The Elder Barr Blog

Thanks for everything. Don’t worry about the money, everything went fine with that. I found out that suits are somewhat machine washable . Don’t worry I needed a new one anyway. I am glad that Japan went well and that the home is alright.

Alright I better get going. Everything is taken care of, and I will see you tomorrow.

Thanks for everything. I love you very much. Thank you so much for supporting me throughout my life and for these past 2 years especially. I will see you tomorrow.

Love,
your son,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the email. Congrats on the surprise promotion. That is really cool and I am sure that it is well deserved. I am glad to hear that your efforts are being recognized.

So how is Tokyo? I actually met with a member in our ward who served his mission there a few years ago. He said he really wants to go back to visit. I bet it is a pretty cool place. What is the air like? I would imagine that it is pretty clean, despite the size of the city.

The work is going really well here, and this area is in good hands. I know that good things are possible here in New Rochelle.

I will most likely get to email next week, but I will have to really be in a hurry to get things done in time. I will start packing Tuesday night, so Wednesday I just have to wash the clothing and pack it and that should be it. One night in the mission home and then it is off to the airport the next day. I am really excited to be home.

I don’t think I have much time left on the computers, so I want to wish you well. I am excited to see you less than 8 days. Have a fun and safe time.

Love,
your son,

How is everything? Sounds pretty busy. That is strange that you had to do a round trip from Seattle to Seattle. The conferences sound really cool. I agree about the making money from syndic8 and second life. I think those are my best options. I made some financial goals for the next 4-10 years over the last few days, that I want to review with you when I get back. I also want to show them to Andy. I think that they may be more attractive to him that retail.

Anyway, I just sent an email to Andy. It sounds like they are working him way too hard at that store. I advised him that he leave as soon as possible. I don’t really think that it is a positive work environment in any sense of the word. So, hopefully he can be out of that environment soon. I am somewhat concerned by that music that he enjoys, especially the even tonight. I am not sure how positive it is. Anyway, I am sure that you and Mom are on top of it.

The time here is going quickly. In my study times, I have been doing some planning and goal setting for the next stage of my life. There is a lot to do. We spoke about getting a laptop. I think that if we do get one, the large form factor models would be best. For my use, which is essentially a portable desktop, I think that would be best. They have good screens and graphics cards, and I think that the large laptops would be good. I would be able to work for a few hours at school, so I could just plug for power somewhere. And they have wireless throughout the campus, or if necessary I could bluetooth to a phone.

Alright, I better go. They are kicking me off the computer, and I still need to email Mom and the girls. Also, Grace hasn’t emailed for 2 weeks. Could you remind her for next week?

Thanks for everything.
Love,
your son,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I am writing a reply to both of you today. Things have been busy this week. We just got back from the mall…not too impressive. A lot of cool stuff but I think the mission has changed me quite a bit so that I don’t value it as much as I used to. It was interesting though.

The schedule looks pretty good. I think that that would work. I am browsing the site right now to see if there are any other classes to take as well, but the schedule looks good. About computers, I agree that maybe a laptop would be better. I did have a chance to visit the Sony store in the mall today…I don’t think that Sony stuff is for me, their computers always have a bunch of extra stuff with them and I haven’t ever liked the feel of Sony computers. Maybe Alienware? I heard those are good. I don’t know. I’m techonologically out of the loop. I was thinking though that if I were to have a laptop, it would be super cool to have a bluetooth enabled phone so I could have internet from anywhere on the campus. They do have wi-fi though, but if I were to get a phone I would make sure it had bluetooth. Anyway, the schedule looks good. Thanks a lot for doing that for me. I really appreciate it.

About the job, I think that it sounds pretty good, but I don’t want it to take a lot of time. If it is something that I could do from anywhere, then I would be interested. But I definately want to ace every single class and that is my priority. So, whatever amount of time that takes, that is what I will give it and if I have time to work on the side, I will. But, that is the mentality that I want to have regarding school.

My Thanksgiving was pretty good. The food was good. I didn’t really know the members, but it was nice of them to have us over at short notice. New Rochelle is a good place to work as a missionary, but I don’t think that I would live here. Everything revolves around the city. Too much stress for me.

About Cody and Chase wanting me to go to BYU. Don’t worry. It isn’t going to happen. Case closed. Like you said, UW is #9 for CS, BYU is #100+. So, it isn’t a big decision. I’ll be sure to go to institute though.

Let’s see, I haven’t accumulated too much stuff. I threw away a lot getting transferred out of Middletown. I don’t think I have accumulated much at all.

Alright, I need to get going. The librarian told me I only have a few minutes left and I still need to write my siblings.

Thanks for everything!
Love,
your son,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I don’t have a lot of time to email today, so this will be somewhat brief. Anyway, I am glad that everything is going well at home. It sounds very wet!

Lets see, we have some good plans for Thanksgiving. We will be with a member family. Also, they shifted our P-day to tomorrow but we still get to email today. It should be pretty good.

Oh, I have some interesting news. President Searle called me and said that he would rather have me not be mid-cycle transferred, so he told me I would go home a cycle early rather than 4 weeks early, so I will be home December 21st. So, this puts us under 30 days. That plans are set and the travel plans have been made. I am really excited for that! I think that it will be great.

I hope all is well at home. Thanks for taking care of my UW registration. I hope that the email advice I sent was sufficient.

My new address is 55A Locust Ave #5F, New Rochelle, 10801. Or you can just send stuff to the mission office, since it is very close to here.

Alright, I better go. I love you very much.
Take care,
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

So, I am now with my new companion in New Rochelle. Mom, sorry to hear about the package. Hopefully I can figure out a way for it to get to me.

Anyway, things are going great, except I am incredibly low on funds. It is nice to be in Westchester county though. I like this place. I am actually in Scarsdale right now, but the area that we work is New Rochelle. It will be good. My companion is Brazilian, which will be pretty cool. He has been on the mission almost as long as I have, so we are an “old” companionship. It will be good. I already know some of the members of the ward, and I am excited to get to know the rest of them.

Alright, I better go. I want to spend some time picking out classes, and I also need to send emails to the rest of the family. Again, Mom, happy birthday!

Love,
your son,
Elder Stephen J.

Thanks for the letter. I hope that you had a good time at the conference and are now safely back in Seattle.

Things are going pretty well here. I am not sure if this is my final area or not. There is one last transfer opportunity, next week, so I will know by then. But, things are definately coming to a close as far as my time here. (~55 days)

We had a good mission conference on Monday, which was nice. They showed some training videos on how to create a spiritual atmosphere while teaching. It was nice. They also showed a video of Elder Holland reminding all the missionaries to be safe, which was nice to hear. It is important that missionaries do all they can to be safe of their own power, in addition to turning to the Lord for assistance. Both are important.

I am glad to hear about school. I will print out a course catalog today and send you some choices next week.

I hope everything is going well at home. We had a good lesson last night with an active family, and we recommitted them to family prayer and scripture study. It was good. I have really seen those 2 things, and FHE as well, be a huge blessing to the people that apply it. So, just a friendly reminder .

Things have improved within the apartment. I think the next couple of weeks will be great. We have some good people what we are working with. I really enjoy seeing people when the understand true concepts for the first time. It is great.

Take care and I hope you have a good week.

Love,
your son,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. Yes indeed, I have recieved candy. However, I am trying to avoid the sugar these days, as it is easy to have too much and get a headache, so I got some good “low-sugar” groceries for this week.

I am glad that you were able to get a furnace. That is nice. As I said, we have radiators for heat and they can get loud from time to time.

I am glad that you are getting increasing popularity. That is great. I am excited to see exactly what is happening in the computer world. Yesterday, I had some time since we had to be in early for halloween, and I got to brainstorm some ideas of things to do, programs to write, when I get back. The problem is, being out of it for two years, I don’t really know what the edge is any more. So, I will definately need a crash course.

I hope that the second life documention is okay, but I will have to ask. I will be hope pretty soon anyway, so it will be cool to get up to speed on that platform.

I think that things will go quite smoothly for my return Jan 2nd. That gives a few hours for some relaxation and eating a decent meal before school. The people that I have told about my upcoming transition think that it is going to be very abrupt. It will definately be fun, that is for sure. I know time will continue to fly by.

I hope you have a fun and safe trip, and that things go well for you. Again, I hope that everything is well. Thank you so much for everything.

I love you very much.

Love,
your son,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the email. I always appreciate the update on the family, and the enthusiasm with which you present it.

That is too bad about the heater. Hopefully you will be able to get it replaced. Here in NY the heat is usually radiator or baseboard, which works well but the systems are usually old. A lot of the things here are old.

So, I am excited to be getting back into the computer world again. It will be fun seeing all the new stuff that comes out. I would think that putting together a couple of new systems would be good. I can’t believe that my mission easily is encompassed by the development of longhorn/vista/avalon. What would be the best OS to use. WS03 or WinXPsp2 still? Wow, 2 years and the same OS. Is it possible to do Second Life on linux or is that out of the question? Is RedHat 7 cds or 8? I don’t even know what the specifications of a “good” box will be. I think that you will have to give me a crash course on technology.

Things have improved with my companion and district leader. I went to President Searle for some advice, and that has helped. I am just going to do the best I can, but I do admit that the day count can be motivational. We’ll just keep going.

I hope you have a good week and that everything at home is doing okay. Let me know what more I can do. I am glad to be able to email individually now. I think it has helped for everybody. I haven’t got much email from anyone else. But, that is alright. I’ll see everyone at home soon enough.

I love you very much and again thank you for the email.
Love,
Your son,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I really appreciate hearing from you. Also, how was San Francisco. I hope to be able to accompany you on some of the trips that you make.

Things here are going okay. I am having a little bit of struggles with my companion and my district leader. I don’t want to rant about it though. Hopefully between my roommates and President Searle and myself we can get things sorted out.

I am glad to hear that the computer industry is progressing, and I am anxious to have access to a good computer again. It will be really cool I think to explore all the new technologies and things that have been developed over the last 2 years.

Speaking of trunky, I also realized that there are only 76 days left. Actually, next week is the last of the double digit weeks. This is week 11. I do double check the calendar from time to time. I have enjoyed the mission but I am really excited to be able to be back with my family.

The developer island sounds really cool. How does it work? Is it one giant world with different locations within it, or are there different instances of the world? Does it have its own language? What can you do within it? Can you incorporate live data on to the “physical” features on the island - i.e. a billboard on a building that gets its data from an xml feed? Anyway, I suppose I will need to play with it to get an idea of how it works.

We have been teaching a lot of good people lately and that has been nice. We have some people who are on the “faster track” i.e. within 6 months they will most likely be members, and some people who are much more throughly investigating the church, i.e. several years before they will be members. Our job is just to help them along the way.

The ward is doing great. Last night we went on a split with a young man from the ward, to teach one of the investigators. It was good. He’s coming out with us again tomorrow. I think that this is good for the investigator and the young man.

We tracted in to some great people this week, and now the trick is to follow up and keep their interest alive. I think that we will hopefully see more visitors at church in the upcoming weeks.

Alright, I better go. It is more work to email everyone but I enjoy it. Thanks for everything Dad. I really appreciate it.

Take care,
Love, your son,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the email. Sounds like everybody is busy. I am excited to see how second life works. I hope that we can make some good money off of it.

I am glad that you got to go the the Salmon days festival. That is one thing I miss. I tell people out here that there is really good salmon out there, but you have to live in Seatlle to get it. Here they only sell farm-raised “Atlantic” salmon. More like “pond-lantic” if you ask me. They have to spray paint them pink just to make them look somewhat normal. Gross. Because of the pollution it would be hard to eat fish that you catch in New York. We might go fishing with a guy we know in a few p-days, and hopefully there will be a good catch.

The work is going well. I have a young new companion, and it is fun working with him. He is a lot like me when I came out, which means that he may have some growing to do. But he will make a good missionary. We have some high quality investigators, and we are trying to find more.

I am trying hard to not get trunky. It is hard though. FYI today is the 12 week mark. . I hope we hear back from the UW. If not I would want to apply to a private school somewhere nearby. I am thinking that I would try to get into computer science before bio-eng, so I will probably have to spend a quarter or two taking some classes to boost my GPA. Anyway, I’ll have to worry about that soon enough.

Thank you so much for everything. Things are going so well here. The money is running out though. I will need a deposit by next week Wednesday for groceries. We are meeting some investigators for lunch in a few days, which is nice but going out to eat can be a financial hit. Plus there was an Elder going home 2 weeks ago and they wanted to eat out before he left so that alone put me behind.

Anyway, I should go. I have to write my siblings. Plus Tom J_______ wrote so I need to write him back. I like the new system.

I love you very much.
Love,
your son,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the email. It was great to see a whole bunch of email in my inbox. It is great.

The work has been going well. On Monday we were notified that Elder Peterson would be transferred today, so yesterday he got to say goodbye to a lot of people. We took some good pictures, which we developed this morning. By the way, I did tell you that the digital camera wasn’t working, right? Anyway, I should have a new companion by the end of the day, so you will hear about him next week.

We had dinner with a Trinidadian member family. They are really gool. They are teaching me how to make curry, Trinidadian style. We also have a Haitian family in the ward, and I am learning their style of cooking too. The islands really have good food.

General conference was great. I really enjoyed all of it. We got to watch all of the sessions. On Sunday, we even had some investigators come. We have this one family from the British Virgin Islands that we are working with. It is a large family. Anyway, the “grandparents” came, and they really enjoyed it. The lady cried during President Hinckley’s talk about the ring, since she had a piece of jewelery that meant a lot to her, and she lost it. Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

That family owns an ice cream store in town, and for some reason their freezer shut off. So, we helped them throw away 100 gallons of ice cream. It was too bad. It was a real loss for them. Hopefully their insurance will cover it. The “grandpa” took us out afterwards for a steak dinner. I ordered fish, since I wasn’t in the mood for steak. It was pretty good.

So, things are going well. Oh, I never got a chance to order the garments, so could you order them for me. 4 pairs of dry-lux bottoms and 2 dry-lux tops. I have no preference on neck style. That would really be great.

Alright, I better get going. I love you all so much and I appreciate everything that you all do for me.

Love, your son,
Elder Barr

P.S. - no BYU application, but maybe a UW Bothel application, or some other local schools. I want to stay local.

Tell Grandpa Steve happy birthday for me. It is great.

President Searle changed the old email rules, and I can now send and recieve individual emails, so I wanted to write you. I hope that you are having a great time in Boston, and that the presentations are going well. […] I hope the presentation went well.

I am excited for working on the projects that you have for me. I think that it will be great for getting back into programming again. I think the first thing that I want when I get back is a blackberry phone. Question, can you bluetooth to it from a laptop and use its internet connection. If so, I think that that would be a useful setup to have. That way you could use the blackberry phone for emails, but if you needed more power, you could use the laptop and still have internet access without a separate device.

Things are great here in Middletown. We have been working hard and we have some great investigators in various stages of progression. I hope that they will all eventually be baptized. The ward is great here. It is very diverse, and the people are really great.

Alright, I hope you have a safe trip back to Boston. Please take care.

Love,
your son,
Elder Barr

Thanks for the great email. It was good to be able to hear from everybody. I really appreciate it. I will try to send some pictures as soon as I can. My digital camera batteries don’t charge, so my companion takes pictures and I get doubles. I might get a few disposables to tide me over.

Things are going great here. We are having a lot of great success. I love this area and my companion, and I hope there aren’t any changes and that I can go smoothly home. President Searle said that the missionary department approved my release date, so everything is all set. Have you heard from the UW? Hopefully they let me back.

Anyway, we met a great guy named E____, who is a young guy who just converted to Catholicism. He is trying to become more religious, and he said that he felt cheated that he wasn’t raised with any particular religion. Anyway, he went to church. We had one of our members pick him up. He stayed for all 3 hours. Afterwards, the member who gave him a ride, who is Haitian and has a big family, invited him over for lunch. We were also going there for lunch, and it was nice to see E____ there too. And, we found out that E____ can really eat a lot. Our member was sure to tell him that this was the best rice and beans he could ever eat. It is funny. People from the islands are really proud of their cooking. We have a 10 y.o. Trinidadian member who said, “You haven’t tasted curry until you have tasted our curry".

We also had a really great meeting with this young family, F____ and H______, and their young son. We talked to F____ in front of Wal-Mart a few weeks ago, and we finally were able to get an appointment with them. The appointment was wonderful. They were both very open minded about everything. I really like them.

We also met with this other family. Guyanese/African-American. They are really cool. We mentioned on the 1st lesson that the eventual goal is baptism for herself and her family, and she agreed. This is the council that we recieved yesterday in zone conference, and it was nice to be able to apply it that same evening.

So, things are going great. I don’t have any complaints. It hasn’t got cold yet, but I am sure it will. It is quite nice actually. About 65 degrees, and partly-cloudy, partly-sunny. It is great. We have been working in some good places. The days seem to go quickly. Which is nice considering the count down. We had an exchange yesterday, and I realized that my time on the mission was longer than the combined time of the other 3 missionaries in the apartment. It was just interesting to be in that situation. There are some great new Elders and Sisters in the mission. General conference is coming up, and I am excited for that. It is great to truly be able to tell people that Prophets and Apostles are going to speak, and they have an opportunity to listen.

Dad, I am glad that things went well in your travels. It is nice to hear about new technology. I am excited to be back in that world. Right now I am on a computer in a Mexican store, using AOL on Windows 98. Not exactly the latest. But it still works and plus they are cooking a nice plate of rice and tortillas right now. Now the question is, will my return preceed the 1 TB drive? I think it will come down to the wire…or the gigabyte.

Mom, I am glad that you have been able to show some more houses. Please let me know if you decide to move. When you tell people that it is Scottie’s old house, you should use some old Star Trek quotes. I have all the movies in my room, unless Andy ebay-ed them. Anyway, I hope you are enjoying your job and that it isn’t eating up too much of your Sunday time. Also, I think it is a really good idea to find a car for Andy. Buses aren’t good. Too many “different” people. That is one thing I have really become synical/sensitive to is the trustworthiness of random people. It is important to be very careful. I was thinking about it all week actually. Try to find a Volvo all-wheel-drive. They are built like tanks and are good in the snow/rain. Or maybe a small truck or something.

Tina, I am glad EHS is going great. Keep up the good work. I can’t believe you will have a permit soon. Bianca, it was nice to hear from you and your workouts. I should do more of those. Grace, thanks for the email. That is a funny trick you did. I hope school is going well.

Alright I need to go. I love you all so much. This church is true. Don’t forget it.

Love,
your son or brother, depending on who you are,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

P.S. 36 waist, 16/34-35,

Thanks for the great email. I would have love to have heard from Tina too, but I bet she was busy with high-school stuff.

First of all I am sorry to hear about Maggie. She has had this problem for a long time. I think what you need to do is purchase an electric training collar. It is a shock collar controlled by remote control, and she should have that on her at all times, and when she goes on walks and gets out of hand, that will stop her very effectively. So, I think that that could be an effective solution. I hope we get this worked out soon.

So, the week has been great. Although, there has a problem that has been developing over the last few months, that came to fruition today. It has been a problem that I have been dealing with for quite a while, but the mission has made it worse. I am not sure what to do about it, but today I realized that it is serious. It is my hair . It has decided to relocate. Hairs that were once on the top of my head have found new territory on my face, nasal passage, and back. One the front line, the left and right sides are starting to etreat, with the center holding strong. The crown of my head is starting to thin too. I gave myself a haircut today, and I am afraid if I give myself any more haircuts, my hair will just give up and stop growing all-together. I suppose it is part of growing up. What was once thick now is thin. And to make things worse, some hairs are out of uniform. nderneath the dark black is gray. That’s right. They are starting to appear.

Other than my hair, things have been great. A lady that we have been working with came to church on Sunday, and she really liked it. We had the opportunity to go to her church, and it was fun. The style was very different than ours. Anyway, the first and second hours were good, and we went with her to RS. The lesson was “Temples and Family History". Imagine learning about that for the first time. It was a lot for her. Wewent to her house the next day, and she had a good list of questions. It was fun. I think she will visit again.

We have been having some great discussions with a Catholic guy named M___. He has been very nice to us, and we have good discussions. He isn’t planning to convert, but it is interesting to see the similarities and differences that are present in our various faiths.

The money situation is going okay. There is enough for groceries today and next week, but I will need some more by next week. I had a sore throat this morning, so I am going to use some of my personal funds to buy some tea’s. It is getting cold. Halloween is around the corner, and Christmas isn’t too much farther than that.

I hope everything is going well for you. Mom, be careful what you do for other agents. Be choosy in what you go. Many risks aren’t worth taking.

One thing about Orange county that they don’t tell you on Orange County Choppers, is that there are A LOT of crazy people around. Lots. Especially here. There are a lot of psychiatric and criminally-insane institutions, and it is sad to hear some of the stories about this part of society. So, just be careful. The same goes to everybody. Better safe
than sorry.

I love all of you so much. Please be careful in all that you do. Thank you for everything. I love you all.

Love, your son or brother
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. It is such a pleasure to be able to hear from you on a weekly basis.

First of all, Mom, I am so sorry that you had to do that for me, in regards to the bank. I am sorry. It is hard. I am trying to live within a budget but it is just very difficult when it is quite limited and you can’t do anything to make in increase (aka work more hours, etc). I’ll do the best I can to not eat into any of that money that you put in.

So, there were a lot of good things that happened this week. One of the first ones, it was about 8pm, and we were trying to find something to do. We decided to drop by the home of a recent convert, only to find that his wife had just miscarried earlier that day. The bishop and HPGL were on their way. We were able to participate in giving her a blessing. It was nice that we were able to be in the right place at the right time.

On Friday to Saturday I did an overnight split in Newburgh. That is a really different city. Not very nice. Anyway, we didn’t spend a lot of time there, but went to nearby Washingtonville, which was nice. We did some tracting there and found some great people. This was the zone leaders area, and they are both good missionaries.

On Saturday we were also able to help a lady in the ward move. She is moving up north a few hours, to get away from this area and start again. She has had a rough year or so, including divorce. So, it was nice to send her off in good spirits to her new home.

We met with this Catholic guy that we met while tracting. He is really nice, but isn’t planning on any kind of conversion. It is very evident from our first meeting with him that he views religion very differently from the way we do. He is suspicious of leaders, and I think that deep down he sees the whole thing as a fantastic story that builds character but isn’t really true. I think a lot of people see it that way. It is sad.

The other day we met a guy who was an Atheist, but he tried to be the best person he could, and said it was part of the humanist philosophy. He couldn’t prove the existence of God with the scientific method, and had thoughts of that nature. It can be hard, since God isn’t subject to the empirical tests that science has to offer. The tests are more spiritual. But, things weren’t real enough to him, and he tried to explain things away through biology. Anyway, my thoughts were that even if one were a good person for the sake of society, eventually the betterment of society would not be a suffieciently powerful motivation to be a good person and make morally correct choicies. It is such an interesting world. I told him that he is better than most people, who are still stuck in a world of pleasure-seeking, but that faith could still play an important part in his life, and that you do not need to turn a blind eye to science in order to accept religion. It was a good discussion.

We had a great lunch with the Bishop and his family on Sunday. They are all from Texas, and they made this delicious beef brisquit. It was really good. Homemade apple pie was a great dessert.

A few nights ago we had a meeting with one of our favorite families, W____ and his wife. He had just sent his oldest daughter to college, and was a little down about that. She is in Westchester county, so not too far away, but it isn’t the same as being at home. Anyway, he is one of those guys who loves the church, but just can’t get himself to go in the font quite yet. He doesn’t have too many doctrinal hold ups; he just hasn’t seen a need to join the church yet. Those are the hardest, the people where their life is really a good life, and they are great people and trying to live a good Christian life, and they are blessed for their efforts. So, you really have to get down to the details to show them whey they should be baptized. Anyway, they are great. I will introduce you to them when we visit the mission.

On the same day as the split, my companion and the other Elder found a great family. The husband is a retired navy medic and the wife is a nurse. They are great. We have an appointment tomorrow. We will see how that plays out. I am optimistic for them.

We had a great appointment with a member family last night. They are all Italian. He is an RN and went down to the city on Sept. 11th, and has some interesting stories to tell.

So, everything is going great. The apartment is good. The work is fun. The hardest time to fill is the morning time, because nobody is home and this isn’t really a bustling community with people walking the streets. We are going to try to see if we can get a booth or something in a good location.

Alright, I will try to write some letters and get them sent off today. I wrote some last week but I never got around to sending them, so I will send those as well. I will try to be more on top of things in that nature.

Dad I hope your trip goes well. Mom, good luck with everything as the school year gets going. Andy, please be careful and always use your best judgement. Tina, I didn’t have any of those teachers, but I am glad that you are excited for them. Bianca, I did have some of those teachers, Lund, Clay, and Blair. Grace, I am glad that you are happy with everything right now.

I miss you all very much and I am very excited for the time to pass quickly and I am awaiting a wonderful reunion in a few short months.

Love,
your son or brother,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I am glad that you all had such a great time and Cabos. It is good to hear about all of that.

Things are going very well here. It is the end of the month so resources are low, but some members gave us a $20 gift card to wal-mart so that got some of the groceries this week. I love the missionary life, but the poor part can be hard sometimes.

The work is going great. This week has been really rainy. Also, it is getting colder so the suit coats are coming back on. It is nice, but it is hard to keep them maintained in the rain. It is too hot for the coat. So, I borrowed an umbrella but it broke. So, I’ll have to get one sometime soon. It isn’t raining today so that is nice.

So Ron wrote me. I will write him back today. He insists that he come to visit me. I checked with President Searle and he said that that wouldn’t work. So, I’m not sure what to tell him.

We have this great investigator from Haiti that we are working with. Last Sunday we had a great meeting with him, talking about the apostasy. He is coming from a Catholic background, so he is having trouble with that. He also has trouble accepting that God has a physical body, but the real issue is just the Book of Mormon. Once he reads it more thoroughly all the things will iron out. His wife cooked us a great meal. Rice with lima beans, chicken, fried plantain, a good salad. Haitian’s eat pretty well. So do Dominican’s, who come from the same island.

So, I’m glad that Cabos was nice. It is so interesting watching everyone get ready for school. Pretty soon it will be Halloween. Then Thanksgiving. Then Christmas.

Speaking of that, President Searle approved my return date. I know that that will be here soon. August is gone. Sept. is short. So, it will be a short couple of months.

Andy, about football. I think that if you are doing other things, they will probably be more beneficial to you than football. I had fun with it for a year. You have experienced football for a few seasons now. I think it may be time to do other things. I did it for the experience, but it took a lot of time, consumed every weekend and weekday, and it can be overwhelming year after year. Of course the choice is yours but honestly you have a great mind and it will be worth developing your intellectual talents. It is a dead end for 99% of high schoolers anyway, so it really isn’t a great investment of time if the goal is to make a future of it. So, that is my advice. Spend time developing your intellectual pursuits and that will probably be of more worth to you.

Tina, I am glad that you also had a good time and Cabos. It is exciting to hear about the new things happening in your life and it will be fun to catch up again.

Bianca, I am eating healthy. I do read your letters. I look forward to them. I make some good food the other day, and we have also been getting good food from members/investigators.

Grace, I miss you too. I know that the time will continue to pass quickly. Keep doing your best in everyting, and always be careful. I know that you will continue to do great.

Mom & Dad, It is so nice to that everyone got home from Cabos safe and sound. I am excited to visit that place again. Oh, I have some information about my account. I think I may have overdrawn it by accident. We went shopping with the money you gave me, and I noticed it was a few dollars over. So, I transferred the money that same day. A few days later, I used the card for a $2 purchase, and that tipped it and I forgot to do a transfer. It was overdrawn by $11, so I put in $14. That would leave $3. Now, the other day, I was really hungry and we didn’t have time to go back home. So, I checked and I still had, what I thought, was $10 on the mission card. So, I got eat, and to pay, and the mission card is decline. So, I am forced to pay with my card. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough money in the account, which I new ahead of time. So, I called the office and asked one of the Senior missionaries to put $10 in my personal account, since there is a wa-mu near the mission office, but not one in orange county. She did that, but I think they still hit me with charges. I am so sorry about that. I hate doing that. I am really trying to stay under budget. It is hard though. I do miss having an income .

Alright, I am glad to hear that everybody is doing well. Please take care and be careful everybody. And keep doing the family prayer and scripture study and home evening. That is so important. The world is not a nice place, and we need all the spiritual armor that we can get.

I love you all so much and I am excited for this work. I keep you all in my prayers, and I know and feel that you are praying for me.

Love,
Your son or brother,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I am glad you are all having fun in Mexico. Just remember to be safe and stick together. And don’t do anything crazy.

Things are going great in Middletown. Transfers came and went, and Elder Peterson and I are together, which is what I was hoping and praying for. He is a great companion and I really enjoy working with him. He is really maturing as a missionary and he is really trying his best to be as effective as possible.

This week has been good. We have found some less-active and part-member families that were off the record, and then want us to work with them so that will be fun. We have this nice lady S_____ with whom we have been meeting. She is a born-again Christian, and she has a lot of good questions about LDS doctrine. We had a great meeting with a Haitian member family. They cooked some great Haitian food for us. Rice, pork, salad, etc.

Last night we met with a great member family from Trinidad. They are also wonderful and we had a good meal and a fun time with them. We had moderate success tracting yesterday. We found one Catholic guy who said he would read the pamphlet and give it some consideration. We also have some media referrals that should go well.

Tonight we have a meeting with a great couple. The husband especially really likes us. He left home at 15, and was taken in by a LDS man in California, and he worked there for a long time. He acknowledges that this man and the teachings of the Church really shaped his life for the better, although he never joined. We are going to visit him tonight to watch a church video and have dinner. Afterwards, we have a meeting with the ward mission leader. He just send his son BJ on a mission to Texas. He talked last Sunday in Sacrament meeting, and it was really good.

We did some work with another less-active family the other day. They all came to church last Sunday, and they want to get back into church. They had just fallen out of the routine for a few months, with having a new baby and some other things that they had to deal with, but they are back and I think that they will return to full activity.

So, the work has been going well. No complaints. It is a great area. By the way, President Seale said that the date specified in January will work fine. So, I think that things are all set. I want to work towards getting into the computer science department, and I think that in order to do that I need to retake physics and improve my GPA in that area. So, I could retake the physics where my GPA is lowest, and also a chemistry class, and maybe linear algebra. How does that sound? I am excited for the UW. I think that that will be fun.

Maybe for work I could do something for Syndic8, so I could do it from home and have some flexibility as to hours. I think that working at msft and going to UW was too much, and my grades suffered. I’m not sure what else there is to do in terms of preparations. Maybe a decent outfit or two, so that I don’t have to go to school in a worn-out suit.

Speaking of that, money is doing well. I am going to do a little dry cleaning today, but that should be the last that I need to do. I just need to clean my suit once before winter. I have been trying to wear the washable pants as much as possible, and only wear the suit when absolutely necessary. I think it will last. I am going to get some new black socks today, because I am out of matched pairs. So, that is what I am doing with some of the money you sent. I really appreciate that by the way.

Alright, I should get going. I love you all so much. Please stick together and be safe. Don’t go in unsafe waters.

I will write some thank-you notes today. I feel bad for procrastinating those notes. I will get that taken care of. Thank you for reminding me. Also, could you ask Uncle Raul about David. I haven’t heard from/about him in a very long time.

Anyway, I need to go. I love you all so much.

Love,

Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great response to last weeks email. I am excited for the future. I think that this last couple of months will fly by, and a whole new different phase of life will be here. Don’t worry - I love being a missionary and I don’t think I am too “trunkie", but the future looms nearer and nearer, so I am excited to grab it by the horns and go with it.

I will try to get the myuw stuff taken care of today. That will be good. Dad, thank you so much for getting the things taken care of. President Searle, I am sure, will be good about letting me take care of all of the college stuff that I need to do. I have a lot of respect for him. He is really soft spoken and doesn’t have the commanding presence of President Boren, but when he speaks it is well thought out, effective, and to the point. He is a good leader. I do miss President Boren though. His knowledge of the scriptures was such an inspration to me.

So, things are going well. However, I do have one thing that I have been in need of. It i$ $omewhat important, but I felt that I $hould a$k. Fund$ are really low. I should be okay for a few day$ but I will need $ome extra $$ by next week.

We have had a great week. We have had lots of good discussions with people. We haven’t been doing a lot of traditional finding (aka pick a street and tract it), but we have really been trying to be led by the Spirit in all of our planning, and it has really paid off.

This is a good story. We planned to drop in on this lady, a member, who is just starting to come back into activity, and had us help her quit smoking. She had been smoke-free for 1 week, and it was day 8. We got there, and she had a burning cigarette in her hand. She didn’t know we were coming, and I don’t think she knew how to react. But, we said hello, and congratulated her that she had made it as long as she did, and asked to have a lesson. Then she told her story. She had had a stressful day, and she wasn’t able to recover some documents she needed from a floppy disk, and she went to buy some cigarettes. She had just sat down to smoke the first one when we arrived. She hadn’t smoked it yet. We watched a video called “Spiritual crocodiles” with her, which showed how there are temptations everywhere and we need to be careful. She thanked us for “saving her life". It was great that we dropped by at that exact time.

Another time, we decided to go contacting at the mall. You can’t really contact there, but we decided just to try walking around for a few minutes and see if we were approached by someone. On the way there, we decided to check the train station. We got there, and there was a nice Jamaican lady there who was clearly under a lot of stress. She was there for her friend’s wedding, she didn’t know the town, and her friend wasn’t picking her up or answering her phone. She didn’t just want to sit at the train station, so we walked with her to the mall and were able to teach her on the way.

We have a great meeting tonight with a great couple. We are going to watch a video about the Salt Lake Temple with them.

So, things are going great. I really like this area…it is nice.

Mom, I’m glad that the new business idea is working well for you. Keep up the good work.

Andy, be careful on the longboard. A lot of people get hurt on those. Keep the helmet on. My companion has a bunch of friends who have hurt themselves on (or rather, flying off) of longboards. So, use a helmet, play it safe, and don’t show off.

I hope you all have a wonderful trip to Mexico. Please be careful and stick together. Especially you Andy. No wandering off alone. Pay attention to your surroundings, and make sure the rest of the family is safe. I know that you all will have a great time. Again, please be careful. I guess you are going to sunset so be sure to stay out of the ocean, as I heard that it isn’t safe there.

Alright, I need to get going. I love you very much. I hope that you have a wonderful and safe trip, and I am so excited for this week. I love you all and know that this Gospel is true.

Love, your son or brother,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I really appreciated it. First, I have something to ask Mom and Dad especially. I have been doing a lot of pondering and praying about my release date, and with school coming up and everything. I know that mission president’s have 30 day leeway in the release dates. I entered early Feb. I talked to President and he said that for school purposes, I could be released 30 days early, or in the beginning of January. So, if I did that I would be able to catch the winter quarter instead of the summer. That would eliminate a lot of idle time that I could have.

So, I would live at home until I can find a place closer to home, and a way to gather some money, if it wouldn’t be affordable for me to be just a full-time student. Anyway, maybe I would be able to make some money over second life or something like that. But anyway, the point is, I could be released on January 2nd, and then be in school for the winter quarter. I was thinking that that could be better, because some classes, like the chemistry track, may not be offered spring, and I would have to wait until the next fall in order to start. So, if I took winter, spring, and summer, it would be equivalent to fall, winter, spring, and I think I would be more “caught up” at that point. So, if you could give me your input, that would be great. But I really think it would be a good thing, although it would be a rough transition going from mission to school work in 48 hours. But, I think I can handle that. So, please check when the winter quarter starts, do the enrollment, and sign me up for the right classes. You might end up buying my books too. And I might have to go in a suit the first day, since I will have nothing else to wear. But, I’m sure we can figure something out. So, please lets get started on this ASAP. I need to tell the mission office so they can buy the ticket, and you need to decide if you want to come here to pick me up or if I should fly back alone, and then I could show you the mission during spring break. So, please lets get started on this and get it all in order. I really feel it is the right thing.

So, the work has been going really well. We are still doing a lot of finding, and also working with active, recent convert, and less active members. The ward is great, and very supportive. It is such a small town though. Most of the people are very nice to us, and it is easy to get to know a large amount of people pretty quickly.

Here’s something interesting. My 3rd companion, is engaged. He will be married in Sept. He went home 4 weeks ago. Another Elder who went home in May will also be married in Sept. I told Elder Peterson he will probably recieve an invitation from me while he is still on his mission.

We had a good zone conference yesterday. Presdient Searle is so different than President Boren. I miss President Boren’s confidence and love for the doctrine. President Searle knows the doctrine, but he doesn’t go deep. At lease, I think he is still getting a feel for things before he makes too many changes. But, I know he will continue to grow into his role as mission president. That must be such a burden, to have the care of missionaries, and all the things that come with it.

I’m glad all is going well at home. Things are great here. Hot, but great. Don’t worry. I have my water and my sunblock. Life is good here, but I am excited for the future. The family, school, work, family, etc.

I better get going. I love you all so much. Please let me know about UW winter quarter ASAP, so we can make sure everything is in order.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the letters. It was great to get some email. It is sooooo hot here. It is incredible. It feels like an oven outside. Our apartment isn’t so bad, but it isn’t cool either.

The work is going good. Pretty normal. We are finding a lot, and having a lot of success working with a good variety of different people. We street-contacted this guy named M___, and we were able to teach him and his wife B______, and they have been very nice to us, although they are devout Pentecostals. We also found a guy named S____, who is a Dominican guy, and he has a wife and 2 kids, and is a police officer in the South Bronx. Hopefully he will come to church this week.

So, on Friday we went up to Monticello as a district. The rest of the Elders did service, but we worked the area all day, myself and Elder Cornelio. Monticello is very different this time of year. I don’t think that there is anything like it. It is a town of 5000 people that increases to 21,000 in the summer, with the visitors being Hasidic Jews that come up from the city. These Jews are the hardcore ones. Full 1800’s style Polish attire, black Yarmulke’s, garments with those tassels, beards, cool hats, and everything. The women wore dresses that were very simple and modest, and many had their heads covered in some kind of wrap. Anyway, it was very fascinating/interesting. Every year they all come up to Monticello for a few months, and live in these bungalo colonies….fenced off areas with little houses on them. A lot of the signs were in Hebrew. We were there on Friday, so everyone was out and about doing errands before Shabbat started. As it got closer to the evening, the pace got faster and faster, especially at the bakeries. They all drive minivans, and they have lots of kids. There were a lot of Kosher bakeries and delis and even a pizzeria. They were all packed. We went to a food market around 5:30 and it was just bustling with Hasidic Jewish men running errands. We talked to the owner, who was a Jewish man himself. He said they most of them come up from the city for a few months for the fresh air and to enjoy the comraderie of fellow Hasidic Jews. A lot of them are jewlery exchangers, and I’m sure some are work financial jobs in lower Manhattan. So, it was a lot of fun being there for the day.

My companionship is going well. Elder Peterson is great, but still has a lot of learning to do. It is hard….just starting out on a mission. There are so many things to do and to learn that sometimes you can forget common sense. For instance, today some weird guy came to our door and said he was looking for someone, and Elder Peterson tried to teach him about the church. It was a little suspicious for my taste. I would have just closed the door. Anyway, we are getting a deadbolt lock put on , just in case.

So, how are things back home? Andy, it is good to hear that you did well by yourself, and that your job is going well. Please send me some more details when you have some time.

Dad, I am glad that England went well, and that you were able to go to all those good conferences. Thanks for working on my UW stuff. That is coming up so fast. So, if bioengineering or cs doesn’t work out, what do you think is the better option. Choose an easier major, or spend a year improving my GPA/doing chemistry and then apply to bio-eng or CS. Applied math doesn’t sound so bad. So, if you could study it out and then make the best choice for me, that would be great. I trust your judgement.

Oh, another funny thing. A recent convert just got a whole bunch of food-stamp money from the government that they owed her, because she is a single mother. She doesn’t need it, so she wants us to shop with it. What do you think? Is that ethical? We used it last week and this week, but I am still not 100% in agreement with the practice. [

We advised him not to use them – Jeff]

Another great thing happened. We met a great Jamaican guy, R__, than owns a menswear store here in town. He said he used to make suits for the Elders in Jamaica. Anyway, we went there to browse around the store a bit today, and then he called his favorite Jamaican restaurant, and told the owner let us come and order whatever we wanted, and he would pay. So, we had a great Jamaican lunch today.

Well, I still have a little bit of laundry to do. I love you all so much and thank you for all that you do for me.

Love, your son or brother,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

First, thank you so much for the package. The rice krispies were good. The pants and shirt fit great, and are very nice. I’ll start working on the milky-ways. Thanks for remembering my favorite chocolate bar.

Thanks for the great email. I really appreciate it. So, I’ve been in Middletown for a week now, and I already have some funny stories to tell. This place is …. well…I don’t know the word. But it sure is whatever it is.

So, my companion is Elder Peterson. He is good, and he is a hard worker, but he is pretty new to the mission. It turns out his trainer, Elder G., did a good job but there is some room for improvement. It will come. My roommates are Elder Cornelio ( my old Mexi-companion) and Elder Farmer, a great Texan guy. He is coming on the post-mission Peru trip.

So, we have this recent convert, K______. On Thursday, we had to clean her house. Her husband had left her, and I guess she got into depression, and forgot to clean for a few months, or a year, or two. Anyway, it was bad. I went over there not planning to get too dirty, but it was bad. I immediately tackled the fridge. As I got farther back, the food got older. There was some leftover spaghetti that had been there at least 6 months. It was green and hairy and white and moldy and disgusting. Anyway, a few bottles of 409 and some paper towels took care of most of the work. The kitchen was really greasy. Like if you took a fryer from KFC and just tossed it in there, that is what it would look like. There was food everywhere. One of the cabinets had a 1 gallon bottle of syrup that had tipped over and spilled, several weeks ago. In 90 degree heat, that attracts insects. Lots of them.

So, we put some work into cleaning up that house. The more important thing will be teaching this woman how to be clean. She has an 11 yo daughter, a 2 year old son, and a 4 year old son who doesn’t live there, due to custody issues. The house is paid for, and she has a food allowance given from her ex-father-in-law. As a result, she was able to sleep all day and just wake up to eat. So, the house was pretty gross. I am so glad that I was raised in a clean house by people who weren’t lazy.

I think I learned som e good lessons from that house and from watching her work with her kids.
1. Never buy a cat. They are disgusting animals. The go to the bathroom everywhere. Their dander creates all sorts of problems.
2. When a kid misbehaves and starts crying, don’t give it either food or toys. This will just create large, lazy people.
3. Don’t sleep more than you need to. This makes you lazy.
4. Don’t ever be overwhelmed by the size of a job. Take a minute to plan, and then get to work.
5. Welfare, and things like unto it, where people get things for free, is pure evil. It breeds laziness and a variety of other undesirable character traits.

Anyway, we went back on Tuesday to help clean the carpets. All 4 of us went. We ran at least 30 gallons of carpet cleaning solution through the machine. Each on was dark black. Disgusting. It is sad what depression and uncleanness and a lack of motivation to work will do to people. I think that the gospel will help open her mind and give her the energy she needs to get her life in order. She has made some improvements from what I understand. I think that over-all people sell themselves short. The human mind is capable of so much thinking, yet there are millions who just put themselves into a mindless menutia of wal-mart, myspace.com, “gangsta” clothes, and rap music. It is sad.

So, to describe Middletown. The ward is good. Almost opposite to the Westchester 1st ward…very economically average…nobody is filthy rich but there isn’t any downright poverty either. The ward is small, but close knit, and most people have know each other for quite a while. Most of the people in Middletown have lived in or near it for most of their lives. One cool thing, we are in “Orange County” and Orange County choppers is in our area. Next month we will try to visit sometime and send some pictures.

So, things are going really well over all. I can’t complain. The apartment is really nice. We are all really short on money right now, and our tap water is bad so we had to buy some bottled water. Anyway, if you could put some extra in the account, that would be really really really helpful. I would really appreciate it. This town isn’t too expensive, but Scarsdale really drained me. So, I could really use some money in my account as soon as possible. I know things are tight. I’m talking maybe $50-$100 for water and food expenses, and also I have some shirts that I need to get cleaned (the nordstrom ones I came out with).

Anyway, I better get going. I love you all so much. Thank you so much. Have a great week, whatever you all are up to.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I really appreciate it. Well, first off I should tell you I have 2 great pieces of news. Well, 1, but it is two-fold. I got transferred to Middletown, and I have a new companion Elder Peterson. He was companions with Elder Georgeson last cycle, who I was companions with in the Bronx a while ago.

Leaving Scarsdale was bittersweet, as is every area. I love it, but you know it is time to go when it is your time. Elder Kunz and I had 2 really good days monday and tuesday, and we taught 11 discussions in those two days. That didn’t make up for a rough cycle, but it was nice to finish strong.

It is great to hear that you found Maggie, safe and sound. That is really good news. I was a little worried about her. Oh, about that package, I should get it soon. Hopefully in the next week or so. I’m not close to the mission office anymore, so I will give you the apartment address. 16 Liberty St., 2nd floor, Middletown NY 10940.

Oh, I got the letter on the UW stuff. Here is what I think I would like to do. I really wouldn’t like to do applied math, but if I need to pick a major and can’t get in to cs or bio-eng, I think I would do some other kind of engineering. What I would rather do is take a year to do the chem pre-requisites, and maybe retake some of the math I did, and re-apply to bio-eng in a year to two. I have done math 308 (diff-eq). I don’t remember my UW student ID, but I know that I entered UW the fall after I left BCC, so that must have been the fall of 03? Wow, that was a long time ago. Anyway, that is where I am at.

So, the Middletown area seems great. We live with the Spanish Elders, including Elder Cornelio, my former companion. It will be great. It is nice to have a change, and to start fresh, especially with a new missionary. He has been out only 6 weeks. I remember how my 2nd companion influenced me, and i am glad to have the chance to be in that position with him. We are going to do great. The most important thing is to get the 20 contacts that Elder Ballard challenged us to get. When we started doing that in White Plains, it made a huge difference in the work. It really shows the importance to obedience to Apostolic council.

So, my birthday will be great. I don’t know anyone here, but Grandma Debbie and Grandma Gloria sent me some money, and I got one last Italian sandwich with my roommates before I left Westchester. It was a great celebration. I took a picture that I will have to send you.

Well, I don’t know what else to tell you. This area is great. I haven’t seen too much of it yet, but from the description, it sounds really nice.

Dad, I hope you have fun at Mashup camp, and that you also had a good Birthday. Mom, that sounds great that you will be doing some house selling. I am sure that you will do great if you dedicate the proper time and energy to it. Andy, I’m not sure what you should do about the sleeping. I remember that it was hard for me to fall asleep if I was trying to fall asleep. So, read something, either a novel or your scriptures, and let sleep come naturally. Also if you are really tired, just pray for a good nights rest. I do that every night, and it has worked. You can always put on a movie if you have to. Also, send me some mail if you can. Tina, I am so glad that summer vacation is going well. I hope you find some good stuff at Nordstroms. Bianca, I am glad that the summer is going well. Enjoy those fresh berries. And say hi to the Rands for me. Did you meet the Boren’s too? Be careful in everything you do, especially on the lake. Always swim with someone nearby. Don’t get hurt, please. Grace, thanks for the email. It was funny hearing about Chase. And yes, I am so OLD. The hair that I have left is gray. Just kidding. I’m not bald yet. I’ll be home soon. Don’t worry. Things will go quick and then we will be having fun together again.

Alright, i should get going. We need to get some groceries. I love you so much and thank you for all that you do for me.

Love,

Elder Stehen J. Barr

P.S. - please forward me some of the Washington Mutual mail. THey are sending me a new pin.

Alright, I again, I love you all sooooooo much

Thanks for the email. I am hoping and will pray that you will find Maggie, or that she will find her qay back home. Hopefully someone will spot her. If not, she’ll have to come back for food eventually. Anyway, it is sad to hear that got out.

This has been an interesting week. President Boren left, and President Searle is our new mission president. He flew in on Friday night, and had immediate stewardship of the mission. His arrival here was Presidnet Boren’s release. They visited with the Boren’s for an hour or two, and the Boren’s left. They are back in Sand Point, Idaho.

The Searle’s are great. We had a mission conference on Monday and he gave a good lesson on how the Lord is always willing to bless us, but that we need to take the initiative and not just wait for things to come. So, it was really good. President Searle is a technology guy as well, so I think we will have a lot in common.

The work is going well. We have been doing a lot of finding. The entire zone came and helped our area on Saturday, and that was good. It is a very different area. It is very wealthy and the majority is Jewish. They are nice people, but very involved in their own world. I asked President Searle for some advice, and he said to concentrate on our teachings about the family, since that is the common bond that we share with them. So, I’ll give that a try.

[Personal Stuff Deleted]

Sorry about spending so much money. It was just for little expenses, but I will try to not do that as much. Things are just so expensive. I shouldn’t have to be doing anymore dry cleaning. My blue suit’s pant’s are trashed, so I got rid of them. That leaves me with one suit, the black one. Should I just try to get by with that? I may go to Marshall’s today to get a shirt and a tie, but I definately need a few more shirts (oxford, long sleeve, wrinkle free). Thank you so much for the shoes by the way. I really appreciate them. They are great.

Dad, I wanted to wish you a happy upcoming birthday! I hope you have a wonderful birthday. I will try to send some mail today.

For the 4th, I saw a few fireworks outside the window, but honestly getting an extra hour of sleep was nicer than trying to see any fireworks. We had to be in by 6pm on the 4th of July, since people tend to drink a lot. Anyway, I cleaned my area, and then took the rest of the time to relax.

Andy, I will look over the schedule today. It looks good though. Dad, the UW stuff sounds great. I would like to start whenever is the next quarter after Feb. Mom, I will try to add your name to the account, and do that notarization stuff. Tina, I’m glad you had a great time at EFY. I have a friend who has been an EFY counselor. It would be fun. Glad you had a chance to learn some stuff, meet people, learn about the Gospel and feel the Spirit, and have a good time. Bianca, thanks for the email. Keep me posted on the good stuff you are cooking. Grace, I wuv you! Take care and stay safe.

I hope everything goes well. I love you all so much. Thank you for everything.

Love,
Elder Barr

Thanks for the great email. It is interesting to hear the Seattle is so hot, meaning 80 degrees. I guess you just get used to the heat, since 80 degrees is hot but not unbearable, compared to the days where it hits the 90s. But, like Grandma has been saying, the rain is definately here. It has rained so much. The other day we got absolutely soaked while tracting. It didn’t buy us much sympathy.

So, this week has been really good. Elder K___ and I are trying to find new ways to work the area. New places to contact people. We met with these great members on Sunday, and they told us to try some parks where families are, and also a neighborhood where it is very friendly and there are a lot of kids there. It has made me think that when I move into a neighborhood, I really want to study it out and make sure that there are kids out playing, toys on front yards, etc. It would be cool to have a huge house. For example, there is this great house in Scarsdale, an 8,000 sq.ft. Mediterranean, for 5.9 million. It would be comfortable, but who would you play with. The members we met with expressed the same concern. They said that in those neighborhoods, where each house has a stone wall and a gate with a buzzer, they have to set “playdates", several days in advance. Weird….

We had the chance to meet with another member family, the B___ family (change their name on the website). They are great, but Brother B___ works a lot and isn’t home all that much. But, he was there and we got to come in and share a little message with the family about the importance of scripture reading. Brother B___ added his testimony saying that if people took all the time of carving a message into brass and carrying those plates for miles, it is something worth reading. It was good.

…

Oh, about the bank fine. I couldn’t get it reversed. It wasn’t their fault. I just miscalculated. But about those finances, I really need some money ASAP. Even today would be good. My shoes are worn through, including my insoles. The rubber is so thin on the ball of my foot that there are holes starting to develop. Also, my blue suit is now garbage. The pants are completely worn through. There are a few holes, but they aren’t tares. The fabric is just so thin that you can see right through it. My only other suit is black, and I need to have the coat cleaned, and I don’t have the funds for that. Anyway, I could really use some money. I found a place that will re-sole the shoes for $40, plus I should spend another 10 on insoles. If money comes today I can do it today, but otherwise I will have to wait till next week. And maybe I should get a cheap suit for the summer? Or just use my black one? I have another blue suit that a member gave me a while ago so I could use that. I might need to let the pants out a little bit. They are 34’s, which would fit but might be snug at times.

Anyway, that is my situation. Things are mostly good, but I am completely out of money and could really use some. Today we are using the mission home’s laundry machines because we can’t afford laundry tokens for our apartment. It was a long month.

Well, I should probably get going. Things are going great. We are going to the Boren’s for a little BBQ before they leave on Friday. I haven’t done much in the office lately, but maybe they will call me in if they need me.

Mom, I hope you did well on your test. I’m sure you did. We’ll have to see what is going to happen from there, in terms of what you will do with this real estate stuff.

Oh, for my birthday, I could use some food, or money for food. And some long sleeve oxford fabric white shirts, wrinkle free, button collar or not - doesn’t matter, and maybe some ties. Socks would be great too. But most important is the shirts.

Alright, I gotta run. I love you all so much.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the email. A little short, but it was still good to hear from all of you. Things have been going pretty well here. Still in Scarsdale. Still working hard.

The biggest news I have to tell you about was the Gladys Knight concert. She was in town Saturday and Sunday and she put on a concert that was designed as a very missionary oriented event. Essentially, she taught the message of the restoration of the Gospel, and how it has affected her life. Her husband also told his conversion story. They both have really strong testimonies. It was good.

Anyway, as I said it was on Saturday and Sunday, 2 performances. We went to the Sunday, 8:00 pm concert, with a member and her non-member friend. The concert was held at the 65th st. building (the Temple building), which was cool. I had never seen the Stake Center parts of the building. It is a great building. The temple parts are very separate from the stake center parts. So, on Sunday night we took the Metro North down to Grand Central station. That station is huge. It was interesting looking out the window as we pulled in. There are literally hundreds of train tracks under Manhattan. The Metro North trains are very nice. From there you cross grand central and descend a few levels (that is the weirdest part, having 4 or 5 levels of subways. You can be quite far under ground and times.) We took a train to Times Square, and then another to 66th. It was pretty fast, taking only 1 hour from the house to the church. There were a lot of people there, and it was a good concert. It was weird being in grand central station at 11pm on the way back, but it was still a good concert.

The work here is going well. We are still working really hard to find people to teach. We have 2 investigators right now. Our best one is A____, and he is progressing very well.

So, I’m glad to hear that things are going well at home. The summer in Seattle sure is nice.

Andy, about your classes. First of all, 3 to 4 classes is a good load for BCC. Don’t ever take more than 4 academic classes. Also, I truly believe that BCC looks better that AP. Because, AP is still at high school pace, whereas BCC is an actual college, and is at college pace. You graduate with an associates degree and a high school degree. Associates degrees are universally accepted. You will find that if you take AP English as high school, it is worth the same as English 101, except that AP English takes 9 months and English 101 takes 3. So, it isn’t a hard choice.

Now, what you NEED, absolutely NEED to do, is pick the degree you want (there are a couple of associates degrees…the AAS degree - associate of science, is good.) Anyway, pick the degree, and then map out all of your classes like this. On the degree, there is a sheet that is very specific to the classes you can take, and there isn’t much room for extra classes. So, Italian might be a waste of your time. You might be better off taking a literature class, since Eastlake requires you to take a literature class to get English credit.

Oh, and don’t listen to high school advisors about BCC. They have no idea what they are talking about, and their motive is to make you stay at the high school. I have had them say some rude things to me. Honestly, avoid dealing with the high school as much as possible. The BCC people know that you need to do. So, PLEASE, get that sheet for your associates degree and do that class sheet. Some classes have pre-requisite classes, meaning that you can’t take physics until you take calculus, and you may need to take 3 quarters of physics. And, you need to take physics in order (121, 122, 123), and, they only have physics 121 during the fall and winter quarters. So, if you take calculus in the winter, you won’t be able to start physics until next fall. It is the same with chemisty. So, plan out ALL your courses, and make sure that you will be able to do all the courses you need to get an AA degree within 6 or 7 quarters.

Speaking of school. How is UW going? Please do that ASAP. It is really important. Remember, CS or bioengineering. I’ll need to re-apply to the school.

Aright, I need to run. I love you all so much. Thank you for everything.
I love you all so much.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

P.S. - thanks for the $$. I’ll check to bank today. Also, it is time for new shoes. The soles of my rockports are worn through. There are holes in the bottom. Please let me know what to do. Thanks again for the $$. I’ll try to spend less, but it is always needed and appreciated

Thanks for the great email. This has been a good week. I think I am pretty much over my sickness. I am finishing up the Mucinex and Amoxicillin. I don’t have the symptoms anymore, but Sister Boren told me to finish the package.

So, I’m glad you got the package. Yeah, I’m at 194 lbs, which is the lightest that I have been in a long time. I don’t think I’m “malnourished", but it would be nice to have more time to eat. That is usually the biggest issue. Time. We are always so busy.

I’m really glad to hear that things are going well at home. The autism walk sounded nice. I remember doing one in Marymor a few years ago. That was fun.

Alright, lets review the last few days. Things have been good. Getting to know Elder Kunz some more, and we have been working hard together. We have been tracting a lot, trying to find some people to teach. We have found a lot of nice people, but nobody that is too interested in the church. Our best investigator right now is A____, our Brazilian investigator. More on that later.

On Saturday, we had to go up to Valhalla to give a blessing to a man in the hospital. It was a good experience. Since we were there, we visited some people in the area. One family was a medical student family who actually lived on the hospital compound. It was nice to visit with them. They are both very nice, but I think that med-school keeps them so busy that they don’t have too much time for other things. I guess that is a good things. At least it leads to qualified doctors. Also on Saturday, we had a good lunch with Sister L____, a lady in the ward. She cooked us a good spaghetti lunch, in exchange for us moving her harp for her. It was good, but I think she thinks I’m not too smart, since I did a not-so-smart thing during lunch. She had a little bowl on the table, and I thought it was salt, like the little bowl we have. Anyway, I decided to salt the spaghetti, and it turns out that it was sugar. She didn’t say anything, but I’m sure it looked weird. So, I had to put on extra salt to compensate.

Sunday was really good. We helped R__ T., our handicapped member. That was fun. Then we went to a less-active’s house, to make sure they were going to church. This was at 9:15. She said, “alright, I’ll be there". She didn’t show up. That is pretty weak. She is one of those people who is too afraid to change, so she’ll hold on to whatever she’s got, even if it isn’t much of anything. Anyway, church was great. President and Sister Boren spoke, as a fairwell talk. They are gone in 2 weeks. That will be an interesting time. I’ll keep you updates. From what I hear about President Searle (I have met some ward members who know him), he is completely different from President Boren. I love the Boren’s, but at the same time it will be nice to experience something different. The Boren’s spoke on not letting go of the gospel, even if there are parts that you don’t understand. Our other investigator, Robert, loved the talk. It was somewhat ironic, that the intermediate hymn was “If you could hie to Kolob". Talk about things to not understand.

Also on Sunday, we went to A____’s house after Church. He is doing well. We cooked lunch togeter, and then had a good discussion about the plan of salvation. A____ is a great guy, with a lot on his plate right now. He came from Brazil about 3 years ago, and now has his own construction company. He is very successful, and he will definately be the kind of person to embrace the Gospel with his whole heart once he begins to understand.

Monday was good. I went on a split with Elder H____, who is Elder Ferreira’s companion( Elder Ferreira is my old companion from Brazil, who is now my district leader.) He is working in Mount Vernon. Elder H____ has only been out about 2 months, and he is a very “special” young man. There is something different about him. Not autism, but just different. Anyway, we had a good day. Mount Vernon is a pretty dirty town, a lot like the Bronx but mostly Jamaican. I wouldn’t ever live there. The work is good though, since there are a lot of people to talk to.

Yesterday evening, we were doing some street contacting, and we saw some members at a store and they waved for us to come inside. They are really cool people. They are both international investment bankers, and they have some cool stories to tell. It was good to see them with their family out in the evening. They treated us to McDonald’s. Since I’m trying to eat healthy, I had a grilled chicken sandwich, and I didn’t eat all of it.

Alright, I better get going. I love you all so much. Thank you so much for everything. I love you all.

Love, your son or brother,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

PS - Mom, thanks for the $$. It was so badly needed. I’m trying to save as much as possible, but there are so many things that come up. So, thank you so much.

Thanks for the great email. It was great to hear from 5/6ths of you. I guess Bianca didn’t make the cut this week.

So, this week has been an interesting week. I have been with Elder K___ for a week now. He’s a good missionary, but he has some maturing to do. He’ll get there though. He’s from a tiny town in Idaho, and we have had a lot of good conversation so far as we have worked white plains.

So, I’ll start with Thursday. We had a pretty good day, in that we had an appointment with A____, our Brazilian investigator. He was pretty good during that appointment, and said that he was excited about church. But, he has been giving us the run-around. We had an appointment with him for yesterday, and he didn’t show up. This is the 4th time he has done this to us, so I left him a message asking him to call instead of just not be there. So, hopefully he will progress.

Anyway, on Friday we tried to do some work in Tuckahoe, which was going alright until it started to pour. We grabbed our sandwiches and took a lunch in the mission office, since there was nowhere in Tuckahoe for us to eat that was dry. Anyway, I don’t think we are going to do too much more work in Tuckahoe, since it is pretty small and dead during most of the day. And, the people that are around the day are older Italian people, who are great but aren’t exactly our target. They tend to be very nice and very Catholic.

Saturday was good. Also very rainy. We did a zone blitz over in Yonkers, which is a so-so place. I went with Elder Summers and we found a pretty good neighborhood to tract. It was funny. Usually the stereotype is that apartment buildings are better than houses, since people would be more “humble” there, but the exact opposite was the case. We had many more doors open in the neighborhood than in the apartment building. We taught a pretty cool young guy there. Hopefully the Yonkers Elders can continue to teach him.

Sunday was good except for that I came down with a headache. A really bad sinus headache. We had to do some service before church, so we did our study after church, and part-way through the study I couldn’t take it, so I just slouched in the chair and closed my eyes. That helped, but it was still pretty bad. I went over to a members house, and all they had was Aleve. That wasn’t the right stuff. I finally found a member with some Ibuprofen, which was the Dargers. They are a great family, and they gave us a good snack too. Some leftover chicken. It was pretty good. That made me feel better.

By Monday, my headache was mostly gone, but I had a terrible mucusy cough, itchy throat, etc. I went through Monday and Tuesday like that. I bought some DayQuil and that was alright except for the heart beat thing came back a little bit. I called Sister Boren today, and she told me to call Dr. Gray. I did, and perscribed me Mucinex and an anti-biotic, and told me to stop taking the DayQuil. So, that is where I am health wise.

Yesterday, we did mostly contacting. It was pretty good. We talked to a lot of people, and got a few good contacts. One Hatian lady with a family, a Hispanic lady, and a few other people. The important part now is to call them and set some appointments, which I will do today.

So, except for my stuffy nose and my mucus filled throat and lungs and the heart beat thing (it isn’t intense as last time, but still noticeable), things are going pretty well. The area is going well, although we are still trying our best to find good quality investigators. We’ll just contact them all and see who responds.

I have been trying to eat more healthily, and it is going pretty good. I am going to try to cut down on sugar - things like juices and pop-tarts. I have been having pretty good breakfasts - usually a bowl of rasin bran. During the day I’ll have a sandwich, and them some snacks at home. But, I’m going to try to find some more healthy snacks.

Hopefully today I’ll have time to cook myself a decent meal. I’ll try to make some chicken, brown rice, and some veggies.

Alright, I better get going. I love you all so much. Dad, have a good time in Manhattan. I agree with your assesment. I really couldn’t ever convince myself to live there. There is just too much stuff all on one tiny island.

Thank you so much for everything. I will try to send some letters today, when I get home. I am going to try to relax for a while, and let this cold pass. I love you all so much.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great letter. This has been a crazy p-day. My companion got transferred to up-state, and I am with a new companion, Elder Kunz. My old companion was great, but he had a few issues that he needed to work, and I think that where he is going (way up state to the boonies) will do him some good.

Elder Kunz is from a tiny town in Idaho. He’s a really good Elder, and has a good heart.

So, today we went to Costco and did all our food shopping for the month. It takes a lot of time but we shouldn’t have to do much shopping for the next couple of weeks. That will be great. So, I will send the memory card tomorrow, and some handwritten letters for the rest of the week. Today, we didn’t get to the library till 5:00, so we have just enough time to email, and then start proselyting by 6:00.

I can’t believe how fast time is going. I have had a lot of companions, and am “older” than most of the missionaries in the mission. The sisters that I came out with are going home at the end of this cycle. Crazy, huh? So, things are going great.

