Howard, Keaton

Olá everyone! Hope you are all doing well. This past week was a good one. Not a whole ton happened, but we are making progress here in Chaves. We were finally able to meet with some members outside of sacrament meeting which was awesome. It's hard because they all work so much, but we were able to meet with 3 of the 4 members in the group. One of them has a son who has a ton of friends that would love to meet with us who are around our age. So we are hoping to set something up with them. They like to play a lot of basketball, so hopefully we can do that with them.  There are a lot of random forests and groves around town, so sometimes we take the paths through them to get places. One day, as we were walking through one of them, we found a random donkey just munching away at grass in the forest. Can't find that in Lisbon. It was awesome. Then, sometimes, we run into random stray dogs. They're all super nice, and sometimes they'll just follow us all the way across town.  ...

Olá everyone! Sorry I wasn't able to send an email last week. We were really busy traveling around on Monday. Everything is going well up here in Chaves. It is still a bit slow. We think it's because it gets dark super early and it's super cold now. Everyone just stays inside their houses, so we do a lot of door knocking. Chaves is a very pretty area too. The air is always so crisp and clean, and everyone has fires going in their fireplaces so it always smells like we're out on a hike or campout here. Especially since we're in the mountains surrounded by trees and stuff. It's cool. It gets foggy a ton too.  We have only a small amount of people that we are marking stuff with, and lots of the time they have to cancel because they have work or something. It's tough, but we're gonna get the ball rolling here in Chaves in a bit. We also get to run everything in our church group. Conducting, presiding, sacrament, talks, and the second hour of Sunday school. I...

Olá a todos! This one might be a bit shorter because I don't have much time to write, so sorry about that. This past week has been a crazy one. We had district counsel on Halloween, which was fun. We all did simple costumes, which was fun. Afterward, I had my interview with President. Since we are in the office, we get to hear about transfers a day or two early, so we have time to get stuff ready for all the missionaries and whatnot. So, in my interview, everything was going normally, and then I got smacked by the biggest plot twist of my mission so far. I was told that I was going to leave the office to go and whitewash an area that is on the border of Spain all the way up north, in a town called Chaves. I was absolutely shocked at the news. We were all expecting me to stay at least one more transfer as a social media elder. It has been super tough processing the whole thing, but I know I'm needed in Chaves, and so I am ready to take on this challenge. I'll definitely miss...