Week #77- Finding Rosia

January 18, 2016

Dear Family and Friends,

I'm staying in Greenville with Elder Claridge! This will be my fifth transfer here and this is the first time I'm actually going to be able to finish the training of one of my sons. 

Unfortunately, we had to drop many of our investigators because we have lost contact with them over the holidays. However, we are also finding some solid new people to teach. 

We met Rosia down in the town of Grifton a while ago but we never visited her because we couldn't locate her address. Sometime last week, I was calling through a potential sheet and talked to Alfonso. He told me that he had moved recently but that we could teach him and his family sometime in the next few weeks. When we were on exchanges with the Zone Leaders this past week we visited Alfonzo.  It turns out that Rosia is her Alfonzo’s wife. They are super cool and they said they would come to church next week. We also talked to their neighbor. It ends up that he has had an interest in coming to our church for a while.  He hadn't attended because he had heard that all our services are in English and so he didn't think that there were any other Hispanics who attended. We told him how we have a few Hispanic families that come every week and that we translate the meetings for them.  He told us that he would come to church next Sunday. We also gave him a Book of Mormon and he said that he'd read it.

We were on bikes for most of this week. Our car finally got approval to go to the shop and get repaired.  Elder Dickerson and I were involved in a car accident a few months ago. Biking has made missionary work kind of hard since most of the Hispanics citizens live outside of the city center.  Although most of the people that we teach are far away and we couldn’t get to them, we were still able to find some more people to teach in the city. Greenville has no sidewalks so we just had to bike in the street.  When you get out towards the countryside there is only 1 lane.  We are forced to bike on a one-foot-wide narrow shoulder.  It is pretty scary to ride at night with cars driving past us going 60 miles per hour. We had to bike on our exchanges with the Zone Leaders, too. I felt prompted that we needed to bike to an investigator's home so that we could give her a Book of Mormon. We have only taught her once because our past two appointments have fallen through. We biked out the 6 miles out to her home in the dark when the weather was just barely above freezing at 35 degrees. We gave her the Book of Mormon and she said that she would read it.  So yeah, biking this past week was pretty fun and it was a good workout. 

Hope everyone has a good week!

Love, 

Elder Cannon

This is my mode of transportation while our car is in the repair shop.

                                  Bowling with Elders in my District on a Preparation day

Bowling

Week #76- A New Person to Teach

 January 11, 2015

Dear Family and Friends,

We have had really nice weather during the last month. I didn't mention this last week but on Christmas day it was 80 degrees. However, now it is starting to get a lot colder here! We have had to scrape ice off our windshields, and it actually snowed for about 10 minutes on Monday afternoon while we were outside playing football on our p-day.

On Thursday, we had interviews with President Baker. He told me that he was really pleased with the work I have done as a Zone leader and that he was pleased with the training that I am doing with Elder Claridge.  

It was pretty exciting this week because a brother of one of the Hispanic members of our ward came to church yesterday. We are going over to that family's home tonight to eat dinner.  I hope that the brother will be there so that we can start teaching him.

Tomorrow I hit the 18-month mark. I can't believe that so much time has gone by already. I do know this work is true. I know that this is the one and only church that has the authority and priesthood of God. And through that priesthood we are able to bless our lives, the lives of others around us, and our loved ones that have passed on. I know that we have a prophet today, someone that we desperately need to help us in this tumultuous world that we live in. I know that Thomas S. Monson is that prophet and that if we heed his counsel we will be blessed.

I hope that everyone has a great week!

Love, Elder Cannon

                      Me and President Baker wearing holiday hats at the Mission Christmas party

                                                             Mission Christmas Party

                                          Eating dinner with the Canseco family

Week #74- Christmas Skype with My Family and Week #75- Listening to Inspiration

December 28, 2015

Hey Family and Friends,

Hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas!!!! We had a great Christmas here!! It was great to be able to skype with my family and see how they were doing. It surprised me how much my brother and sisters are growing up! We spent most of Christmas day with one of the members in the ward. We ate a really good dinner with them and then they invited us to work on a 500 piece puzzle with them. 

We spent Christmas Eve with the Pinder family. We talked to them for awhile and then Brother and Sister Pinder read a few Christmas stories to their kids.  It reminded me a lot of being home with my family. Every Christmas Eve we sit around the fire pit, eat chicken soup and drink hot chocolate as Mom and Dad read Christmas stories to us. 

We also had our Christmas conference with all the missionaries in North Carolina. President Baker met with us in Kinston. We watched the Muppet Movie and A Christmas Carol. We had a really good lunch and then some missionaries performed musical numbers. 

Luck was on our side this week in terms of food. We ate food with members every day this week, and twice we had dinner with Hispanic families. We had some really delicious tacos with chile de arbol and then some Guatemalan carne asada.

We were able to teach some lessons this week and found a few new investigators this week as well. We have a pretty busy week lined up.  

I hope that everyone has a great week and Happy New Year!

Love,

Elder Cannon

January 4, 2015

Dear Family and Friends,

Feliz Año Nuevo!

I hope everyone had a really good New Year's Eve and New Year's day! I know we did. We weren't allowed to proselyte on New Year's Eve after 5 p.m. We got a bunch of missionaries together to play some soccer and basketball.  Elder Claridge were back to our apartment by 9 p.m. Apparently there was a lot going on outside because Elder Claridge said he was up all night listening to fireworks and sirens, but I must have been so tired that I slept through all that because I didn't wake up at all until the alarm went off the next morning.

With the new year, church changed from 1p.m. to 9 a.m. That meant we had ward council at 7 a.m., and man that was rough. 

Elder Claridge and I found two new Hispanic less active members this past week that we didn't know about. One of them happened to be at her brother's house whom we have been trying to contact for some time now. She lives on the other side of town and we actually were able to go to her house on Saturday and teach her. She hasn't been to church for like 10 years so hopefully we can help her come back. We found the other less active members while tracting. We were in a trailer park in Ayden and our lesson had fallen through. We knocked on a few doors near where our lesson was supposed to have taken place.  Then we decided to leave and go to another trailer park. We were walking back to the car and I turned to Elder Claridge and told him that I felt like we needed to stay, so we did.  We kept knocking on doors and asking people for referrals and to try to determine where Hispanic people in the trailer park lived. We got down the street a little further and a woman opened the door, saw who we were and said she wasn't interested and started to close the door. I told her to wait a second and I told her that we also spoke Spanish and asked if she knew of any Hispanics in the trailer park. She pointed out a few houses and then her son told us that a Hispanic family lived in the home where a red truck was parked. When we knocked on the door of the home where the red truck was parked, a Hispanic man opened the door. His wife recognized who we were and said  "Los Mormones" in a Puertoriqueno accent. She let us in. Her husband didn't seem too happy about that and so he went into the other room. Lillian told us that she was a member and was baptized when she was 9 in Puerto Rico. However, she fell away when she was 16, and she hadn't been to our church for 30 years. She also said that she hadn't seen any missionaries at all in the two years that she had lived in North Carolina. She remembers a little bit about the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. She has attended many other churches since she left the LDS faith, and believes that it doesn't matter what church you go to. I'm super excited to start teaching her and hopefully she comes back to church. 

I hope everyone has a great week!

Elder Cannon

District Elder New Year's Eve Basketball game 

My District