That's right! I'm out here in Brooklyn!! It's a huge difference from the the island because I no longer have a car, I'm riding busses and subways and best of all, I'm walking! Oh I can already tell you all that I'm going to grow so much this transfer. I'm finally with a companion who is struggling more than I am at the language which means I will be doing lots and lots of talking. Am I ready for this? I am actually! I'm not exactly sure what has happened this past transfer but all of a sudden I'm talking a ton, the grammar is all right (85% of the time), I'm talking fast and people are understanding! My confidence has definitely grown and I don't even know where this all came from. But it was definitely needed. Now, because Brooklyn is so big, it's divided into 3 or 4 zones I think and I'm in the zone that covers Midwood and man was I surprised when I got called to go there. This is kind of how it went: We are sitting in transfer meeting and they decided to change things up a bit and instead of going zones 1-10, they go 10-1. And I was like okay sweet I'll probably get called pretty soon then because I probably won't be going to the city yet and zones 1-6 are the city zones. But was I wrong about that one. As soon as they finished zone 7 and my name wasn't called I was just like BROOOO IM GOING TO THE CITY!!!! But I was still chill about it. Then they get finished with all the Queens zones and I'm just sitting there wondering where the heck I'm going! Then finally they call zone 2, Midwood, Brooklyn. They call my old companion, Elder Peña, as district leader there and I was like okay I'm not going there because he's training and there are probably just him and 2 sisters in his district...but nope! They call my now companion, Elder Oaks, then myself and I'm just like no way! Peña and I are back man! So I'm in Midwood with an old friend and I'm loving it already.
So yeah! That's that. Like I said before, my companion is now Elder Oaks and he's actually closely related to Elder Oaks of the Twelve Apostles so that's pretty cool. But he's struggling a little bit with the language so I'm trying to find ways to help him...especially since I don't do anything during language study. So I'm thinking if I help him, my Spanish could get even better. I'm not exactly sure if it's going to help at all but I can definitely still help him. There's no harm in that at all. That's actually one thing I've realized about myself since being out. I love to serve others. It's just something I look for each and every day. I've been talking a lot about it as well. One thing I always find myself saying is "Cuando hacemos servicio para alguien, no podemos pensar de nuestros mismos. Tenemos que pensar solamente de los necesidades de la otra persona quien estamos ayudando." Which pretty much means that when we are doing stuff for others, we can't think of ourselves. We just can't. We have to think of the needs of the other person who we are helping so that we can say we did absolutely every possible thing we could to try and help. And that's one of the biggest things we do as missionaries. If we are fully serving, we aren't going to think of ourselves. We really just can't.
As for this week as a whole, we are pretty much just meeting people and getting to know the area a little bit better. And this is definitely an interesting place. We've already had two people pretend like they were going to jump us. But luckily they were just kidding. Saturday was definitely the best day of all. And it got me excited to train! You see, Elder Peña is training right now and Saturday he had a meeting so I was like why don't we do exchanges so that he can keep working and his trainee, Elder Corbett, was cool with it and we got the okay from the zone leaders so I was like alright sweet I'm finally in charge. Let's make some real stuff happen. Because elder oaks enjoys doing look ups but here in the city, that doesn't work all the time. So this is what we did: We started the day with look ups and we actually had success from that which I was honestly surprised by but it was mainly to try and challenge myself to learn to get around town. But anyways, our area book has about 90 potential investigators...that's not necessarily a bad thing but trying to figure out who's interested and who's not is a big challenge. So we went and looked maybe 7 or 8 people up in this one area and I'm pretty sure I dropped 4 out of the 5 people we actually talked to because they weren't interested. So success there! Then we went to the church after dinner to make some calls. There were some good ones and some really funny ones. The best was definitely the one with this Dominican woman who was super excited to hear from us but was a little busy at the time so she's going to hopefully call us this week! Then there was this one where I asked to talk to this guy Eddy then a lady just responded with "Estoy sola" then hung up and I was just like what just happened?? 
that one was funny
So yeah! That pretty much does it for this past week. The only other thing was that yesterday to introduce myself to members, the bishop asked me, Elder Peña and Elder Corbett to get up and speak since it was testimony meeting yesterday. So as always, I shared my story of how I went to BASEcamp and that's pretty much the biggest reason why I'm out here. That's the big experience that pretty much changed my whole perspective because that's the experience I had when I was able to feel the spirit super strong for the first time. It helped me come to realize that this is the true church, Joseph smith was in fact a prophet of God and he did translate the Book of Mormon and that is a true book and other testament of Jesus Christ. That is my small testimony that I was able to gain through just one powerful experience. Y por eso, aquí estoy! So yeah. Thanks to everyone, I hope you all had an awesome week and you're all amazing! Now enjoy pictures.
1) The district in the subway station
2) The subway view with Brooklyn Bridge way out there
3) Mugging...then there's me
4) Taco Bell with the Hatian Creole speakers
5) Coney Island. With my reflection
6) Elder peña's companions both old and new
7) The district again
8) Elder Oaks
9) Elder Peña
10) Elder Corbett
11) Everybody!
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