Elder Nathan S Moser: Monday, Nov 2, 2015

Friends and family!

It has been a cold, rainy week here in Coulee Dam, but the spirit is keeping us warm!

To be honest, things have been kinda slow here. Most of our week has been spent visiting less actives and recent converts and tracting. Tracting here is very interesting, because there are such varied beliefs. Some people are hardcore atheist that tell us to go away, others are devout catholic, some are Native American and just don't give a rip, and the list goes on and on. Most of the people that we have come across are really friendly as well. Some let us into their homes even if they don't want to hear our message.

I have met some really great people, though. One recent convert that we frequently visit, V., is an older black lady that lives with her little dog, Earl. Her relationship with Earl is funny. Every time we visit her, her dog starts yapping away and she spends most of the lesson threatening the dog, like "ooohh, Earl, Imma slap you!" I love teaching her, because the work is a little slow right now, and she is one of the few people that we get to teach regularly.

To be honest, I don't really know what to talk about next, because so much happens every week that it isn't fair that we have to cram it all into one weekly letter. I guess I'll start with last P-Day!

Last Monday, Elder Coy and I took a tour of the dam. It was pretty cool. There were about 8 of us in the tour, and they put us all in a van that was being followed by a vehicle with some armed guards.

We saw a bit of the inside of the dam, which contains who knows how many miles of tunnels, and 15 or so pumps that each pump about about one billion gallons of water per day. The tour guide said that the dam is the Largest in North America, the 2nd biggest concrete structure in the world, and contains enough concrete to build an interstate from Seattle to Miami, or a sidewalk that wraps around the equator twice. Its so big that the engineers and workers ride bikes everywhere! Other than the tour, the rest of Our P-Day was pretty chill. We are the only missionaries in the area, so we spent most of our day by ourselves relaxing and cleaning our apartment. And eating some overpriced tacos from a taco truck in town.

We actually got to travel quite a bit last week! We had about 200 miles left for the month, so we used them as much as we could to visit the smaller less-traveled towns. We hit up some of the smaller towns like Wilbur, Coulee City, and Nespelem.

Long road to nowhere....or .

We even picked up a few potential investigators along the way that invited us back, something that I hadn't seen yet in the mission field. I am most hopeful for someone that we met while tracting in Grand Coulee (confused by all of the town names yet?). She said that we could teach her because she is actually in the process of looking for a new church. She has been doing an "online church thing" for the past few weeks and says that it just isn't doing it for her, so we need to get over there before the Jehovah Witnesses snatch her up.

Nespelem Town Hall

I met a lot of cool people this week and I probably don't have enough time to talk about them all. But I have to tell you about one guy we met, an inactive guy name Brother C. We decided to meet him and invite him back to church. Brother C. is a big guy with a Harley, beard, and tattoos everywhere. But when he invited us into his house, we saw his ENORMOUS Beanie Baby collection. So. Many. They were actually his wife's, but they were displayed in the living room for all to behold. We talked with him for about an hour and a half on everything, from his time spent in the Air Force to the gospel of Christ. He is still a believer, but he doesn't want to travel all the way to Coulee Dam for church. That is the way it is for most of the inactives up here, unfortunately.

I have seen and smelled a lot of marijuana in the past few days. One lady we tracted was growing it right in her flowerbed in front of her house. Some places you can just smell it. It smells pretty nasty, like skunk sagebrush. Blehg. We were out tracting last night and we asked one guy that was outside if he had ever talked to the missionaries before, to which he replied, "No... I'm blazin! Hahaha" so that was pretty much a quality conversation.

I fasted yesterday that Elder Coy and I would get into someones house to talk to them about the Gospel. Yesterday was also the day that we went up to Naspelem, a really small/ghetto reservation town, so I really didn't think that we would make it into anyone's house tracting. But the first door we knocked on let us in without hesitation! It turns out that the man that answered the door was a missionary from Wenatchee that had moved to the reservation to start a christian church there. Being a missionary, he was pretty set in his ways, and we could tell that he wanted to bash - but we just testified to him what we know to be true, and that is something that you can't argue. It is cool to see how heavenly father answers prayers. He answered my prayer pretty much instantly, but in a way that he knew I needed. We didn't really get to teach that missionary, but now I know what to study for the future, some of those being things that I have never even thought of before.

I wish I had time to write about everything, but I don't. So here is a summary:

Some of the cutest kids I have ever seen are here and they love the missionaries.

Coulee Dam is full of great people.

The church is true.

The book is blue.

I love you all!