Willy

Hi all!

Things have been really good this week in Antioch. We witnessed two people yelling and cursing at each other over who was in line first at Wal-Mart today. One proceeded to throw a box of crackers at the other. We be livin’ in the hood.

Naw, it’s not that bad. Antioch has a crime problem, like Oakland, but the rest of our area is pretty nice. Antioch is pretty sketch, though. We’ve seen some weird things here.

This week we mostly worked with recent converts and less-active members of the ward again. The local college is still closed, so we don’t really have a whole lot of methods for finding people to teach, and our teaching pool is pretty dry. We’re working on it, though. The people here are much more receptive to us than anywhere else in the mission.

Despite the fact that we don’t have many investigators right now, we do have a lot of receptive people that we are trying to meet with. By next week, we should have some investigators we’re regularly meeting with.

This week we were able to work with the Hillcrest Elders in Antioch. We were on exchanges with them and I worked with Elder Bills, our district leader. We just worked on finding all day here in the YSA because we have nobody teach. Our efforts went well, but nothing real notable happened. Elder Bills is a funny guy. He’s from Seattle and was trained by Elder Barnett, and it was really good to get to know him better and help him improve as a district leader.

This week we had zone conference. We had a training on street contacting which involved us practicing street contacting with the other missionaries there. We had three zones there and just went around contacting each other (individually, not as companionships) for half an hour. It was a really good training, and one that this mission really needed because we have so many new missionaries at the moment.

I’m not really sure what to report on here from this week. It was a pretty dead week for us, aside from zone conference and exchanges.

Some YSA members took us to get pho (Vietnamese food) this week. Super delicious. Sorry for the super blurry picture.

It rained a whole lot this week. The hills are really green and it’s very beautiful, especially with all the open space.

Look how green it is!

OH! I know what happened this week. We regularly go to do service at a cemetery out in the farms of Brentwood. We go there to do landscaping work and maintenance. On exchanges, Elder Bills and I had to leaf-blow the paths (or whatever you call it). They gave us the big motorized leaf blowers you wear on your backs, and we had to wear these white vinyl jumpsuits over our clothes so that the oil from the leaf blowers wouldn’t stain our clothes. The reason I mention this story is because Elder Bills and I looked like Ghostbusters. I couldn’t even handle it, I thought it was so funny.

The most interesting thing that happened this week is we went to Hazel’s, a burger joint out in the middle of Antioch. They are famous in the mission for this massive burger called the Willy Burger. Every missionary who serves in Antioch has to take the challenge and eat the Willy Burger in one sitting. This was my first (and last) time doing it. Elder K has completed it four times. Elder Barnett finished a Triple Willy, fries, and a shake in fifteen minutes. Elder Bills downed his first Willy in ten minutes. It’s insanity. These people have hollow legs.

This is a Willy Burger.

Needless to say, I felt like garbage afterwards. I can now say that I have done it, but I will never do it again. It was delicious until about halfway through. After that, I swear the burger was growing with every bite and I wasn’t getting any closer to the end. I only did it because it’s a rite of passage of serving in Antioch. Next time I’m getting a normal sized burger.

Anyway, that’s all I got to talk about today. It took me far too long to write this because I’m incredibly distracted by other things. Maybe I’ll have a more worthwhile email next week. Sorry, all.

Hope you all have a great week! Love you all!
~Elder Pike