I can do a BYU app from here. I will get President Boren to write me a recommend letter. He is super busy, so I will call him tonight to make sure he has time. Handing off 100+ missionaries and 4 stakes to a new mission president will be quite the process. President Boren is done on the first of July, so he has less than a month. The new mission president arrives a week before next transfer, and he will interview a lot of people, and then do the transferrs. I am guessing that I will probably be doing some office work during that time, but I think that the senior couples have a pretty good grasp of things and they should be fine without me.

So, the area has been going great. We are still trying to get to know the members, and we always make sure to build good relationships of trust with them, and then ask them for referrals. That is the best way to get high quality investigators.

Oh, Mom, thanks for the CD. It looks great, but it is “unapproved", meaning the songs aren’t hymn’s or composed before 1900. Honestly, I would really love some opera music, or some great classical instrumental music. I love “LDS music” but I think I have heard the large majority of it and a change would be great. I love the Mormon Tabernacle choir, but I think I have heard every CD they have produced in the last 5 years. So, some opera or classical would be great, as long as it is composed before 1900.

So, the summer is here. I shouldn’t have any more dry cleaning bills, since I am not using my suit anymore. I know things are expensive. I will try to be as frugal as possible. We are going to try to eat the food from the apartment as often as possible, and that should save some money. I’ll see if I can borrow a cooler from some members to keep in the car so we don’t have to buy drinks during the day.

Grace, that science experiment sounds really cool. I would think that it would rot the tooth. That is pretty crazy though. Where did you get the teeth? Is it yours?

Bianca, it sounds like you are the master chef. I wish I could eat the stuff you cook. In a few months yes. It sounds so good though. I’ll have to show you some of the Italian deli stuff I have learned. That is the best food around here.

Tina, I can’t believe that you are going to the dinner dance. Not that it is bad. I mean I can’t believe in that it was just a few years ago when I went to it. I had a lot of fun. Those are good events. Send me a picture of you in your dance.

Andy, I don’t know too much about asking girls out, but I do know that it would have to be a very special someone who would appreciate 72,000 ladybugs in their car. I think that for 99% of girls that would be a not so great idea. But, you need to write me a letter and fill me in on all the details…stuff you can’t write in a family email. I like the classes you are taking. Why Italian? Just curious. I hear it all the time here. It is a cool language. I wouldn’t take more than 18 credits your first quarter. It is only 3 or 4 classes, but it takes a lot of time. It is worth the work though. As for math, take the class you test in to. I’m sure you could handle calc if you took it, but you might as well take the pre-classes just to make sure you are ready. I think it is math 120 pre-calc II? That is where I started. What you need to do is get the sheet that tells you all the classes you need for an associates degree, pick the degree you want, and do all the classes you need. So, you’ll probably have to take chem 142. You should get started on those, because there are some cool classes you can take if you have taken a lot of chemistry. And, some classes only are in the fall and winter quarters, so plan things out at least a whole year in advane. Make a chart that has every quarter, and the classes you will take, and make sure that you take all the classes needed to get an AA degree in 6 - 7 quarters. That is 3 full quarters plus 1 summer. That should be do-able. So, the best thing to do is to work off of that sheet.

Alright, I need to go. I love you so much. All of you.

Take care,

Love,
Your son or brother,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. This has been an intense week.

First of all, the Boren’s time is really running out. Their house is packed. The last of the mission conferences happened Monday and Tuesday. They will be out of here before we all know it. The Searle’s get here on the 30 of June, and the Boren’s are gone on the 1st of July. President Searle will have about 1 week to do interview every single missionary, and do transfers before the end of the next cycle.

So, this week has been a lot of ups and downs. As always, we are looking for some good people to teach. We have been doing a lot of street contacting, tracting, and member work, trying to find some quality investigators. We have a few people that we were working with, and one, A____, who we thought was going to be really good, but nothing is working out so far.

Apparently, that is the trend in the mission. So, President Boren challenged each of us to pray with our companions in order to find a “new way” to work the area. I have definately been pondering that for a while, since White Plains/Scarsdale is a very unique area and certainly the techniques of the Bronx and Danbury may not apply. So, I’ll be thinking and praying of a new way to do missionary work here. Any suggestions would definately be appreciated.

Andy, I want to address Running Start vs. Eastlake. I honestly think that Running Start would look better on an application vs. AP classes, since Running Start is actual college class (the teachers don’t know if you are a RS student or not). Also, AP classes are college level, but not college pace, which makes a difference. For example, 12 weeks of Math 124 is equivalent to (1 year of AP Calc 1 + Passing the AP Test), so, in my opinion AP looks better. It will be interesting, you are catching up to me in education. If you can, try to graduate BCC with an Associates degree. That will open a lot of doors for you. That would be my advice anyway.

So, lets see, we worked hard this week and none of our investigators came to church. That was a little bit of a bummer, but it happens. As I said, we are really trying to find high quality investigators - people who will come to church without too much prodding, and who are actively investigating the church.

I am thinking of some way to hold an open religious seminar or forum and how to advertise it here in Scarsdale and White Plains. We could hold it at the church, and even invite people from the local churches and synagoges. That would be fun. I’m not sure how successful it would be.

I went on a split yesterday with Elder Hinds in his area, Mount Vernon. He has been out almost a cycle now, and his companion, Elder Johnson, is going home. So, we did the spilit and I let him direct everything, to see if he had a good handle on the area. He did. Elder Hinds is pretty special, and he is kind of in his own world sometimes, but he has what it takes to be a good missionary, and I have faith that he will develop well.

The weather has been pretty good here lately, hovering around 70 degrees. It rains hard when it rains, but it hasn’t been too bad this week. Just one or two bad days.

On Saturday, we helped the Yonkers missionaries tract in their area. I was with Elder Bostwick, and we found some good people. A young Ukrainian man who was interested in learning more about the church, and learning English. Also, a Jordanian Catholic who had been an investigator several years before. Hopefully the Yonkers Elders can help them to progress.

It was so great to talk to everybody on Mother’s day. It is interesting all the things that are happening in the ward. Our ward is a great ward though. The ward here is really good. It is interesting, because there is a huge amount of economic diversity in the ward. There is a very high upper class - wall street business men, investment bankers, etc, and then there are some poorer people who live in Yonkers. There are a handful you young student families, in some form of higher education (medical, legal, etc). We are trying to focus on finding people like them, young families that are just starting out. So, to do that, it would be best to work with those members and find out who their neighbors and friends are. That has been one of our approches. We have also been working with the Scarsdale members, and the White Plains members that we know. Hopefully a referral will come soon. We just have to work and pray for it.

Alright, I better get going. Dad, thank you so much for the check. I really appreciate it. I will deposit it today. And we have had some good meals in the last few days so that is good. I hope you have a great time in Scotland and England. It must be cool to see all the old buildings and stuff. However, it will be nice to be home.

Alright, I love you so much. I’m off to go look in to some college stuff.
Please take care. Be careful. I love you all with all my heart.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Today was such a busy day.

First of all, it was great to be able to talk to you on Sunday. It was amazing that this was the thrid phone call, and that this upcoming general conference will be my last general conference as a missionary. That is interesting to think about. The time has definately gone so quickly.

Today, we went to the Manhattan Temple. It was great. I loved it, and I hadn’t been there in a long time. As a missionary, it takes a long time to get there since we aren’t allowed to drive to Manhattan. We ended up getting a ride from a senior sister, Sister Browne, to the Bronx. From there we to the subway down to 66th St. I loved the Temple, but I am not a big fan of the city. It is so dirty and congested. There is a lot of degeneracy there. To live there, or raise a family there, would be very difficult. I know I have made a commitment to myself to never live there. It is so weird to think that so much money and influence and thought rotate around that island. It is too much for me.

Mom, thanks for the advice on the food. I will talk to President about it when I get a chance. I will have to do canned beans, since they are faster than other beans. So, that will have to do for a while. At least, until I figure out how to cook faster. We only are allowed to have a 1 hour lunch break, so whatever has to happen has to happen in that amount of time.

The last few days have been pretty good. We have this new investigator, A____, from Brazil. He came to church for the first time on Sunday, and he really liked it. His friend, I_____, got baptized on Sunday, and now A____ wants to be taught and baptized too. We took him to the B_______’s house last night, and it was really a good meeting. We talked about a lot of good things. He had a lot of great questions about the Book of Mormon, and we were able to help him resolve some of those questions. He really wants to know how to change his life to be more like the life of the Savior. That has been his quest, and now that he has the Book of Mormon, he can know more of the Savior’s teachings and be able to follow them.

Before I forget, I didn’t get any picture or article from Dad. Hopefully I will soon. I got a great package from the YW of the ward. I haven’t get a chance to look through it too much but I read some of the cards and they were really nice. Dad, it sounds great about your trip. I am looking forward to some postcards. I have a good picture I took of me in Manhattan, and it is from the Temple, and you can see Times Square in the distance. You’ll like it. I’ll send it soon.

So, things are going great. With less responsibility, there is definately less stress, which will allow me to concentrate on other things, like teaching, baptizing, and day-to-day life things like maintaining a clean apartment.

Well, I am running late, so I better go. I am going to ask a member to do my laundry, since there are only 2 machines in our apt. building, and they were in use and we are just flat out of time.

Alright. I love you all so much. I know that this work is true. Please be careful. I will be too.

Love,

Elder Stephen J. Barr

Things are going much better this week, in terms of stress. Actually President Boren wrote me a letter thanking me for all the work I have been doing, and apologized for putting too much pressure on me.

There is still a lot to do, but I am learning better on how to manage it. I definately am not the extremist where going without food is some kind of sacrifice. Fasting once a month is more than enough for me. It is sad, because some missionaries like to be “extreme", and it is really just prideful showmanship combined with ignorance if you ask me. For example, you aren’t supposed to fast every other day, and yet some missionaries ask for permission to fast often. The 12 Apostles said you CANNOT fast more than once as a missionary. Only if there is some special circumstance you can do an occasional extra fast, but that is it. Anyway, I think people just make extreme statements to be heard. Sometimes it is just misguided genuine dedication, but there isn’t.

Anyway, we got some good meals this week. Elder Holland was in town for the Westchester Stake conference, and it was really good. The Saturday evening session was down in Kingsbridge in the Bronx, and it was great. We brough this lady and her 3 kids. The youngest was 5, and said “I’m a Mormon princess” as her introduction. It was good.

On Sunday morning, we drove up to Yorktown, and had the other session of Stake conference with Elder Holland. Again, the remarks were good. Afterwards, we went to the Dargers, and active member family, for lunch. They are really cool, and all of the kids are really sharp and fast-paced. The whole family is fast paced. It was a good visit. We shared a Mother’s Day message.

We also went to the B______’s, our WML, for dinner. It was good. The hardest part of getting a good diet is fruits and veggies. It just takes so long to prepare veggies. I got a bag of frozen vegs from Costco so I am going to try to eat 1 bowl of them every day. About the budget, it is honestly hard to get good QUALITY food, so it is a tradeoff between time, quality, and quantity. I’ll try to do the best I can. We are going to go buy some fresh fruit today.

Another cool thing that happened yesterday. I went on a split with Elder Hind’s, a new missionary from Jamaica. He is cool. He dosen’t have a good grasp of the doctrine yet…at least it is not organized in his mind in a teachable way, but he is making a lot of progress. He is good at talking to people in a way that gets their attention but is very non-threatening, which is a hard balance to achieve. I know I’m still working on talking to people on the street. Anyway, I did street contact this one young lady, and introduced her to the church and gave her a pamphlet. I got her name and #, and I called her that night when we got home. She said that she had read it twice and really liked it. We had a conversation on the phone for a while, and she asked a bunch of questions, and told me some stuff about her life, that she was from a family that was half Jewish and half Catholic, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do, but that she wanted to be Christian but wasn’t sure what type. She asked if becoming Mormon would be the best thing to do, and I said that I know that it was right. We have an appointment coming up with her soon.

So, I’m glad to hear that things are going so well at home. Andy, congrats on driving alone. And also congrats on your internship. I think that you can learn a lot. Just don’t stay in Seattle too late. The more time you spend on the street, the more you realized how many WEIRD things and WEIRD people are out there. A lot more than I ever realized before. Of course there are a lot of good, decent people, but there are a lot of weird ones as well.

Bianca, that food menu is making me drool. That sounds sooooo good. Grace, that waterbrook house sounds cool, but expensive. Is it big? That is a lot of money. You could build a pretty cool house for the cost of that one. Say hi to Tina also. I’ll try to send some letters and pictures today.

Alright, well I better get going. Today should be a good day. I had a good sandwich from my favorite deli. The Calabrese, from Giovanni’s. It is provolone, sopresatta, and an egg on an everything bagel, although today I had it on a hero. It was good. I sure will miss Italian deli’s when I leave NY. There is no where else you can get a good sandwich and some good cannoli so good and so fast and so cheap.

Alright, I need to be going. I love you all so much. The work here is going great. We have been finding a lot of new people who look like they will progress. We have an appointment with a Peruvian family in a few days. I will let you know how that goes. We are also working with a great part-member family, and I know good things will come of that as well.

Alright, gotta go. Take care. I love you all.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. It was good to be able to hear about all the things that are going on at home.

So this week was really interesting. There is so much to tell.

You may of heard, there was a missionary who got hit by a car in Argentina and died. His name is Matt Turley. He is from the Newtown, CT, ward. Many of the Danbury ward people (where I was a few months ago) were part of the Newtown ward before the split. Anyway, I personally knew the Turley’s, and it was a really hard thing for them. The funeral was on Saturday, and about 50 missionaries from all over the mission gathered togeter to sing “Called to Serve” as one of the final musical numbers in the funeral. Afterwards, the missionaries escorted the casket to the car. It was quite an emotional even. I know I shed more than a few tears. I had been to the Turley’s house on a split, and they are great people. The chalpel was completely full, and the overflow as well. They got a lot of support form all the people in the area, which was good.

A general authority, Elder Staheli from the Seventy, spoke at the funeral. He made some really good remarks. Bishop Oaks and President Crittenden also spoke. President Crittenden made the comment, “I cannot remember a sadder week of my life than this has been.” It really was a sad event.

So, that was most of Saturday. It was nice to see some people up in Danbury. I really love the wards there. They are such great people.

Also, another big event. You may have heard of the immigration issue, and the strike that has been going on. The Hispanic and Brazilian immigrants decided to stike, to show how needed they are in the community. It is to display anger at the new law which makes it easier for police officers to initiate a deportation process. It was interesting. The strike was on Monday. On that day, I was on a split with Elder Johnson, my district leader, who just got released as AP a few weeks ago. I had some questions to ask him regarding how to lead my jr. companion, and some other things. Anyway, we were planning to go to this GREAT Brazilian restaurant called Patamina’s. They have these AWESOME sandwiches there. Anyway, we get there. CLOSED. The sign said, in Portuguese, “Closed for a noble and just cause. You, IMMIGRANTS!” It was disappointing. We tried to find something to eat, and discovered that all the Brazilian places were closed. We went to Subway instead, and it was good, but nothing like a Patafranga at Patamina’s. So, on Monday, we definately needed them. It would be hard to get some decent food in New York without involving an immigrant. Not to get too political, but that is what we concluded as we ate our Subway sandwiches.

Monday was also interesting in that my heart started acting up. Every 5 or 6 beats it would do this giant BEAT. I called Sister Boren, and she referred me to Dr. Gray. Dr. Gray told me that it sometimes your internal pacemaker gets messed up, and your heart skips a beat every couple beats, and then does a big one to catch up. It isn’t unhealthy to be in that condition, but it sure was annoying. It went away yesterday, which was nice. He said that sometimes big meals or stress brings it on. I have had a lot of stress lately, and the subway was a big meal. So, I took a good break, went to Trader Joe’s and bought a good meal, and had the first good lunch I had had in a while.

Speaking of dinners. It is a mission rule that we can’t eat with a member unless it is before 5:00pm or we have an investigator present at the meal. So, we usually only get fed on Sunday’s, if at all. We have 1 solid investigator, Robert, but he is working more and more (which is good), but since he is busy, we really can’t arrange meals anymore. It is a hard rule. The idea is that we have prime tracting time (from 5-7) open, and not fill it with time with active members. Again, it is a hard rule. You really have to make an effort to get a good meal in. That is what the mission is like. You have to live a balanced life, and yet do things that are nearly impossible and make it look easy. It is hard.

