder b left on friday, so now its just me and elder m. we're doin work! V got baptized on Wednesday, and we've got got 4 other ppl that are close. mostly we teach lessons and contact ppl we've already met. we do some tracting, but its usually only about an hour a day, mostly to fill time and rack up blessings ;) Someone called us on friday and said they knew an old lady that wanted to get baptized! so we were psyched! we ran home, changed into our nicest clothes to impress this woman and ran through a couple of scenarios for different lessons we could teach (we didnt want to mess this up). so we got to her house, we were pretty excited to teach her. and then we found at that she was completely bed ridden. and almost completely unresponsive. we were like uhhhhhhhh.... what are we supposed to do!?! she didnt even have enough energy to open her eyes or answer any of our questions. a few times we actually thought she was asleep. Its pretty sad, but we cant do much for her :/ i guess it was just a bad day for her, so we're gonna go back and try again, but we'll see.

today we went to and played tennis. it was pretty fun! its pretty much always sunny here so thats nice. (i think its about 90 degrees here today.) once we got to the tennis courts everything went down hill. im not very good at tennis, cause ive only play like 4 times, so i was trying to hit a ball that bounced close to my feet and i accidentally hit myself in the forehead with my racket lol. long story short, i cracked my head open and now i have 13 stitches in my forehead lol. it'll heal up fine, and i'll finally have that cool face scar ive always wanted! for right now im just telling ppl i got hit by a car lol.

on sundays we go to 3 sacrament meetings, and 3 correlation meetings. we actually end up at the church building from 8am until 5pm. its kinda dumb, but we need the members help with finding ppl, so thats what we've got to do! in our 3 wards combined, there were probably 800 members at church on sunday. and i know maybe 20 of them lol. thats ok, i'll keep learning em, and if all else fails, i can call anyone "brother" or "sister" and get away with it lol.

Anyway, thats about all thats up with me. my companions cool and so are the rest of the missionaries we work with. alls well in Vegas and it feels like ive been here for a lot longer than a week lol. if you want to know anything else, you'll have to send me an email/letter and tell me what your up to, and then i'll answer your questions :P

Love you all, Elder Donovan Chambers :)

ps that whole cracking my head open with a tennis racket was a lie. i have no stitches in my forehead. anyone who believed that i am that uncoordinated, SHAME ON YOU

6 September 2011

Hey yall, just keep sending that mail to the mission office address I gave you, they'll send it to me :) (you'd better be sending mail :P) got here yesterday. we woke up at 4am utah time to get to the airport, that was pretty awesome! they just piled us all up on a couple buses and we caravaned up to the airport. there were 19 of us missionaries on our flight, that was pretty cool! when we got of off of the plane in Las vegas, we met prez and sister black and the took us to their house for breakfast! then we went to the mission office for orientation. that was kinda awful! we were there from about 11-5 and the whole thing was watching safety videos and filling out forms. finally after all that we got our assignments and our companions. My new comp is Elder M. He's from British Columbia, been on his mission for a year, and has trained 3 other new missionaries. Elder B is also with us for this week before he heads off to England. Our area is the Tule Springs area and we're over 3 wards! from what I've heard, one of the wards really loves the missionaries and works with them a lot, and the other 2 don't really trust the elders too much. so we'll work on that. but everyone says that the members hook us up all the time. Someone will feed us dinner every night. Last night we ate with The E family, they are way cool and take care of the missionaries well. Our apartment is supposed to be a 4 man apartment but once B leaves at the end of the week, there will be only two of us there for the rest of the transfer. so we wave 2 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms, a kitchen and a big living room for just 2 of us :) and we have a mini van lol. we have a baptism on Wednesday for V. i haven't met her yet but she sounds way cool, shes 13 and is joining without her parents, but they are supporting her and Elder M says she has a great testimony. the goal for the mission is to get 1000 baptisms by the end of the year, right now we're at 580, so we've got some to do! anyways, so far so good! haven't had the chance to do too much work yet, but I'm sure by next week I'll have some fun stories about my failed attempts at teaching. Hope everyone is well! I was glad to hear that both BYU and OSU won their games on Saturday, that's always good! I'll get you some pictures soon. miss you all! love elder chambers :)

5 September 2011

How are you guys all doing? Things are nice enough here. This past week a lot things were happening in the community as the people of Teshie finished their festival. It is called the Homowo. You can google it. The main final event was on Saturday. Most of the town went to witness it and we had lessons fail. We went to the chapel and were able to watch them running through the street. It was interesting. We have been teaching a lot of people, but it has been difficult for them to come to church. Transfers are next week. I'm kind of hoping to go on transfer. I think that way I'll have to work harder and things will go easier, since that way I'll finish my mission in a ward were I don't have any friends. It's way too wierd that I'll be saying goodbye to my mission and to Ghana. Love you guys, hope you are all doing awesome. Good luck to Dono on his first day in Vegas! Love, Elder Chambers