Restoration Concert

Alright so first Happy Father's Day Dad!

Next I guess I will just explain what the Restoration Concert is since, once again, a large portion of my time was spent on it. We are going to be teaching the Restoration through music and spoken parts, mostly taken from the Restoration teaching pamphlet. Most of the people who do them just use hymns from the hymnbook to do it but we have some taste so we decided to make it actually sound nice (not that the hymns don't sound nice, they are just not performance pieces). So we are starting out with a vocal solo arrangement of Be Still My Soul, of which there is no good Spanish translation so I had to make it myself (Who would have thought two years ago that I would be writing poetry, let alone in Spanish?). Then we have an introduction and then arrangements of Abide With Me Tis Eventide/I Need Thee Every Hour on the piano, I Am a Child of God by Sister Blossil (who is a sister missionary and also a somewhat famous Mormon singer), I know that my Redeemer Lives as a small group, If You Could Hie to Kolob on the Cello (By a woman named Gizem, who is a professional Cellist and who would be baptized but is unable to because of political reasons (she is a refugee from Turkey)). Then Joseph Smith's First Prayer piano solo, How Great Thou Art Vocal solo, and Abide with Me Tis Eventide vocal solo. This week was pretty stressful getting ready for that because we kept having performers bail on us or we couldn't find a song that we wanted so we have to get a new song and adapt the script to the new song. It was a little bit rough and took a lot more time than we wanted to spend on it but I think we have all of the pieces and performers finalized so just a few quick adjustments to the script and we're home free. The actual concert is this Saturday.

Just to add a bit to my stress in ward council yesterday some of the members started talking about how we are springing this on them way too short notice and they don't have time to prepare everything we are asking for. Ok so first off this has been on your calendar for a month and they have announced it in church for the last two weeks so don't say this is short notice. Second off all we asked for was a few refreshments. That's not that hard. Luckily the Elders Quorum President came to our rescue and just told them to suck it up and do it (a little bit nicer, but that was more or less the gist of it). So hopefully we get some success out of this because it has taken a lot of time.

Other than that, most of our time was taken up by activities this week. On Friday we did a little street sweep at the park to advertise the concert. There was some foundation that puts pianos in parks for a few weeks for anyone to play, so one of our Elders played and sang while the rest of us tried to talk to everyone. It was pretty good. Then Friday night we had the Father's Day Party, which was fun, other than the fact that missionaries out here have to mediate between members (especially when it is between different wards with a language barrier) and because I am district leader I take the brunt of it. And I ended up spending half the party just trying to solve members problems.

But it was still a fun night. Then on Saturday we went to the park to play soccer in the morning and found some good people doing that, so hopefully we can start teaching some of them soon. We also had a good lesson with a semi-active/part member family. I knew the family really well in Midwood my first time and Elder Albornoz and I started teaching the daughter, who got baptized a few months later. But now her sister is back from Virginia and so we are trying to teach her. We saw her at the park a week ago and started talking to her and came to find out that she makes Baleadas for a living (it is Honduras' special dish, which are really good, and I happen to have a Honduran companion right now) and she said she would make us some. And because we need a man over there to eat with them they invited their husband and his wife. So we taught all of them. The wife doesn't speak any Spanish so I translated the whole time for her and she was crying through most of the lesson. So hopefully we can meet with them again soon.

And for your questions:

No official release date yet

We get fed not too often, although that is from a policy change that I will explain later (running out of time) and the wing challenge is later today.

Love you all,
Elder Pearce