Anyway, today we went shopping at Costco. It was good but the apartment is a disaster. I will spend the rest of the p-day cleaning it. Again, it is hard to find time to do anything. I think what I will do is get a cheap tape recorder, and record my letters, and send a tape every week. Also, about the pictures. I will try to burn a CD to send them. I wasn’t sure if you sent me an extra memory card or not. I’ll have to double check the box.

Andy, that job with Medronic Physic-Control sounds really interesting. That is a field that I think that we could be involved in together. Some kind of biomedical engineering. At BYU, they have a computer science with bioinformatics emphasis, which is using the computer to analyze DNA, and other applications. I think that that would be interesting. I want to see if I can do that at the UW, or maybe BYU. I would rather the UW. Dad, can you see what the process would be like for re-admission to the UW, and what programs they have under computer science/bioinformatics. That would be really cool.

Tina, thanks for writing back about that neighborhood. I think that that would be another great idea for a job that we as a family could do. It would be pretty easy. Design the neighborhood. Buy the land. Build the houses. Put the up for sale. It would be fun. If you would like to research that more, that would be cool. That walk with Maggie sounds cool. I do miss the nice fresh air of Seattle.

Bianca, congrats on winning the 400. I know it was hard competition, and that there were runners on your tail the whole time, but good job. I’m sure you would have beat anyone that raced you. I’m sure they heard that you signed up, and just gave up, because they knew you would have won. Hey, don’t go telling people I liked Sister Holst. I thought she was cool. But, I really don’t know her that well anyway.

Grace, I like your screen name. Sounds like you. That Chinese food sounds good. So, in your sims, have you built a whole mansion or a couple of them. I drew a cool house the other day, and then we found a house that looked just like it. It was weird.

Alright, I better go. I love you all so much. Mom, thank you so much for the money. There have been a lot of expenses lately.

I love you all so much. I’ll call betwen 6:00-6:30pm on Mother’s day.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Its 3:00, and everything is done. That means I can get some real letters out today. I promise they will be postmarked today. Also, I spent a lot of time taking a lot of pictures this week and I want to include them in the letter today. I love my companion. We are trying to speak only Spanish in the apartment.

So, I have a perfect story for the mission report. I’m not sure if you would want to publish it though, since it would be easy for the families to figure out who they are. Sunday was really an interesting day for Elder Cornelio (my new Mexican companion) and I.

[Personal Stories Deleted]

The rest of the week has been pretty good. It was really rainy over the last few days, but now it is pretty nice. It is mid-60’s. Which reminds me. I need a few things. Basically, $$. I went to the doc to look at my hands. He said it was mild exema, and gave me a perscription cream for when they get bad, and told me to use lotion after every wash. That cost me $225. Also, I need some white shirts and ties, and socks as well. I could by them here. That would be easier than shipping. I think I will buy some today as there is a nearby store. So, if you could send some $$, to replenish my funds, that would be very much appreciated. I am down to just a few wearable ties (stains, wear, etc).

Alright, thanks for the great email. I’m glad to here that things are going so well at home. I bet the weather is great. Here it is good too, but the humidity is coming soon. The gas prices have gone up. Oh yeah, Mom, don’t put in Arco. That is horrible gas. You’ll get better milage on BP or some other brand. But not Arco. I would consider that emergency only gas.

Alright, my companion has to do his email, and then I am going to go write some letters and get them in the mail TODAY, along with all the pictures that are on the card at this very moment.

I love you all so much.

And Grace, my letter won’t get there in time, but HAPPPPPPY BIRTHDAY. And remember, I’ll be back before you are 12. Actually, the Sisters that I came out with are going home in mid-July. Crazy huh?

Time files when you are having fun.

I love you all!
Love,
Elder Barr

Things have been going great here in White Plains. Currently, I am sitting in the Scarsdale public library. It is pretty nice. It is an all stone building. The biggest news is transfers. I got a new companion. Elder Cornelio…Nefi Abinidi Cornelio from Mexico. He seems to be really cool.

Well, not too much has been going on this week out of the ordinary. A lot of work. It is getting hotter. In a few more days we’ll be able to put away the suit coats for the most part (still need them for church).

Easter was really good. The Sunday service was great, and then we went over to R_____’s house. He is our investigator. His girlfriend that he lives with is Jewish, and she has some kids from another marriage. So far we have only been able to talk to R_____, but a few days ago we were able to have a great conversation with her as well. Hopefully she can try coming to church sometime. There is a long way for that couple to go, but I htink that good things will come from them.

Other news…I think I am going to try to go to a dermatologist today. My hands are not getting any better. They are still dry, and they have this irritation where the on the inner sides of my wrists (closest to my thumbs, about 1 inch down from where the thumb meets the palm). I’ll ask Sister Boren or Sister Brown about somewhere good to go, and then go there.

Otherwise, things are going really good. I’ll try to send some pictures and some handwritten letters today. All we have left to do is clothes shopping, and then my laundry, so while I am doing that I’ll write the letters. We need clean the apartment too. The ants seem to be finding their way in somehow, so we need to make sure to keep them out as best as we can.

[Personal Stuff Deleted]

Alright, I better get going. Come to think about it, I want to get in to the dermatologist today if possible. My hands are just dry and red. I’m going to try to get some better soap too, and not wash my hands too often (you know I like to be clean…probably too much sometimes…I think it is borderline germophobic). It is hard though…New York is such a dirty place. Even the “clean” parts of the cities are dirty. I’ll let you know what I find out. If you have any recommendations, let me know.

Thank you so much for everything. I love you all so much. I miss you all. Time is just flying by. Again, I love you.

First, thanks for the package. Also, I got Grandma’s letter. I will try to write her back today. Tell her that it was really nice of her. I have been working through all the snacks. Those “hot chocolates” are good. They aren’t hot at first, but they seem to get hotter as you eat it.

Thanks for the great email. I really apprecatiated it. This has been a really good week.

This being a fairly Jewish area, Passover is a huge deal here. It starts tonight I believe, and things are pretty quiet. Scarsdale is quiet anyway. We don’t do any finding there. Only member work. And my companion and I have gotten into the habit of pronouncing Scarsdale with a wealthy British accent. Still, the members in the area are great.

So, for the highlights - not all that much special this week, aside from mission conference. I went on a split with my DL Elder Miller, and we got a chance to do some good contacting. We talked to a few people who are really promising, and it will be good to get to follow-up with them in the next few days.

The office work lately has been good. Some of the software I’m writing may not be used, I met with President Boren, and we brainstormed over a few simple spreadsheets that could be done by hand, that a senior couple could do. The essence of the meeting is, “if you ever want to get transferred, make sure that this stuff is extrememly simple". So, I think I may say farewell to access for a while. There was some good code, queries, DB theory, and VB script in there, but he had a good point. I don’t want to maintain this for the rest of my LIFE, not to mention mission. So, we are developing a simple spreadsheet system that involves some hand work (ugh..) but it is simple. The other issue is that my system was dependant on the computers being updated correctly, which may not always be the case. I guess that is the classic programmer/end user debate. How to balance features with complexity. Most of the office work has been making stake reports, and developing ways to make sure that the office can run smoothly. We got a new senior couple, the Blackhursts. We are making sure they they get up to speed quickly.

Oh, I did some college research today while I was in the office. I think I want to do the computer science undergraduate degree. From there, there is a lot of decisions that I need to make, but getting into the program will be good enough for now. I will be able to have the application submitted within the next 2 or 3 weeks. Once I get a reply, the next step will be to talk to the department and get a course outline going. We will have to see which of my BCC/UW credits transfer and which don’t. Apparently that transition is common enough to be acknowledged on their website.

Also, Dad if you had time, could you research re-applying to UW. I want to have that option available as well, just to see what happens. It would be nice to be able to do college close to home. So, I think it would be worth looking in to re-application. If you could research and let me know next week, that would be great.

Mom, I will see if I can get to the bank today. P-day is always so busy. Plus, our roommates went to the temple, so now we need to help them out with some stuff. Plus, Elder Wall and I both needed haircuts. Need to buy some food. There is never any time.

To answer G______’s question, there is a Trader Joe’s here. 2 actually. We shop there from time to time, but it is hard to buy enough food for a small amount of money there.

Andy, I’m glad to hear that you are learning some programming. Those skills are really important. I think that you will learn a lot from those things.

[Personal Stuff Deleted]

So, another week in Mid-Westchester county. Being here is so different. A lot of people here are so addicted to work that they forget everything else. It is interesting…there is NOTHING happening here after 4:00pm. Everything is closed, and the nightlife revolves around Manhattan, which isn’t the best place to be for an LDS family.

I will try to write some letters while Elder Wall is doing email. I’ll see how much I get done.

Well, I better go.

I love you all so much. You are the best family ever.

Love, your son or brother,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

-P.S. - The wordwrap didn’t come out write this week. Could you try sending it differently next week. Each line of the email is really long.
-P.P.S. - I will try to go to the bank and send the check today.

Thanks for the great email. I really appreciate them. This has been a pretty relaxing P-day. Nothing too exciting. I am on a split right now with Elder Bostwick, my roommate from Liberty Utah. He’s a great Elder, and is in the Spanish program. We did some of the food shopping for the apartment, laundry, some cleaning, and I have to pick up some stuff for the cleaners, and that is about it. I will try to get some hand written stuff out. I think I’ll be able to.

I swung by the office and I saw that the camera and that batteries had arrived. I didn’t have the time to open them, but I will soon. Thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it.

So, things are going fairly well here. A lot of good experiences. I always feel like I learn so much for myself, and do so comparatively little for the people whom I serve. I am really getting a good deal out of this.

Elder Wall and I had a good lesson with R_____, who is currently our only investigator. He is a great guy, but currently unemployed and it is hard to get him motivated. We talked for a while before starting with the lesson. Whenever we first get started, he is always a little sad about himself. He messed up a long time ago, and in NY state, felony convictions never go away. So, what has happened to him a few times is he will get a job, and be working on the paperwork to get started when the conviction will pop up, and he’ll end up losing the deal. Anyway, that gets him down a lot, and he sometimes thinks that he has no options. So, we told him, “you could always move to Mexico and start a smoothie stand. That’s a good life". He chuckled about that. For the lesson, we talked about D+C 58, where it says “It is not meet that man be commanded in all things, and the same is an unwise and slothful servant, and such shall lose his reward.” And he says, “Great! Now I’m not only unemployed, but slothful and I have no reward.” At first he got defensive, but then realized that it was true, and that he had a laziness problem. For instance, he had some things to do that would help with his job, and he was just too lazy to do them. So, I told him to get up and do it…right that instant. And he did. He went to his laptop, hooked up the printer, and got started. It was nice to see that. Today we ran into him at the grocery store and while there he said he had found a break, and found a program that will fund $4000 in vocational training for him, so he may go do that. It was a good testimony builder for him of being “anxiously engaged.”

Let’s see. About learning from Westchester county, Scarsdale in particular. It is such an interesting place. We dropped in on a member, and their 16 y.o. son was there. He said, “don’t tract Scarsdale, you’ll be arrested.", which is probably true. There are so many lawyers here, and just the people are so aggressive. You can see it in the way they work, the way they drive, actions towards others, etc. Everyone wants to be insulated from everyone else.

Sometimes office work keeps us late at the office, and there is a group that we have termed the “Scarsdale Renegades". Just a bunch of H.S. kids who hang out in the back of an office parking lot, listening to loud music, dancing, probably using illegal substances, and so forth. It is pretty sad that these kids have nothing better to do on their weekends than to hang out in a parking lot. But, honestly there isn’t that much to do here. Everything revolves around Manhattan. Most people here don’t get home from work here till 7 or 8 o’clock.

That has been another thing that frustrates me here. A lot of people here, including members, work these crazy hours. In trying to set appointments (including with members), the wife will tell us that the husband leaves to work at 6:30am and doesn’t get back until after 10pm. The obvious question….WHEN DO YOU SEE YOUR KIDS???? In some houses, both parents work and the kids are raised by nannys.

It reminded me of a meeting I had during my short stay in the Newtown ward, where it was a 5th Sunday and he asked parents for suggestions on how to strengthen families. I said, “honestly, parents aren’t home anymore. Tract a rich neighborhood, and before 7 all you get are kids and nanny’s". ” Then, a 20 y.o. nanny in the ward said, “Yeah. I agree with Elder Barr. I’m a nanny. I’m with these kids 24/7. They NEVER see their parents. All communication goes through me. I’m 20 years old. I have no idea how to be a parent. But, I’m the one paid to do it.”

Anyway, it made me greatful for such great parents who have always been able to spend time with me. For example, all the hours working in the garage or the mini-chopper….most kids in Scarsdale don’t have that. I know that we are all really busy, be we as the Barr family always made it work. It had made me really reflect on some policies that I want to set, or rather carry on from our family, when I am a parent. Such things as always have a family dinner, even if it is late. I have a list going. I’ll have to send it to you.

Anyway, Elder Wall and I are going to focus on finding people with concerns about their families. We are going to do this by doing street-meetings, with slogans about the families, like “Do your kids call the nanny MOM?"… or…"The dangers of outsourcing…have you outsourced your parenting responsibilities?”

So, it has been a very good week, in terms of my future family. Still haven’t helped the Mid-Westchester area a whole lot yet. We are working and praying for it though.

Anyway, time is almost up. I love you all so much. Please take care. Also, Bianca, make sure to take Andy with you jogging. That would be a good precaution. It is really important that you do this.

I love you all so much. Please take care and be safe. Thank you for everything. We are a great family!

Love,
Elder Barr

Sorry for the lateness of this email. The p-day before General Conference is “CONFERENCE CLEANING", which means that the apartment gets a top to bottom deep cleaning. Our apartment was pretty bad, so we made it look really good. Myself and Elder Bostwick (a roommate) took 6 hours on the kitchen, Elder Wall made the bathroom almost as clean as an operating room, and Elder Sawyer took care of the bedroom. Apartment living on a low budget in NY is an adventure. In our apartment, now that it is spring, the ants are coming out. We are doing our best to keep them under control but they manage to find their way in. Hopefully the improved cleanliness will help.

Thank you for the great email. I’m really glad to hear that things are going so well at home.

[Lots of personal stuff omitted]

So, this week was really good. We had a good meeting with my district leader and one of my zone leaders and did a little revising of the focus areas. We are working White Plains, Scarsdale, and Tuckahoe. There are some great members in the ward, although their lives are so busy. Still, the people who want to make the time for the gospel, and are definately kept busy by the Westchester Stake.

For example, we met with the T_____ family a few nights ago. We did a good FHE for them, and then I had a chance to talk with President T_____. He is in the stake presidency, and was actually Bishop of the Olmstead II ward when I first got there. He’s a good guy.

So, that’s what we have been doing. Meeting with members. Trying to get a feel for the area. Finding a lot. Etc. This is such an interesting place. People are so busy, and it can feel very aggressive here. It is so great to have the church here to give life some perspective.

Alright, I better get going. Thank you so much for everything. I love you all so much.

Love,

Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great message. I have had a really great but really stressful week. Here has been the schedule on average:

6:30 awake, excersice, get ready, personal study, a little comp. study, and then to the office by 10:00. Office from 10:00-2:00 (we have food there - there is a Trader Joe’s nearby), and out working by 3:00 or so. Work till 9:00, and go to the office to do our planning (since we only have 1 phone line at the apartment), and then finish stuff. A lot of times the AP’s will come in to work on their stuff, and it seems like we have been up past midnight more than a few times in the last week or two. In fact, I don’t think the 10:30 bedtime has applied to us in quite a while. It is alright though. It is to further the work.

We have been working a lot in Tuckahoe, which is a tiny little village that is part of Eastchester, which borders Scarsdale. Westchester county is the strangest place. Some of the most wealthy and most poor people live here. For example, there are some really poor, ghetto areas in Yonkers, and then again there is Scarsdale, where a 70 y.o. 2000 sq. ft. house is $1.5 million. And it is still all on the same tiny piece of land. Also, most well-to-do people here work in Manhattan. The main commute is the metro north.

So, the ward is really great, but the people are really busy. It is incredible. In most of the families, the father isn’t home till 7 or 8 o’clock. Usually later. I think that the mom’s in the ward try really hard to keep the families strong, and many of them are. I would think it would be really hard to do with the father’s gone till 8 or 9 at night every day of the week. There are some where I think the kids only see their dad on weekends, even though they live in the same house.

