¿Donde están?

So this week nothing super exciting happened but overall it was a good
week for us, the work was slow as usual and we're still finding
investigators for the English missionaries, but at least somebody is
having work to do.

This week we have been taking out a whole bunch of our youth with us
on a split because we have 2 kids that are going on missions soon and
another girl who really wants to, so we have been teaching them on how
to teach the first lesson and me and elder Hinckley have been going on
splits with the 2 guys. There's this one time Thursday I think when we
visited this less active guy and I was with Ethan, he is going to
Chilean his mission but we had a super good lesson with this less
active and this past Sunday he came to church, so that's awesome.
During this lesson Ethan didn't really say much because he doesn't
know Spanish yet but it was a good experience for the both of us and
it was also fun.

Yair is still doing awesome he is progressing and everything he's
totally ready ofor baptism, he is solid and knows a lot of stuff, we
are excited for him to get baptized.

Good news, the sisters found us a Spanish guy that's apparently
interested in learning about our church, so we're gonna try to get in
contact as soon as possible, we need some new investigators.

Something cool that I learned this week is that our bishop Victor
Guzman has his own Mormon message because he was working in the World
Trade Center on 9/11 and he was actually in the building when it got
hit, so that's really crazy but he is a awesome bishop and his family
is really cool as well, his returned missionary son Ben comes out with
us a lot for member presents.

Anyways that's about it for this week.

Love,
Elder Pugmire

Elder Grow

So this week has been really good, we had a lot of meeting and I
learned a lot from this week.

First of this week was out stake conference and it was awesome, our
general authority that we had had over here was Elder C. Scott Grow
and he was super good. On Saturday we had the adult session and not
very many people showed up to that actually but the mission president
asked all the missionaries to go so we went and the meeting was really
good and also really fun at the same time, Elder Grow was talking and
teaching about the ward council and how it is suppose to be and so to
demonstrate he called up all the ward council members from our ward
and made us stay up there for a while with him. It was good because he
made everybody say stuff so that everybody could participate and not
just stand there, and some of the things that people said were kinda
funny but I learned a lot from it especially because I didn't know
what the ward council even was because I have never actually been in
one because in my last area we never went and I haven't been in this
area either.

On Sunday we had the actual stake conference with the whole stake and
that was really good also they had the kids sing some songs and one of
our investigators who we are working with also came and sang with
them, his name is Yair and he is awesome, I don't know if I wrote
about him before but he comes to church every Sunday and really loves
primary and recently we have set a baptismal date with him for the 5th
of June, the last time we met with him we went through the baptismal
questions with him and filled out the baptismal sheet record paper
thing so he is pretty much all set to get baptized and I'm really
excited for it.

On Tuesday we had zone conference with the Poughkeepsie zone and that
was also really good, we talked about a whole bunch of stuff but the
main thing that president focused of was the 1st lesson which is the
restoration and how we can teach it more simply and we practiced
teaching it in 4-6 minutes in front of everybody which was super scary
because I just felt like I was being judged hardcore but it was a good
learning experience for us and how we can improve on our teaching.

One of the scriptures that stood out to me during this week was 2
nephi 33:1 it says "for when a man speaketh by the power of the Holy
Ghost the power of the Holy Ghost carrieth it unto the hearts of the
children of men" and I like how it says UNTO because it's up to us to
take the stuff that the Holy Ghost gives and put it INTO our hearts
and apply it.

Love,
Elder Pugmire

Not Much

So the last couple of days have been good, I don't really have that
much stuff to report because it's only been like 3 days and the work
here is pretty slow, but on Monday we went out and did some lookups
and one of the people we were looking up was this one guy Samuel who
we talked to like 5 days before, he seemed interested but was a little
drunk so we scheduled for Monday, on Monday we knocked on his door and
some old lady came out so we asked her if Samuel is here and she told
us that she didn't know anybody named Samuel, he might have given us
he wrong address after all he was super drunk, but we asked this lady
if she would like to learn about our church and she invited us in,
she's from the DR and she had some really good questions that we were
able to answer and so we gave her a Book of Mormon and rescheduled for
another day, so we got a new investigator right there, it was awesome.

Yesterday we didn't have anything at all because everything fell
through and so we did finding and lookups all day except at 4 o'clock
the sister missionaries called and and asked us if we could give a
blessing to a lady because she had some weird experiences with like
evil spirits or something, she said like she would be sleeping and
would feel something touch her face or pull on her clothes, it was
super creepy and scary especially because she lived in the basement of
this old house but we went anyways and gave her a blessing and then
blessed her house as well and at the end of all of that she felt good,
well at least that's what's she told us, and from that experience we
got another investigator, and she is actually really interested and
wants to come to church so hopefully she can make it this Sunday.

Other then that that's all I got for today, we actually have to leave
right now because we're doing some service today, but I hope you are
all enjoying your week.

Love,

Elder Pugmire

The hidden Gem

The hidden gem💎

Arias family also a super cool family

So this week we had transfers and gauss what?? I'm out, after being in
one area for almost 8 months, that's a long time. But now as I look
back on it I already miss it after only one day. I really did like
Kingsbridge a lot and I will miss the members over there, they were
really awesome. Also I will miss elder Jagneaux, he was a really fun
companion and we got a lot of good stuff done during our one cycle
that we were together for.

My new area is called Middletown, people also call it "the hidden gem"
because not very many people know about it but it's a good area,
except for Spanish work, because there's not very many Hispanics here,
Middletown is about 2 hours away from the city and its WAY different
from the city because I just feel like I'm in Utah. My new companion
is elder Hinkley and he is from Utah and he was actually the trainer
for my Mtc comp elder brown. We also get a car because the area is
huge and I get to drive because elder Hinkley can't because he has
seizures. The apartment is way nicer then the one I had in the Bronx
and we also live with the English elders, my new area has a lot of
hills and a lot of trees and wild life, well there's wild life in the
Bronx in my old area as well but here is different kind of wild like
animals and stuff. That's basically it, we visited one lady yesterday
an active member and we talked about the Holy Ghost, but thats all I
know about this area so far, hopefully I will know some more stuff
next week. Que pasen una buena semana🙂

Love,
Elder Pugmire

Some pictures from KB

More less active work👊🏻💥

So this week we actually have been doing a lot more less active work
mainly because all of the lessons that we had set up with our
investigators fell through, some of them called us the last second and
cancelled the appointment and some of them just didn't answer the door
when we went to their house so for our backup plans we just decided to
look up and call a whole bunch of less actives, and we actually had a
lot of less actives that answered and said we could come by and share
something.

On Sunday we had a pretty big crowd at church about like 200 people,
even thought that's only about 1/3 of the ward thats still really
good. A lot of the less actives that we visited this week came, I was
really surprised when Stephanie and Kelvin came because from what they
told me last time they haven't came in years. Also we had a whole
bunch of other less actives come and even though most of them, if not
all of them only stayed for the sacrament that's way better then not
going at all. I hope they will start coming more frequently.

As far as lessons with investigators we didn't have much success with
that this week as I said earlier, during the time that we spent
knocking doors we didn't find anybody that was interested, but we
received a referral from this one guy in the Concourse ward and he
told us that Hugo (the referral) really wanted to learn about our
church, so we went over and this guy actually lives in a nursing home
and doesn't want to learn at all because he is Jewish (the first
Jewish Hispanic I have ever seen) but he is a really nice guy and I
enjoyed talking with him and now we're just gonna visit him every once
in a while to see how he is doing and to maybe help him out with some
things, the last time we were with him he told us that he likes to
read so we gave him and Book of Mormon, I don't know how mush he will
read from it but if he does that would be really cool.

That basically it, oh and we also ate a whole bunch of food this week,
a lot more then usual because for some reason almost all the less
actives decided to make food for us, it was really good.

Have a great week!🙂

Love,
Elder Pugmire

Conferencia General de Abril de 2016

For some reason this week was really cold and windy and kinda slow but
really awesome at the same time because as everybody knows we had
general conference this weekend and all the talks were really good, I
already started to re watch them for personal study.

As a missionary something that I have grown to appreciate a lot is
general conference, to be honest before the mission I didn't really
look forward to conference weekend because I thought it was boring and
I was super arrogant and I never really payed attention to it but now
I'm a little less arrogant and conference is super awesome, as I payed
attention this weekend and as I really listened to what the apostles
and the prophets were saying I felt different and even thought the
talks were for everybody, sometimes it felt like a face to face
conversation because I was able to apply so many things to help me
with this work.

As usual we invited a whole bunch of people to come and watch, but
like the last conference nobody showed up, even the people that called
us to ask us what time the conference was gonna start didn't come so
that's a bummer but there's always another conference thought so maybe
next time.

Some of the talk that I liked were by president Monson on Sunday it
was really short but to the point and we already showed that talk to
some of our less actives. Another talk that I like was obviously by
elder Holland because he is my favorite and he gave a really good
talk, I really liked how he said that in this gospel we get credit for
trying, as long as we try our best and fail we will still get
blessing.

This weeks we also had really good lesson with a guy that we found 2
weeks ago, his name is Joel and we only had one lesson with him but
form what I saw he seems really cool and had good potential, also he
said that if we want to he can give us free Dominican haircuts so that
also sweet.

Not too many exciting things happened this week, everything was pretty
normal, but I hope you all had a super good weekend and that you
learned something.

Love,

Elder Pugmire

Here's a serious picture of our zone when we had had a zone activity,
we played nerf blowgun dart war, it was super fun!