Curtis, Alex

I had some other titles for this email swirling around, but first things first, we got transfer news about an hour ago. I'm getting sent to Aviles to the far north of Spain with Elder Tapia. Not shocked to be leaving, it's been surprising to us as a zone that I've been in the islands this long. I'm going to miss Lanzarote a lot  but I'm pretty pumped. 3rd area vengaaaaaaaa!!!! Here's the tough part: Elder Romrell's going to the Madrid 9th ward, in one of the most populated areas of the city, with my boy Elder Williams. I've heard it has insane potential and he's going to do great. The downside is that (and stick with me here, the missionary logic is kinda complicated) if he leaves Arrecife and goes to Madrid, he won't be here in Arrecife anymore. We just got whitewashed.  Brrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh hhhhh After the week we just had this is not the news I wanted to hear. I was excited to leave this area in his capable and knowledgeable hands, b...

Not sure how long this has been going on but I've started cutting the "s" off the ends of words in Spanish. It's basically the Canary Islands accent. That's probably a good thing, right? At least until I get sent back to the mainland. We get transfer news next week, stay tuned. This week was pretty great, we spent last P-day and also Tuesday on Gran Canaria for an exchange with the ZLs. Their area on the south of the island has some really cool beaches and sand dunes. It was fire.  The exchange was great, the zone leaders had set up like 9 teaching appointments for the four of us and 1 actually happened. Elder Richards and I talked to a lot of really cool people on the street though, and walked away with like 3 Peruvian families who wanted to hear a message sometime. Fire. When we got back, things got interesting. We had our weekly appointment with Graciela and Ulises. As a refresher, Graciela got baptized during my second transfer here, about four months ago, and...

Pretty great week! Biggest event was probably our zone finding challenge, the districts competed against each other and we sent a hype video every time we found someone new to teach. We ended up losing 16-10, but we had lots of setbacks and comebacks. Vamoooos Ejercito de Tenerife! Bishop is probably like 80 years old, but the man moves wooden pallets around like they're nothing, eats whole lamb legs a foot long each, and, this week during our weekly farmwork, extended the scoop on his 60-year-old tractor to the treetops 15 feet high, stood on it, and pruned aggressively with a chainsaw. We just kind of stood on the ground and cut the stuff he threw to us into small chunks. Good time. This week we met Midalis. She came to English class, participated a lot, and then said "amen" every three sentences. Needless to say we hit her up later, and we ended up teaching a great Restoration lesson. She loves music, English, and the gospel, so she's going to be a ton of fun to te...

Writing from Gran Canaria, the big island. Zone conference was yesterday so y'all get another Saturday email on this fine zone P-day. That's been a vibe, great to see all the missionaries in the islands again and we've had some fire trainings. Before we left we had a pretty good week, doing our best to find more people. Also did service at our bishop's farm again jaja. Something amazing that happened this week was that we were able to start teaching a former named Elisa again. She's from Italy and has met with a lot of missionaries in the past. A transfer or two ago we lost contact with her, and we found out a while ago that her phone broke and she became super busy all at once. She told us she'd "reach out when she had time", which is normally Spanish for "goodbye forever". Luckily she's Italian and actually hit us up last week.  We had a great lesson where we read Alma 7 together. The Spirit was really string and we were making powerful...

This was a cool week.  We started off with an exchange with the elders from Los Cristianos on the south of Tenerife. We got to just hang back and let them come to us, make pretzels, enjoy a fire P-day, and show them everything cool on our island.  Elders Hansen and Thacker are another trainer-trainee duo like us, and this exchange it was time to send our sons out together. We sent Elders Romrell and Thacker to visit a part-member family with about 4 months of Spanish experience between the two of them and they knocked it out of the park. My trainee has grown so much, I couldn't stop noticing it throughout the whole exchange.  Tuesday was a typical exchange day, but the Elders had a few extra hours on Wednesday beacuse of flight plans so they got to come with us to our service project. Bishop still uses us as free labor on his farm and we had double the numbers so it was a great idea. We dug trenches and to this day I'm still not 100% sure why. The Google Photos has a good...