No More Couches (week 1/29 to 2/5)

SORRY THIS EMAIL IS A WEEK LATE! I WILL SEND THIS WEEK’S EMAIL SOON!

The work here in Charlotte has been really slow since we got here because we had nothing to go off of when we got here. It’s been a long few weeks full of lots of hard work and things are finally beginning to pay off! We now have a few people that we are working with and so I’m really excited that things are beginning to move forward! Truly a success story of the principle “Get on your knees and pray, then get on your feet and work” (Gordon B. Hinckley)

In other news, we told the housing people, The Monteleone’s, about all of the things that are wrong with our apartment so they decided to come and inspect it themselves while we were gone and we got a call from them and they just kept on listing off all sorts of things that they wanted us to fix or get rid of or replace so we had a bit of a discussion with them as we explained that almost none of the stuff or damages that they found have been caused by us, but rather by other missionaries in the past so now they are going to be working with us to get our apartment up and running as it should be. Usually the mission only rents a particular apartment for us missionaries for about 2 or so years before the missionaries inevitably move to a new apartment, but our apartment has housed missionaries for 4 straight years and now we are supposed to make it as good as new which is going to be a big task. We’ve already spent a lot of time over the past few days just cleaning and scrubbing everything.

In other news, I got to learn how to use the bus system this week! We only get the car every other week, so on the off weeks we usually bike but this area has lots of busses (and my tire popped) so we’ve been trying to use the busses and I think I’m starting to get the hang of it! We only took the wrong bus once but I can’t count the number of times that we’ve missed our bus or have missed our stop whilst riding the bus haha. It has also provided lots of opportunities to talk with people that we wouldn’t have met otherwise!

On another random note, we had interviews with our mission President this week and apparently some missionaries told him that they would get up on time, but they would just go out and lay on the couches for an extra hour or two. I guess President Alexander decided that there was an easy fix to the problem, and on Saturday morning we had a mission-wide call in which he announced that he is banning all couches in mission apartments. He said “if you’re resourceful enough to get the couches, then you’re resourceful enough to get rid of them”. Pretty wild stuff! We also had our hammocks confiscated for the same reason! So that isn’t awesome, but I’m sure it will all work out and we will soon see a lot more miracles throughout the mission.

We also went on a super fun hike with everyone in our zone so I will attach some pictures from that!

Love y’all! See you next week!
Elder Klingler