Hey Family!
Holy christmas! Thanks for all the green stuff, it's great. Today for dinner they served Pizza Hut pizza for the occasion. How nice! Getting letters from you guys is amazing. It feels so great too, so thank you.
Re: Web Page: Just tell like everyone about it and tell them how often on average a new letter or something will be on it. 66! Wow! can you tell who? who knows thus far? I got a letter from Kayla, and she said she went there. Pics are with this letter so I guess you can put those up. Don't put the ugly ones up tho. :P
Re: Elder Capoeira: he just knew some moves, but doesn't really play.
Re: Singing: Singing is going great. On average there are about 600 missionaries who sing. We sing at some/most firesides/devotionals. No word about conference or anything yet. We just sang a Ralph von Wagner or something for when William R. Bradford of the 70's spoke. Too bad I didn't when Neal A. Maxwell was here, because then I wouldn't have to have been in the overflow! :( Oh yeah, I'm singing bass. Big boy now!
Re: Miscellaneous: geez, a stinking interrogation! :P I'll just answer questions here, I guess. About anything. e-mail: from what I've seen, snail mail is still vastly the majority. and no word on whether it's frowned upon. I just know that I'm still getting them! I did get a hair cut, and you would be surprised. I took before/after pics, but then now I'm pretty much used to it and I know how to style it now, differently I think than the "after" pics. For the entire week I'll wear 2 pairs of pants and 2 shirts. Cuts down a lot and I'm not as hot as down there, and I'm gaining the skill of "food flying onto the white shirt avoidance" skill. It's an awesome thing to be able to do. . . .
Please take pics of the hills and stuff around our house (back by Greg's house, coming over the grade from LA to Calabasas, etc.) Only like 3 would be great. Pics of family and people are the best. Anyone who I'm friends with or anything. Get pics of Apryl :)! Muahaha - Everyone's pretty settled in by now. A lot of guys weren't used to such a busy schedule and working for so long, and the companion thing and so many rules really "ticked off" some guys. It's pretty sad. Yep, 10 weeks, probably mas o menos una semana. Fridays are our P Day. Actually, we got lucky, most districts don't have laundry and temple on the same day. Firesides and classes are great. The average age of my teachers is like 24. I have 2 that are fresh off the mission. It's great. Actually, the one who's freshest off is Hermana Swensen. All those who don't have girlfriends have a little crush on her, it's funny. She went to Uruguay and actually my morning teacher, Hermano Stuart, was her zone leader once. Just a little interesting tid bit. I'm in Branch 16; I'm in district 16-A. There are districts 16-A through 16-E in my branch. I have sacrament meeting with my branch. My branch Presidency, Pres. Palmer, Pres. Huff, and Pres Swensen, is great. Well, my hand is about to fall off. Please send like a cassette or something with everyone on it! Family, friends, everyone! . . .
The church is so awesome! Chao, che!
Elder Onken
March 17 The Referral Center
This place is awesome. We'll go into an assigned room, no bigger than mine at home, that has a row down the middle and little cubicles on the side - 6 open spaces a side. Each little cubby has a chair, a desk, a CPU monitor, a phone type thing on the side of the monitor and a keyboard. We accept inbound calls from people calling us from commercials.
3/21 (sorry it's been so long - as you can see, I've been taking this paper around hopefully finding some time to write, but alas-) We all hope for incoming calls because of course these are people who want to talk to you about the church. The next anticipated calls are those outbound calls where we check up on people who have ordered the Book of Mormon. Next, I would say, is for outbounds about the family videos and then the Lamb of God and then the Nativity (no one's seen the Nativity, that's why :P) We get a ton of calls just asking for a Bible or to people who've received a bible. Most of these are polite "no's," with a few really hairy ones and some real prospects who accept a referral to have the "representatives" (missionaries) come over. The best are those calls where the person requests for the reps to come over before you even get to ask them yet. Such a great feeling. But in my opinion, the best ones are when you bear your testimony, your soul, to perhaps a reluctant person and you totally know that they can feel the spirit and when you ask them, they know it and they accept the missionaries to come over. I feel that these are the ones who have that incredible but mysterious burning from within that testifies to them of the truthfulness of the message. And these are the ones that you really get to know.
The main goal is to get them to accept a visit from the missionaries. Each time we're in there, we set a goal. Our first goal was 15 because we had no idea what to do (15 missionary referrals, that is). I think we beat it that time. Our next goal was up to 25, and the next was 35. Our third time I think it was we were all really pumped, so we set our goal to 55, when previously our max was like 42. We had a prayer on our knees just before we logged on and we all said our own prayers. At the end of that day we had collected sixty seven missionary referrals! It was the coolest thing. The next day we broke 50 again. In passing we had been speaking with other districts who had also done The Referral Center, and they said that their average was like 17. I guess that my district is just awesome.
I'm sorry that my voice and my style of writing or whatever is a little off, I notice it myself but this time of night (10:15, etc.) I am always beat. I take it as a good sign tho.
Tomorrow we gain two entirely new districts to our branch, since we lost the Swedes and a Spanish speaking district (headed for Paraguay and Bolivia) in the past two days. It's kinda sad, because I thought that we were a pretty close branch.
The Branch President just stopped by, and now I know that we're gaining a Spanish speaking (stateside and Puerto Rico) and an English speaking (stateside and Kenya, Nairobi!). Cool!! Well, I'm going to end this so it gets home. I'll just describe the pics.
Chao!
Elder Onken
March 23, 2000
Well, still not out . . . apparently, I can call this a "work in progress" type thing now. :)
I just got the letter today that has Greg's . . . nice . . . letter in it :) so I'll answer some questions.
. . . Daaang, who'd you tell the URL to? How cool - 123. I guess instead of copying the letters just mail them with the URL. Save money or something! :)
Music, yes, please send tapes of classical music, Phantom, Fiddler, and that Spanish hymn tape. I bought a spanish hymnal and they gave me spanish scriptures, and because I got them both at the MTC I could get my name engraved on them for free. Cool, huh?
Last night we got to meet at least one of the new districts. There are two guys from CA and one from American Fork, who is an Arnell (with 2 L's). I asked him but he didn't know any. Anyways, I'm off to the post office finally!