Email: October 31, 2011

Hello family,

Well it has been about two weeks and I have recently decided to disown everyone except for Mom, Maggie and Grandma, as they are the only ones that I have heard from since I got here. Maggie is now my new favorite. On another note, the work has been picking up here in Prineville which is awesome! Bernice Powell was baptized on Saturday and it was amazing! It is amazing to see the work of the gospel in someones life. She has completely changed, she had a problem with smoking before and with drinking coffee and she overcame both and was baptized. It has also helped her less active husband to see the error of his ways and come back to church also. So all around it was awesome.

We did a lot of finding stuff this week because the teaching pool was running low. We found a good ten new investigators that we have return appointments with this week. We did have a few fall through this past week so we have decided to not really count them as new investigators until we actually meet with them that second time. It was funny when I got here we had two full boxes of copies of the Book of Mormon and the first one is almost gone. We figured it out and we have given at least six if not more away almost everyday this week.

I don't know if I told you but we have two sets of Elders living in the same place right now, which can get kind of crazy but its fun. They have been looking for a new place but are having a hard time. This town is just kind of dying off. It's sad to see so many people without work. A lot of the ward members have been moving elsewhere to find work. I also took a look at the ward list this week and realized how many less active people there are around here. If we had all of them coming to church we would need to create another ward to accommodate them. We made a goal to try and visit one of them a day and see where that takes us.

Well I really would love at least one letter. I have not received any as of now and it's kind of a bummer and that's why you are all disowned for the moment. I guess Melinda you're off the hook too because I just barely sent your birthday card off and I'm sorry that it took me so long.

So a random fact about Prineville, It is where Les Schwab started. So a lot of the people in the town work there and apparently Facebook just put one of their big data places out here also. That doesn't really help with jobs though because it doesn't really need many people to run it. Anyway, Love you all and hope to hear from you.

Love,

Elder Erickson