Las Ovejas de Shastonville
From: Seth Gifford
Date: Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 15:32 PM
Subject: Las Ovejas de Shastonville
Yeet.
Heyall, how are ya?
I really gotta get better at writing emails. You’re lucky I’m even writing one this week…Have fun reading this novel 😈
But GUESS WHAT! I’m now in Charlotte! Transfers were actually postponed a week because covid started to spread throughout the mission so they shut everything down. Lucky for the branch in Winston, I was there to give a talk last Sunday. But then FINALLY on Thursday we drove down to Charlotte where I met my new comp, Elder Jensen. I am used to driving super far after transfers back to Winston-Salem, but this time it was only a 20 min drive to our apartment!
I was SO ready for this transfer, and so far I absolutely love it here. We are living in a 4 Elder apartment with me, Elder Jensen, who is our new district leader (Side note: our new district is called the Shastonville Sheep, or “Las Ovejas de Shastonville,” which is a combination of our areas: Pineville, Sharon, and Gastonia…my birth area 😭) and Elder Walker, and Elder Strong, who are the ZL’s. They are all some of the best Elders I’ve met on the mission so far. They are good missionaries and great examples to me. We have a good time.
Our apartment is super nice! We live on the 3rd floor in a corner apartment, which was newly renovated. We live in an area called Pineville but the area we cover is called Sharon, which covers part of the main city of Charlotte itself. Me and Elder Jensen got to Sharon, with no one to teach, and absolutely nothing in our area book. But me and Elder Jensen have been hitting the grind so hard that sometimes we don’t even have time to eat, and at the end of the day we’re both so tired we crash pretty hard, to wake up refreshed in the morning ready to grind just as hard. We literally just contact and find all day. Honestly, it’s hard but it feels so good to finally work hard, because as much as I love them, my past 2 comps didn’t share that same desire to work hard like me. We go to an English ward because all the Spanish members are inactive with the exception of 2 families. If everyone was active, we’d probably have a Spanish branch. Me and Elder Jensen are going to work on helping to reactivate all the Spanish members so eventually there can be a branch, and eventually a ward! For now though, the Spanish people that come have to put on headphones to listen to the translation of all the English that us missionaries provide. My Spanish has not reached the point to be able to translate everything, but hopefully soon 🤞
The week before transfers, I made an epic video with the ZL’s (Zone leaders) and STL’s (Sister training leaders) and the other District Leader in the zone to help introduce a zone initiative for Spanish Land Ole’ North to help us get more people to come to church. It was a mini heist movie, that tied in to the initiative. It was lots of fun to make and luckily everyone loved it. Not to mention our small zone got the most sacrament attendances in the misison, more than anyone else!! We set a mission record, so that was pretty epic.
Now I’m here in the South Zone in Spanish Land Ole’ as the new page admin. There’s a lot to do. If it interests you, I’ll explain how it works. If not then you can skip this part 😘 So, there are 4 social media specialists (missionaries) over our mission, and in each zone, there is a page admin who runs the Facebook page for that area. As page admins, we work under the social media specialists who work under an area seventy. Generally we follow what the page admins want us to do, and we help the missionaries in our zone make content for our Facebook pages, learn how to use technology and monitor the page. We create posting schedules, Facebook watch schedules, and we work alongside all the missionaries in the zone. It has been cool because technology is being implemented more and more into missionary work and as page admins, we get to help missionaries learn how to use it etc. What’s unique about my responsibility as a page admin is that a lot of the things the social media specialists tell us aren’t applicable to the Spanish Facebook page. We operate differently than the English zones, and so me, Hermana Galvez, a past page admin, Elder Jones, the new page admin in the North, and the ZL’s and STL’s for both zones have been in charge of running our page and learning how to make it more effective. It’s been cool because I have been put in the lead to head this project and it has been so cool to see how things are going and how it has improved. We’re hoping to turn this trickle of technology use and the effectiveness it brings to missionary work into a flood, that will sweep the entire earth. Being a missionary now is so weird and different than I ever imagined it’d be, but we are literally the pioneers of this age because we have to figure out how to use technology in missionary work in the way the Lord intends. My hope is that what we do, and what we build, will help those generations of missionaries after us, to have shoulders to stand on, to allow them to reach unimaginable heights. If you read all of that, then dang. Good job. Here’s a virtual high five 🖐
Well, I could write a lot more, but I’ll save it for later. I don’t have very much more time.
Anyway, I LOVE you all!! Maybe I’ll send an email next week. Here are a few pictures:
