1st Week in Rhode Island

My mission President, President Packard, is awesome! Our first day, we went street contacting in the Boston Common!!!! Wow! Me and another guy placed 3 BOM and made 1 referral in the park but we only spent an hour and a half doing so since it was our first day. It was SWEET dad! I told everybody I was just here last year and so I was like "yeah, I know where the good spots will be" (right on the freedom trail line:) 

So, right now I am currently residing in Providence, RI, specifically in Central Falls (just north of the city). This place is Awesome!!!! The weather is super muggy and we ride bikes everywhere, just like real missionaries:) My companion's (trainer's) name is Elder Richardson, he's our DL (district leader) and he's really chill. He's a pretty big guy planning to walk on to U of A after the mission. He's from Gilbert, AZ too so we have a ton of things in common. The one thing that I love about the area already is THE MEMBERS. They are so sweet and there are a ton of them in this area. They have feed us beans rice and carne every night, so Karen don't worry, I'm getting fed... a lot!

So the Spanish ward was way cool as well. Everyone here in this part of RI is either Dominican, Puerto Rican, Guatemalan, Columbian, etc... All hispanics! Everybody refers to me as Elder Berto... since they can't pronounce my last name. haha!The bishop and the ward here are solid. The one thing bishop really stresses is the members need to get involved in the work. How awesome is that?! And my bishop is from the canary islands which is pretty cool too. I cannot tell you how much I love the members already. The F. family was the first family I've met and they are hilarious. Even though they preferred to speak in english the whole time, we had conversations about Gabriel Iglesias and making fluffy quotes. It was great! 

A lot of our work here is being stressed to teach members, so they can refer us to their non member friends. Right now our main focus is getting to know the members so they can feel comfortable with us and make those referrals. Its great how the members are willing to be involved. To give you an idea of how big the ward is, we have 4 elders, 4 sisters, and 20 ward missionaries. How crazy is that!

So get this, on saturday we (me, my companion, Elder Stones and Elder Collins) rode our bikes through this kind of rough neighborhood to get back to our apartment. when we noticed these 2 guys playing football in the middle of the street. So me and my companion got off our bikes to talk with these guys and told them who we were and everything. As soon as we knew it, all of us were playing street 2 hand touch football, with all of our nice clothes on and everything and it was way fun! We got all intense and were beat down sweating after we played for a couple hours. The guys names are J. and A. They thought we were "tight" and wanted us to come back and play some more with them. My companion and I ended up teaching "J" the next day and we think he has some potential to improve his life and may even consider joining, we'll see how everything goes later on though. 

 On that same Saturday, after we all got done visiting one of the member's homes, it started to down pour on us... and we had to ride 5 miles back to get to our apartment. It was such an incredible experience! We got back to our place drenched and it was then that I knew that this work was not going to be easy, but it would be all worth it. 

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The work is amazing and I hope you can share some of your experiences with me as well.

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I'm going to continue to stay strong and continue to work as hard as I can.