I don’t think I could ever raise a family in Westchester county. It is just too close to Manhattan, and things rub off way too much. Although there are some really nice part of Westchester county, it is all just too much in too small a space. You always have to have your guard up. Not necessarily for safety, but just for weird stuff.

One of the lessons in gospel doctrine was about Lot and Soddom. The Gospel Doctrine teacher, Sister S______, is awesome. In her lesson, she said that there were a lot of good reasons to be in Soddom. It was a trading center. There was culture. Arts. Trade. Lots of money and technology. Also, she pointed out that as you read more and more of the story, Lot gets closer and closer to Soddom until finally he is right in the thick of it.

I think the same goes for Westchester county. It is so close to Manhattan, and you can find EVERYTHING worldly in Manhattan and close to it. Although it is possible to raise a strong LDS family here, it would be a real fight. And, in my perspective, why put yourself on the downhill side of a battle.

There was another interesting observation that I have had over the last few days that I have been sharing with some of the people we talk to. It is that although the Gospel has “big things” and “little things", and the big things (WoW, Chastity/morality, etc.) and little things (wearing a tie to church, doing home teaching at beginning of the month, running errands on Sunday, etc), people can make or break themselves by little things.

For examle, it is common knowledge that white shirt and tie is what you wear to church. Is it a big deal if you don’t. No. Especially for investigators…many don’t know any better, and our church dresses fairly formally. But, when you see returned missionaries that don’t dress to church as they should, it is frustrating. Not that they will lose their temple reccommends…but it is still not what they should be doing. Anyway, I have way too much to say about that.

[Personal Stuff Deleted]

Oh, about the expenses. Yeah, Scarsdale is really expensive, and I had a bunch of dry cleaning to do. I found a cheaper place, and I think I may be done with cleaning for a while. Once it gets a bit warmer, I won’t have to wear suit’s except for Sunday’s, and then I can use the machine-washable pants.

About my companion. He isn’t Chinese. He’s a great Elder though. He’s from Hyrum, Utah, which is close to Idaho. He learned Chinese in the MTC, and in his long stay in China town (his entire mission up to this point). From his description, Chinatown sounds pretty cool. Hopefully I’ll get to see it at some point. At the same time, it sounds really dirty, of which I am not a huge fan.

Well, I better get going. Thank you so much for everything. If I have learned one thing, it is that you all play such a regulating influence on my sanity, and without that, I think my sanity goes off the deep end sometimes. Working the the mission office and all the stress that comes with that doesn’t help. That’s okay though. It is great to be of service to the Lord and the mission. Pres. Boren said that I’ll probably be in the office for a while. The new president gets here in July 1st, and Pres. said that there was some “stability” that I brought to the office that will probably be useful to him. That was nice to hear.

ALright, I really need to go. I love you all.

Love,
Elder Barr

This has been a great week. I love White Plains, and my companion Elder Wall is just great. We have been having a good time working the Westchester 1st ward. I love it. The ward covers White Plains, Scarsdale, pretty much the west side of Westchester county, with the exception of Yonkers. There is a branch getting started in Yonkers, that currently is still part of the Westchester 1st ward.

So, lets start off with Wednesday. Transfers come, and since I am an office Elder I know exactly what is going to happen and where and who. But, it was still nice to see all the new Sisters and Elders coming in. We got a big group, especially with Sisters. I think we had 8, and we have another big group coming up in May. But, a lot are going home in May/June so we will need the replacements.

Anyway, on Wednesday, Elder Willden and I drive down to the Scarsdale mission home, meet the new missionaries, and help load their baggage into the mission van and the truck. It was funny to see the new missionaries. New suits. New ties. White shirts (not yellow or grey). New luggage. It was a nice time to reminesce about my entry in to the field. Anyway, we got them all loaded up, and drove down from Scarsdale to the Kingsbridge chalpel in the Bronx. The KB chalpel is something else. It is at a fairly busy intersection, and it is huge. It has underground parking, and a lot of other interesting features not typical of your suburban LDS chalpel.

So, all the new missionaries entered the transfer meeting, along with everyone being transferred. We sung a hymn, introduced the new missionaries, and met our companions. I knew what was going to happen, so it wasn’t too big of a shocker. Once Elder Wall and I met, we went straight to work trying to fit 15 people’s worth of luggage into a 12 passenger van. We got it all to fit, with the doors just able to close. One interesting thing, I was with Elder Willden and Elder Watkins, and we were running down a stairway, and we got locked in the stairwell somehow. There was an exit, but it was emergency only. So, we had to knock on the stairwell for a while before someone found us. Not too big a deal. Bad design though.

So, Wednesday night we started working. We contacted some people in downtown white plains, tracted a little bit, and it was great. Thursday was the same thing. Just starting to call members and make appointments, and then start tracting and street contacting. We had a meeting with the zone leaders and discussed a few possible “focus areas” to work. We have found some really good neighborhoods. The main theoligistics (not sure if that is a real word) here are Jewish, Catholic, Asian (Christian or Buddist), and a few Protestants.

On Thursday in particular, we were able to see the inspiration of this companionship, as we were able to teach a young Jewish man and a Chinese family all in the same night. It was great. I don’t think either of those people will progress, but it was still nice to be able to handle that situation.

Another thing we have been trying is Chinese restaurant look-ups. We found an interesting family from Fujo at one of them. They were all amazed that Elder Wall - a - Spoke Chinese, and b - had heard of Fujo. It turns out that a lot of people who come into this country from China are coming from Fujo. They speak Mandarin but they also have a dialect called Fujanese. It has been interesting learning more about that particular culture, especially the illegal immigration part. It is amazing what people will do to get in this country. It really makes me think of how blessed I am to be here.

We looked up another Chinese restaurant, where they happened to serve Mexican food too, although there were only Chinese cooks. So, it was interesting to think about where they picked up Mexican cooking. They were nice too.

We street-contacted an interesting guy a few days ago. He had a Book of Mormon, and had met with missionaries before. His main concern was that as Christians, we didn’t have a stronger anti-war perspective. We tried to explain the doctrine about it, without becoming political. It was good I think, and we left it in his hands. Anyway, a few days later we street contacted him again, and had a long, thorough discussion on many aspects of the Gospel. Again, we bore testimony and left it in his hands. Hopefully he’ll find his way someday.

Things have been going well in the office. I haven’t had a ton of time to work on some of the software. I keep getting new feature requests. For example, the CES missionaries wanted to be able to generate a list of all the converts from 2005 and onward, within a certain age range, living in either the Westchester or Manhattan stakes. Not too difficult of a query, but the data is not there. So, I called SLC and asked them to send me the data in some format that I can work with. They can’t give me an XML, which would be nice, so I am probably going to have to write a parser of some sort. Havne’t done Perl in a while…..This will be fun.

So, things are good. Sorry I didn’t send some handwritten stuff lately. I will try, but just like you all, we have been soooooooooo busy lately. It has just been incredible. There is so much work to be done. In the office. In the area. Personal studies. I wish I could just pause the world for a while to catch up.

So, today was good. Played football with the zone. Shopped at Trader Joes. Got a new belt. It was good. I think I am good on stuff for a while, although probably some shirts (long or short sleeve) and some ties wouldn’t hurt whenever you get around to it.

Alright. I better go. Thank you for everything. Oh, here is some quick car advice for Andy. Andy, get something good. Like, $3000+. Anything less is going to be much more trouble than it is worth. If I total up all the $ I put into the truck and the mustang, I could have probably a nice used Tahoe. Look into something like that. Maybe a 98-00. Spend $3500-$5000, so you’re going to have to save for a while. But that will be nice because you will be able to drive your car, instead of fix it. And fixing cars is fun, but not when you want to go somewhere but you can’t. So, that is my advice. Get something decent. And do whatever Mom and Dad tell you.

Alright, I have to go. I love you all so much. I know this work is true and of God. Please take care.

Love,
Elder Barr

Thanks for the great email. I will get some handwritten letters out today, and I will use a yellow pad of paper. Also, please excuse the inevitable punctuation errors. I am using an international keyboard and the layout is a little bit different.

This has been a crazy week. Only once did we get in before 11 o clock. That is because it was transfers this week. Elder Willden is going to work in Yonkers, with Elder Watkins, who just got released as an assistant. I am with Elder Wall, who just came up from Chinatown. That has been his only other area in the mission as he is called Mandarin. Anyway, we are going to be re-opening the White Plains English area, and we have some Chinese investigators that hopefully Elder Wall will be able to talk to, because I can´t.

Anyway, it will be great to be proselyting again. The office was fun, and we will still come in 4 hours per day to do some stuff, but we will get to tract and teach again, which will be great. Plus, White Plains is a nice, fairly clean city with some great families who are just dying to hear the Gospel this month. Anyway, it will be great.

Today, I will be picking up some dry cleaning, buying some food, and then I will spend the rest of the time writing some letters. I may go to the office to write the letters because it is easier to concentrate there and there is more space there as well. We´ll see what happens.

Oh, I got to do something cool the other day. Andy, you need to try this. We went to a Brazilian restaurant with the Assistants, and we had these awesome sandwiches. Here is a description from the bottom up.

Bread, corn, cheese, ham, egg, bacon, chicken, tomato, lettuce, cheese, bread. I know it sounds fatty but it was really good, and I have been losing weight so it is fine. I am wearing a size 34 pant right now and they fit fine. I´ll have to send you a picture.

[Personal stuff deleted]

Speaking of BYU, I will ask President if I can do the BYU application online, but it would be EXTREMELY helpful if you went to the website and did some research for me in terms of semester start and end dates, and if you could send it all to me, along with a course catalog, that would be so extremely helpful. I don´t want to miss any deadlines, so I really need to get started with that application. If you could do some research on it, that would be great. Because even if I did the application online, it would still be very rushed and I would like to see it. So, if you could print it out and send it to me this week, that would be wonderful.

Mom, I would love to see a picture of you with your braces. I´m sure you look great. About Andy doing running start, I think it would be a great idea for him. Tell him there is a lot of good money to be made in the sciences. I will write him a good letter today about it. I also wrote a letter for him with some car advice. I just need to send it.

So, I hope everything is going well at home. I will definately send some hand written letters this week. They will be in the mail tomorrow. That is a commitment.

Dad, I am excited to hear about Korea next week. I´m sure you´ll have a great set of things to do there. If Mom doesn´t have time, could you send me prints of all the college stuff, so I can get started on that. Also, I am working on some good apps for the office, and am actually getting into some pretty deep DB theory. For instance, I am writing a program to record key indicators. The issue is, there are 2 reports generated. One shows key indicators per companionship and one shows key indicators per ward. Storing the data, you need to use a comp-ward pair as a key, because there are some companionships that work multiple wards, and some wards that have multiple companionships. Also, there is some interesting stuff in there that makes sure that the data gets entered for every companionship once per week. It will be great when it is all done.

Anyway, I better go. I love you all very much and I thank you for the great letter. I promise to get some handwritten stuff out today.

I love you all so much.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I really appreciate it. I am glad to here that everything is going well.

This week was pretty regular. Transfers are coming up and that is a busy time at the office. Especially this transfer, we are getting 10 sisters. Most of the sisters in the mission are going to be training this cycle. We are getting a few English, a few ASL, a few Spanish, and one Mandarin speaking.

In the office, right now I am just about done with the baptismal statistics stuff. It is pretty cool. I wrote an XSL that transforms the output of the church baptism software to a format that access can import, and then all you have to do is review the imported baptisms, tell how they were found, and it prints out some good reports.

Also, it is great to hear about that job in Provo. I think that that will be a good thing to do, so we better get on top of things for the BYU application. There is a March semester there, so that may be a good option. Either that or start in the summer. Either way.

Today we went bowling as a zone. It was really fun. The city we were in was New Rochelle, which is a nice and clean city. I like it. Most of Westchester County is pretty good, although there are some bad spots from place to place. It is amazing how close together it all is. You can drive from a bad spot in Yonkers to a $5 million Scarsdale home in 15 minutes. It is weird. White Plains is pretty good.

So, a day in the office is pretty normal. We work, take a lunch/study break, and then keep working. We get there at 7:45 AM, and we work the ENTIRE day, except for meals/study. We do most of the “cooking” ourselves, although I haven’t had a good cooked meal in a long time. Either “take-out” or packaged stuff. There is just no time.

We work with the Assistants quite a bit. They usually come in just as we are finishing things for the day. Sometimes if they give us a last minute request we’ll be there to quite late in the day.

Also, Dad, I have been getting your postcards. I really appreciate them. I hope you have a great trip to Korea. Take care of yourself. Mom, I’m sure you’ll look great with the braces.

I will try to send some handwritten letters today. We have most of the errands done, and there are still a few more hours in the day.

Also, I wanted to mention. We had a great mission conference on Monday. The subject was on the proclamation to the World on the Family. It was great. It has made me resolve to plan to be the best parent I can be. I have a head start though, since I have the best example parents in the world.

I love you all so much. Please take care.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email.

First, there is a MAJOR concern: Quoting Andy: >>>> So when we all get to the top, A___, T__, and I__ went to do the black diamonds and mogul fields so they gave me a radio and let me go off and do some of the more milder greens.

Could you make sure this doesn’t happen anymore? It is really bad to be alone at Whistler. REALLY BAD. It actually made me really sad to read that. It gets dark early there and I don’t like that. Even if he is on greens only. Please make a phone call and put a stop to that. I am sorry but I really feel strongly about it. There is no reason for someone inexperienced to be alone. Please call and make sure that doesn’t happen anymore.

Okay, things have been going well at the office. Work is great. The Microsoft Access project is pretty much done, but there is one more thing that I need to do, which is write an XSLT. Yeah, it is funny that it all came down to that. To submit baptisms to Salt Lake, they have developed a program called CDE which generates a file, and then sends it to Salt Lake. The file is a zipped XML file. Access will import XML, and will also allow a series of XSLT’s to be applied to the XML before import.

Anyway, of course the XML file that CDE generates is in a different format than the way my tables in access are set up, so I will have to write an XSL to do the transform. I haven’t done one of those yet, and I have very little documentation on how. So, what I am going to do is check out a book from the library (with permission of course) and figure out how to do it. Other than that, I think that we are about done. It is like going back to work, except the days are much longer. (We work from 7:45 AM to 9:15 PM, with a break for study and eating).

I like this work though. Another mission happened to call yesterday and ask what we are doing for baptismal statistics, and I told them, “We happen to have a solution that is almost done. We’ll call you when it is ready.” So, that will be good.

Nothing really exciting happened this week. It was cool to see some money in the savings account. Money here has been tight lately. We have had a lot of extra expenses, but we made some adjustments and it should work out but I had to spend a bit of personal money this week. What was happening was that our roommates wanted us each to put in $20 for food, except we were never coming back to the apartment. So we put in money, and plus we would buy food for the office, and we wouldn’t eat much at home.

Our apartment is looking better, but it still isn’t clean. We are all going to work on that today and hopefully make it better.

Also, I need some advice on hand lotions. My hands have been really dry-and crackly, so much that they bleed sometimes. I was using Eucerin and that wasn’t doing the trick. I got some lavender stuff from Trader Joe’s and that has been better, but if you had any other ideas, let me know. I think I may have irritated my hands washing them too much. I’ll try to cut it down. Sis. Boren is always making sure that we wash and use sanitizer, but the only soap we have in the apartment is dish soap, and I think that has done a little damage to my skin.

All in all, things are going great. Oh, one more experience. We got to spend 6 hours in a hospital for my companion. He has something wrong with his lungs and chest (pains), partly due to the Bronchitis, but the doctors haven’t been able to make it better, and he has already been through a round of anti-biotics. Anyway, at the hostpital they did all kinds of tests on him, including one where he had to breathe in radioactive materials and then use a machine to trace it. It was the “nuclear radiology” department. I got to have a good conversation with the tech, and it was pretty interesting. I asked him what he thought about the medical field, and he asked about the church. It was a good interchange of knowledge. He lives in the Bronx, in a really nice part called Pelham Bay Park. It is in the north east corner of the Bronx, bordering New Rochelle.

Alright, sorry about the short email. Reading that message made me a little frustrated. I’m sure Andy will be fine, but it is really bad practice to be by yourself on the mountain, no matter what the difficulty of trail is. Please let T__ and A___ know that.

Alright, I better go. I love you so much.
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I really appreciate it. It was a good Valentine’s day. Pretty irrelavant holiday for missionaries I think, but still good. It was funny being in the office and watching the decorated envelopes come in for certain missionaries.

