Glendale California:  Week 13

This week was pretty awesome, lots of new experiences. 

We did service for some people, including some that was totally unexpected. Someone had fallen in their house and wasn't able to get up, but they had to go to a surgery very soon that morning.  So we were able to rush over there and help them up and get ready, and they barely made it in time for the appointment!

We also went over to a ward member's house to assemble some shelves after she'd just moved houses, which was really fun. Plus she ordered pizza for us afterwards. We always love when people feed us.

We teach English class twice a week, and it's been cool to meet all the interesting people that come. It's usually 1-4 people that show up, with all different levels of English speaking.  There've been several Armenians, one Spanish speaker from Mexico, and the other day we even had a guy from South Korea. It was just us and him, but he already spoke English super well, so instead of teaching him English, he taught us some Korean. (Picture below)

This place is so diverse, it's kind of unbelievable. There are buildings with English, Armenian, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean words, and we've got other missionaries speaking all of those languages plus Tagalog. We literally carry around 4 Books of Mormon, and they're all different languages: English, Armenian, Arabic, and Farsi (not sure how to spell that. Persian). Since a lot of Armenians here are from Iran, it turns out many can't read Armenian very well. Also, everyone else says the Iranian Armenians are harder to understand, but to me they actually seem easier to understand. I don't know why, they just don't have as heavy of an Armenian accent.

Last week we were over with some Armenian friends of ours, hoping to extend an invitation to read from the Book of Mormon. But instead, one of them gave us a reading assignment! He wants us to read Jaremiah 35: 1-19 and Psalms 91:1. But he's just learning how to write in English, so when he wrote down our assignment I couldn't help but laugh. "Jermaya" and "Sanz" (I'll attach the picture) 

Finally, yesterday was stake conference. And there's one Armenian who's really good about coming to church, and who needs us to translate into Armenian.  So my companion and I got to sit up front and use the translation equipment, then we just kind of went for it. For reference, he's been here a couple months, and I've been here a couple weeks. So it was.. very difficult. I'd say it was like 70% silence, 25% attempted translation, and 5% actually correct translation. It would've been so much easier to translate a testimony meeting or something, but nope, we got stories about overcoming cancer and boat metaphors and such. It was a good experience though.  And the person listening to our translation thanked us for trying, haha

I keep finding more and more things to like about Glendale California!

I hope everyone back home is doing well. I love and miss you all! 

Elder Clayton

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