Our Area is Huge!

Hello everyone!!! Things are going great here in Parika Guyana. We have been working very hard this week to try to get to all our investigators. We have so many investigators its not even funny. But most of them are brand new, and we can't really drop them yet, because we don't know if they are going to follow through on their commitments yet. It is quite difficult to keep track of all our investigators, and most of them we are only able to see once a week. Our area is HUGE. We have investigators as far away as an hour drive, so we do a lot of traveling, but it seems like our most promising investigators live the farthest away, its weird... We have 7 investigators with baptismal dates in the next month, and all of them are very promising investigators, so we'll see what happens. 4 of them are supposed to be baptized on the 11th of November.

We had some really great lessons this week. The best one, however, happened on Saturday with a recent convert named Emtiaz. He is 18 and lives with his grandmother. He was baptized last month, and has been less active, because his girlfriend is a bad influence on him. We kind of hope they break up haha. We met with him and he asked us if the Bible says anything about the Book of Mormon. Someone had told him that the Bible tells us nothing about the Book of Mormon, but boy were they wrong. We shard with him a prophecy from Isaiah about the Book of Mormon being translated by someone who was unlearned. We a great lesson about the Book of Mormon, and bore our testimonies of how wonderful and true the Book of Mormon is. The Spirit was so strong, and I know that he felt it too. And the next day, he and his girlfriend were at church.

Sacrament meeting was great. We had 37 people come, 13 of which were investigators. They had the primary program which was still great, even though there aren't that many kids in primary. We have a sister from the United States who is a Peace Core worker here in Guyana, she teaches school here in Parika. She plays the piano for sacrament meeting, and she is our Sunday School teacher, and she is GREAT I don't know what our group would do without her, our Sunday school is always amazing.

This coming week we will have our Zone Conference with President Egbert and Elder Alonzo. We will be talking about the Book of Mormon. I am so excited!!!

Well thank you everyone for your letters and good luck this week. Keep reading the Book of Mormon everyday!!!

Elder Porritt

Here is our study area

Week 1 in El Campo - Currently Serving in Guyana!

Holy cow, I have done alot of traveling this week, and I am finally here in Guyana. So we flew from the MTC to Miami, to Trinidad and stayed in the mission home. President and Sister Egbert are AWESOME. They have been very welcoming, and Sister Egbert has made some REALLY good food for us for the two days we were there. President and I had a 15 minute conversation about baseball and softball, so he and I have some things in common.

Tuesday I found out I was going to the Parika area in Guyana, Guyana is an English speaking country by the way, I don't know if I have said that already yet, but I am not even speaking my mission language here haha, but I still have an hour of Language Study every day. My new companion is ELDER VANCE, He is from Idaho Falls and has been in the field for 21 months, and he is AWESOME. He and I have a lot in common so we have gotten along very well and we are teaching very well together. I should have already taken some pictures with him, but I haven't yet so I will send some next week. 

Parika is really sweet, it is not like extremely poor but people don't have a whole lot. Probably about half of the people are Hindus so that has been a struggle. They are basically 0% receptive to anything we say to them. The church is brand new here, the area opened up like 9 months ago and we only have a group, which is right below a branch. We get about 20 members to church for sacrament meeting and this week we had 13 investigators at church. We have 10 investigators on date to be baptized in the next 3 weeks currently, we are expecting probably like 5 or 6 of them to follow through on it. So the work is going great!!! The drivers are exponentially more crazy here. Public transportation is horrendous and we have to ride it occasionally to get around everywere. They play the most vulgar music I have ever witnessed and at indescribable volume levels. Normally we are on our bikes though. 

Well I don't have any time left, but everything is going good, we are teaching lessons and having a lot of spiritual lessons everyday. So all is good.

Elder Porritt

This is supposedly the largest all wooden building on earth or something. It is ENORMOUS

The largest floating bridge on earth, and its got to be like 3 miles, it is crazy

Here is what my companion made me eat the day I got here hahaha

Arrived at the Mission Home!

Dear Family and Friends,

Your missionary sons and daughters have arrived safely in the Trinidad Port of Spain Mission. ​They are tired but happy to have had dinner waiting and a bed to go to sleep. Tomorrow they will be in orientation all day and have personal interviews before they leave on Thursday to meet their new companions and arrive in their assigned areas. They will be emailing you on Monday, their preparation day, to let you know more about their week. We are happy to be serving with them and will take good care them. 

Sincerely,

President and Sister Egbert

Here are some pictures of the Last Day at the MTC

Last Week in the MTC

Hola everyone!!! It's good to hear from everyone. This is the last week in the MTC, and it has flown by so fast! We got some information about our flights this week. Elder Norton, Elder Stott, Elder Sessions, and I (the Trinidad boys) are leaving early on Monday morning. We will fly to Atlanta, then to Trinidad, and stay the night in the mission home. The next day Elder Stott and I fly to Georgetown Guyana, where I'm assuming our first area will be. One of the members here at the MTC just got back from the Trinidad mission and he has been telling us all about it. He said that Guyana was his favorite part of the mission because the people there are SO nice, but it isn't really a nice area. He said we likely will have an apartment with no shower and no washer and dryer. And it is going to be HOT like right on the Equator hot, depending on where in Guyana our area is. I am sure going to miss some things here at the MTC, like the AC haha. Most of the missionaries I have got to know really well are going to the Santiago DR mission. I am going to miss those guys for sure.

