called to serve Calgary: August 9, 2010

Hey everyone! How is it going? So after such a busy week last week I had a pretty slow one this week with not very much going on. Cochrane is a tiny town and there isn't much to do here. The ward is amazing though. I love the people here. They are so nice to us which is awesome since they don't really know either of us at all. Elder Grace put that it was my birthday this Friday so someone signed up to feed us then... I was kind of hoping that the ward really wouldn't find out. I don't think I really like things being about me... but I guess it's a good thing. It got someone to sign up for the dinner calendar so we are going to get fed. So that's good. And the ward pretty much filled up the dinner calendar for the rest of the month which is awesome! We have had a lot of people come and tell us they might have people for us to teach. So that would be great because we don't really have that many people to teach at all. I think Elder Basinger and Elder Estes were too good of missionaries. They were the last missionaries here and they seemed to have baptized pretty much everyone that was interested in being baptized! Which is great for them and it means we have a lot of recent converts we can teach, but it left our investigator teaching pool pretty darn empty... but that is where the service we can do here comes in handy. I might have told you guys about them last week but we have the food bank, the thrift store, the library and Compassion Africa which collects clothes and sends them to Kenya. It's pretty sweet. I do love service and it's keeping us pretty busy for the days. But it would be nice to replace some of that time with teaching people. haha. That's pretty much all I really have to say about our week though. Not much really happened. Elder grace seems like a pretty cool guy. I haven't even been with him for a week yet though. And he is a little bit hard to understand. He went to speech therapy for twelve years of his life but he still has a pretty bad lisp. So me and members ask him to repeat himself a lot. I think he gets kind of frustrated with it at times. He is a good missionary though. He works hard and we still have fun together.

Anyway, so Cochrane is actually a pretty cool place. The downtown is pretty small but there are a ton of houses out here and they are pretty spread out. So it makes this area huge! We drive about 50 kilometers everyday and it doesn't even seem like we do very much every day. We also cover a native reserve, which is awesome. It's called Morley and it is the Stoney Indians. They are pretty sweet. The natives are so humble and willing to learn, it's pretty awesome to see. The only problem is that they aren't very committed. Pretty much all of the members there are less active. There used to be a branch out there, but nobody ever came so they combined it with our ward. We actually have a separate Sunday school class for the natives. It's pretty cool. They cover the basics and teach it really simply so that they can understand. It's pretty awesome. But there aren't many people there. Yesterday we had a Mom and her two sons and then some others from the ward in it. It is a really good idea though. I think the natives will learn a lot better in that environment. Especially because they aren't very outspoken and kind of shy around non natives so a class for themselves that goes at their pace is awesome. We haven't gone out to Morley much though which is sad. I really like it there, but its a 45 min drive to get there and "isn't safe" for us to go alone so we have to get a ride every time we go there. I've only been out there once so far. It was fun though.

And for how big this area is there isn't much fun things to do. Since we are too far from the stake center we can't go in for Pdays and play basketball or whatever with the rest of the missionaries so we are kind of stuck with not much to do... So we called a bunch of the youth last night and hopefully we can get some out to play with us at our chapel today. Last Pday was really fun though. That was when I was with the zone leaders and the Rockyview Elders said Bob, the guy we did service with when I was there, was taking them to Kaninaskis for a hike and he asked if I wanted to come. So I went with them. It was actually a lot of fun. We hiked along this river and then came to a big waterfall after a while. I really enjoyed it. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of hiking. But I hope that one of these Pdays we can get out to Banff. We have to find a member that will take us though... but I hear it's beautiful up there! anyway.... that's pretty much it this week! Thanks for everything!

Love
Elder Townsend

Hiking