So on Friday, (and we will do it again tomorrow) we went on splits with the missionaries from the DR west mission. My new companion was Elder Incu from England. He had been out for 18 months. Holy cow that was a crazy experience no doubt. We all met at a stake center and split off from there. The missionaries don't have cars there. So how they get around is riding in a "Carrito" which is like a really cheap taxi. It is usually a 70's, rundown, gutted out, runs on a propane tank, car that they squeeze as many people in as possible. Just imagine a small 4 door sedan with 3 people in the front and 5 more in the back. It is SO uncomfortable, hot, and unsafe, but it is the cheapest way to get around from place to place. So we rode in one to Elder Incu's area and back at the end, we had two appointments lined up to teach lessons. We walked to one house to teach a 13 year old girl who was going to be baptized the next day. That neighborhood was kinda scary and VERY run down. My companion taught basically the whole lesson and I could only understand what he said really because Dominicans talk So fast it's ridiculous. We also taught a single woman about the Word of Wisdom, and she seemed to be very receptive of what we said. We walked around a lot, because the lessons were so far away from each other, so we got to kind of see what the city is like. We went to his apartment which didn't look great. All in all though the experience was AWESOME!!! Spanish is going to be a struggle to learn, but I am so excited to get out there and start teaching REAL people. 

We had a really great sacrament meeting on Sunday, and later that day listened to an MTC devotional talk from Elder Holland from 2009. HOLY COW I love Elder Hollands talks. He talked about how ESSENTIAL it is to teach with the Spirit in missionary work. The Spirit is the link that connects the Godhead, the missionaries, and the investigators all together. The Spirit was so strong the whole time he spoke. Also we had another Devotional from Elder Alonzo who spoke about the importance of following Christ and having faith in Him, it was great.

Thank you everyone for the emails. Everything is going great. Good luck to everyone with whatever they are doing this week. The Church is TRUE!!!!!!

Elder Porritt

General Conference was Just Amazing!

I can't believe that I have already been here for 4 weeks now. Counting today we have 13 more days in the MTC assuming that we leave here on the same day we got here. So I will only have probably one more email from here in the MTC. All is well here, we are working very hard with the language and practicing teaching investigators. We teach about 10 lessons a week to our fake investigators, and we are improving every time we teach. I am understanding more and more Spanish each day. I can understand almost everything we talk about in class every day, so that's good.

General Conference was just amazing!!! For maybe the first time ever I was able to sit down and watch all 5 sessions of conference and write down my thoughts from each talk. I can't believe how much more I get out of conference when I watch all the sessions and pay attention, which is difficult to do at home all the time. Here are my favorite talks

My favorite talk was from Elder Quinton L. Cook in the Saturday afternoon session. For anyone that wasn't able to watch the Saturday sessions I suggest going back to watch them, they were great. Elder Cook talked about the importance of humility in our lives. I really loved when he told us "Anyone who is sent to preach the gospel in my name will have the power to open the doors of the kingdom of heaven to any nation of the world so long as they are humble." This applies to me so much, and I felt the spirit so strongly when he told us this, and I have been trying to be as humble as I can so that this promise will come true for me.

My next favorite talk was President Eyring's talk from Priesthood Session. He taught us that "When God calls someone to a calling it is never a mistake", he also told us that we need to look past the weaknesses of our church leaders and have faith that they have been called by God and that he has a plan in place for them and that we should always sustain our leaders in word and in deed. I really loved this talk, and it has really taught me that our leaders are called by the power of God, and that we should never criticize them or think we could fulfill their calling better than they can, because God knows them better than we do and he has put them in that position to help and strengthen them. 

My third favorite talk was President Nelsons wonderful talk about the BOOK OF MORMON. I just loved his talk so much. He asked us the questions "How precious is the Book of Mormon to you? What would your life be without the Book of Mormon? What would you not know? What would you not have?" I know that the Book of Mormon is the keystone in our religion, and that without the Book of Mormon we would be very different people. I know the Book of Mormon is true and testify of its power. I also loved his promise that " If we read and ponder the Book of Mormon our individual prayers will be answered" this is such an awesome promise. I know that this is true for sure.

Other than General Conference the highlight of this week was going to the University. Ours and the other older district had the opportunity to leave the MTC and hand out Restoration pamphlets and teach the people at the university here in Santo Domingo about the Restoration. We talked to a few people and got a few numbers and gave out a few pamphlets, but nobody had the time to listen to our message. We were however able to teach one guy who was sitting outside one the buildings, he told us that he was a professor at the university. I had the opportunity to try to teach him about the Restoration in my terrible Spanish, but he was very patient with my companion and I. He listened to the whole lesson and we gave him the pamphlet and he said he would read it. We tried to give him a Book of Mormon, but he wouldn't take it, and he said something about he only reads the Bible. It was really great though. I was able to teach him about the entire Restoration and hopefully he reads the pamphlet and wants to know more. He gave us his number and the real missionaries will be giving him a call sometime soon to hopefully give him the lessons.

Thank you everyone for your emails! Good luck to everyone with everything. I hope you all have a great week

Elder Porritt 

This is Elder Chatterton and I

The Trinidad Boys