Speaking of the office, things are going well with the MS Access stuff. We have some good reports being generates, and I am trying to make the data-entry side simple and unbreakable. I think I may be able to get Salt Lake to maintain it if the application is good enough. Here is the thing I am stuck on right now, and if you could think of a good solution in the next few days, that would be great. Here is the question.

I have a table, called baptisms. It is essentially as such,

bID, bFirstName, bLastName, bGender, bAge, wardID, baptismDate, howFoundID, and a few other fields.

Now, here is the question. I need to generate an access report in the following format:

Month: mm, yy
Male 8-11: # Female 8-11: #
Male 12-17: # Female 12-17: #
Male 18-65: # Female 65+: #

# Found through method 1: #, 2: #, 3:#, etc.

So, there are probably 5 finding methods, and findMethodID references a findMethod table. there is also a wards table that has this structure:

wardID, wardName, SLCUnit#, ParentStakeID, #ofCompanionships

and a stake table:

stakeID, stakeName, StakeSLCUnit#, etc.

Anyway, the challenge right now for me is doing the baptisms per age/gender on a per month basis. That is what I’ll be working on tonight. I’ll send you the MDB file on a disk (ugh!) and see what you think of it.

Let’s see, so office work is great. We really get to see all that goes on in the mission. We see President Boren from time to time. Also, since we came in, they are putting one of the office senior couples out into the proselyting work up North, so Elder Willden and I will be taking over their duties, which include the referral system and apartment management. There will be a senior couple for apartment management, but referrals are completely on us for the time being. Anyway, it is definately a blessing to serve.

On Sunday, it snowed about 2 ft. Needless to say, church was cancelled. Since my companion, Elder Willden, has bronchitis, he wasn’t allowed to be outside in the cold, so we essentially had the day off. The snow has mostly melted now, and it is about 55 degrees.

Oh, sorry for not being able to send mail last week. The apartment was a disaster when we got there. Stuff everywhere. Junk on the floor. The walls were disgusting (grease, ketchup, various stains), and the other Elders living there were a little oblivious to it. It has been just the 2 of them for a while, and they had really spread out. So, we used all the cleaning supplies in the apartment to scrub down the walls and give the floor a good mopping. But there are still some real problems there. The dishes haven’t been “effectively washed” in a long time. When you look at the dishes, they look clean at a glance, but it turns out only the middle of the front side was ever really washed. The rims are disgusting, not to mention the back side. Anyway, I told President about it, and he embarassed my roommates about it in front of the whole zone. I felt bad, but something needed to happen. Luckily, my companion agrees with me that the apartment needs some serious attention, and it has gotten cleaner throughout the week.

Alright, I better get going. A few more errands to do, and then back to the office.

I love you so much. Happy Valentines day! Tell Andy and Tina to stay out of trouble .

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I am emailing from the downtown white plains public library. White Plains is a cool city. I am with Elder Willden, who will be my office companion. We will be working full time in the office, and then doing some proselyting if we need a break.

[Personal Stuff Deleted]

Anyway, the work is great. I am glad to know things are going so well at home. A few days ago, we had a General Authority, Elder Jensen, and an area authority, Elder Christensen, visit our mission and the Yorktown stake. It was very inspiring hearing from both of them. They were great. I had a few seconds to personally talk to Elder Jensen, and the best part about talking to these people is that they are real. They are good people who live the gospel and try to share it with others.

Speaking of that, D___ B______ will be baptized on the 11th, which will be great. I am excited for him, even if I won’t get to be there. It was hard to leave Danbury, but at the same time it was definately time for a change. I will be working on the referral system, and also a MS Access system for gathering some data and generating statistics. It should be fun. I’m glad to be able to use my talents to help the Lord.

Other than that, I think things are going great. It will take me a little while to get used to White Plains and Scarsdale, but I am excited to be working here. I think it will be great.

I’ll try to send off some letters today. Sorry I can’t make this longer but the parking meter is running.

I love you all so much.
Love,
Elder Barr

Thanks for the great email. This has been an interesting week.

First, Mom, I’m sorry to hear about your back. I hope you feel better. Back problems can be a pain, as I’m sure dad can attest to.

We tried to visit the Bishop last Saturday, and his back was out. He was walking funny on church this Sunday. It is amazing on how much one small physical problem can really change everything.

Dad, how did you like Manhattan? I have only been there a few times to go to the temple, so I haven’t seen much of it. I am hoping to serve in Manhattan 1st ward some day, to work with the J_____ family. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the city and were in a good area.

This week has gone by so fast. So, Elder Brown and I are working Danbury and Newtown wards, and it is great. On Sunday, we had 8 hours of church. The Newtown ward is more affluent than the Danbury ward, and the 5th Sunday meeting was about how to more effectively raise kids. Bishop O. gave the lesson. He asked for suggestions from the crowd on how to be better parents. I gave a comment that, “well, when you tract in the nicer neighborhoods, all you get is kids until 5:00 or 6:00 pm. Parent’s aren’t ever home…". I think that recieved a mixed reaction. Luckily, a young woman in the ward backed me up. She is a nanny for a family in Ridgefield, and she said, “Yeah. It’s sad. I’m 20 years old, and I am a mom for these kids. They never see their parents. I’m the only one who ever talks to them.” So, it was interesting. I think it was worth mentioning.

Yesterday Elder Brown and I were at Scarsdale again. We told Sister Boren that we felt like regular Fairfield county residents, commuting to an office in New York for work. Anyway, the office is having a handful of issues that they need to be resolved. There is some issues with the referral system, and that the SLC solution doesn’t provied the granularity that week need. (They want to go by zip code, but in Manhattan that doesn’t work. Too dense.) Anyway, I may be working with the dev in SLC via phone to see if we can figure out some kind of system for smaller areas based on streets.

[Personal Stuff Omitted]

Our investigator, D___ B______, is progressing quite well. He is getting baptized on the 11th, and we are excited for him. He’s a great guy. We have an appointment with him tonight. It should be good.

Anyway, I should have some time to write today. After email, Elder Brown and I are going to go grab some lunch and that should be it for errands today. The laundry is already done. Study done. Cleaning done. It has been a good preparation day so far.

[More Personal Stuff Omitted]

By the way, could you review the college application stuff and see what needs to happen so I can get in by the March semester. If you could research the following:

BYU (comp sci.), UW (comp sci.), Harvard (why not?), and some of the other schools that you think would be good. I think BYU would work fine, although another shot at the UW wouldn’t hurt either. I think once I return I can research my graduate education.

So, tomorrow will be significant in terms of mission time. I think my time in Danbury has gone quickly, and I can definately believe that the second part of the mission will go faster than the first. I love the work. I love teaching the gospel to people. I love being of use to my Father in Heaven in whatever way I can be of service.

Take care! I love you all very much!
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

How are you doing? I noticed there is no email in my box. That is alright. I hope you are all doing great.

First of all, Andy, I hope you had a great birthday. I wanted to write you something, but we had a power outage in the apartment last Wednesday and it was a bit of a mess. Anyway, I am so proud of you turning 16. I hope you have a great year. Things are going so fast. I love you so much.

Second, transfers came and went. I got transferred, kind of. The SP/PG branch is going so well, so it was decided that there would be a full-time SP/PG companionship. I am companions with my district leader/roommate Elder Brown. I have lived with him for almost 6 months now, so I know him pretty well. He is a great guy. Anyway, we will be working both the Newtown and the Danbury wards. Great things have been happening in both wards.

Starting last Wednesday…after a huge windstorm, the power went out. So, we didn’t by groceries, and spent a lot of the p-day making arrangements, and trying to find a non-cordless phone. It was interesting. It has been cold/snowy lately, so the apartment cooled down pretty fast. On Wednesday night, we went on a split. And I went with T***** K***** to teach D*** B******. The appointment went really well. He is such a great guy, and we are excited for him to get baptized.

By the way, this reminds me.T***** and I were talking and it turns out he was in the Potomac North ward too, around the same time we were. So, it was great talking about all the common people that we knew. He remembered a lot of the big events in the ward, and knew all the same stories that I did. He is about 10 yrs older that me, and he said he faintly remembered you, Mom and Dad. I’ll show him a family picture to see if he remembers us.

Anyway, Wednesday night, went to bed, house at about 67 degrees. Wake up Thursday morning. House at 50 degrees. No way we are staying much longer. We have got things to do, like “Thursday planning", that takes a few hours, and it would be difficult to do at a cold apartment with one phone line and 2 companionships. So, we called Bro. R***** our ward mission leader. He let us come over, since he works from home. We showered there, and then we did some planning and study. The planning went really well.

Thursday we went on another split, and the teaching went well. Friday we had another split, and I was teaching D*** B****** again. It was at the C*****’s house. It was another great lesson, and we watched part of the general conference DVD that we had, and answered some of his questions. His baptism is on the 25th of Feb. It will be great.

On Saturday morning we had the Q***********’s, which is our Ecquadorian family. They are great. We showed them the conference talk by Elder Ballard, called “What matters most is what lasts longest", which is all about the family, and she loved it. She was interrupted by a phone call, so she grabbed the phone and said, “We don’t need nothing!", and kept watching conference. She is a great lady, and very worried about the well-being of her family. When we taught her about the law of the fast, we fasted that her husband would join us in our discussions. So far nothing but we remain faithful. She went to church last Sunday and she loved it.

That leads into Church. D*** went to the English ward, and the Q*********** went to the branch. We went on a split for Sacrament meeting, which was weird but it worked out. The SP/PG group had 45 people in it, which was great. It is really taking off. Some Hispanic less-actives that we have been working with for quite a while came for the first time in a long time, and we are excited for that. The group leader is President Seely, who just returned from Mexico where he servered as a mission president in one of the missions there.

After church on Sunday, we were richly blessed by the guidance of the Spirit to visit a certain family. We had made plans to visit them later in the day, but as we drove by their street, I felt a strong impression to visit them now. So, I turned and told Elder Ferreira, “Let’s visit them now". So, we visited with them and had a great visit. It was the perfect time to, because the husband was just about to leave for the week (he works in NH, but his family hasn’t moved yet). Their kids have gone a bit wayward lately, so we are going to try to strengthen them as much as possible. Anyway, the point of the story was that it was so wonderful to be given a prompting, have acted on it, and to see the results. This really is God’s work and He wants it to succeed.

On Monday I had to go into the mission office to fix some of the computer problems they were having. I have had to do that a lot lately. This was part 2 of a set of visits I had to make to upgrade the entire office. The Church uses a corporate version of XP, and each mission office VPN’s into a large private class A church network, over a local DSL. Anyway, we were having some slowness issues, and the computers were recieving all sorts of bad packets. This was diagnosed after staring at some TCP dumps care of Ethereal. Anyway, nearing the end of the night, I started thinking…."this is an LDS class A network….with a very strong firewall on our side….the computers are named Nephi, Alma, etc,….this is an LDS class A network….let’s rename those boxes.” So, I renamed them to much more unique names. Also, we switched out the 100BaseT hub for 10/100 Switch, and things worked MUCH better. It was great.

Today was transfer day, and I got Elder Brown. We shopped, and now we did email, and that is it to this point.

Anyway, I love you all. Thank you so much for everything. Sorry I haven’t been very good at writing lately. I love you all so much. Please send me a hard copy of whatever you were planning to send today.

I love you all so much. My God bless you all and keep you safe and happy.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I really enjoy hearing from each of you. Things have gone fairly well this week.

Yesterday I was in the mission office from 8:00 am till 10:00 pm. The Church sent us a bunch of new software, and each computer had to be upgraded and reconfigured. Plus, there isn’t a whole lot of documentation on exactly how certain things are supposed to work, so it was a bit of a challenge. For example, there is a program called Mission Office System (MOS), that we just got an update for, and it requires that the computers be networked together. That part was fine, they were already networked using the church-approved setup (which was a little strange…there was some IPX stuff, some Novell stuff, in addition to regular TCP). Anyway, I got all the software installed, the shares set up correctly, and everything, and the computers have trouble talking to each other over MOS. They can share files fine over regular TCP/windows file sharing, but it doens’t work well through MOS. I found some of this stuff out while sitting in the mission office at 9:30 PM running ethereal to scan the network…..there is a lot involved in missionary work that you just can’t anticipate.

So, pretty soon it will be a certain important landmark in my mission. That is pretty cool to think about. I like Danbury, although it has its quirks. Overall it is pretty cool.

Oh, you had asked about what I wanted to do after my mission, so we can start working on college apps and stuff. I think BYU computer science would be good, but I wouldn’t mind giving University of Washington another try. It would be nice to live near home, especially after 2 years away. What are some other good WA schools? Anyway, for graduate work, there is a man in our ward, (former) Bishop Smith, who works for Pfizer. He is a microbiologist, and I was asking him how computer science related to that. He said that they try to have sophisticated computer simulations of the human body so that they can try to predict what certain chemicals and medicines will do to the body. That method is much better than the “eat this and tell me what gets better” method. Anyway, that would be fascinating. I am not sure what would be required to go in that direction, but I’m sure that would be interesting/high paying. Anyway, when he told me about that it sounded like something to look in to.

Our investigator pool is pretty strong right now. We have D***, who is doing great. We had a good lesson with him on Sunday. It snowed a lot and they cancelled church, so we had a member, Bro. B., come and teach with us. Bro. B. joined the church 8 years ago, and he is a great teacher because he makes things very real and down to earth. Anyway, D*** is progressing well and I think that things will go smoothly with him.

We have the O****’s, from Argentina. They have been sick lately, and we haven’t been able to meet with them. We are going on a split tonight and my companion and Bro. R***** should see them tonight. That will be great. He is supposed to get baptized this Sunday, but he still needs an interview.

We have B*** and B**, who we are teaching at Bishop Smith’s house on Thursday. I am really excited for that lesson. B*** and B** are both semi-retired engineers and they came in contact with the church while visiting Temple Square. We met with them a while ago, but then the holidays came and we weren’t able to meet for a while. Anyway, I gave them a call and we set this thing up for Thursday. It should be great.

Anyway, the work is going great. We have been challenged by Elder Ballard to contact 10 people per day per missionary (20 / companionship), independent of tracting. So, we have been doing a lot of street contacting. There are a lot of great people to be found and I know that the Lord will bless us for our efforts, although it could be in an indirect fashion.

By the way, next cycle we are studying The Family Proclamation as a mission. I am really excited for that. I love that document. It has so much good doctrine in it. We have been using it quite a bit lately.

Thanks for everything. Thank you for the extra money also. I will try to send some mail out today. It is only 2:00, so I should have some time.

One last funny story….last Wednesday we had a correlation meeting in the evening. One of the ward missionaries, Bro. S******, was there. His first name is Steve. As we were leaving the meeting, someone called out “bye Steve". I thought, “what? who’s calling me that? It’s Elder Barr…". Then S**** S****** reacted and I realized the situation. It was just funny to hear my 1st name in a way that could have referenced me. It threw me off for a second.

Anyway, I better be going.
I love you all so much. Thanks for the emails. They are appreciated.

Thanks for the great letter. And sorry I haven’t been able to write. I literally have had 0 time the last few P-DAYS. It isn’t just napping all day. I won’t even have the full 30 mins to email today, as I am going on a split with the Bishop in about 40 minutes.

Things have been going great.

1st, I had a cool experience on Jan 1st that I forgot to mention. It was the first meeting of the Spanish/Portuguese branch that we have been working with, and it was great. We had 18 out, which was good. I got to bless the Sacrament in Spanish, and my companion got to do it in Portuguese.

Last Sunday we had 31 at the branch, and the local Priesthood blessed the sacrament and we passed it. Hopefully they can be self-sufficient completely soon, but it is nice to help out as well.

The last few days have been good. I had one more trip to New Caanan to have a zone conference yesterday. It was great. President Boren spoke about the transition between teenage, missionary, and disciple. In other words, knowledge, doing, and becoming, respectively. It was a great conference and I came away with some great ideas.

Also, in my cyclic interview with President Boren, we talked about a lot of important things that will help Elder Ferreira and I work the area more effectively. It is a fun challenge to balance 3 languages/cultures, but it is a great work. I love it.

The weather here has been cold and snowy/rainy. But, things have been nice. I put a bunch of stuff to the dry cleaners tonight, and I missed the 10:00 am cutoff, so they have to keep it overnight.

Anyway, I was wondering if you could send a little $$. I have had to dip in to personal funds quite a bit (dry cleaning, supplies, area maps that we made, etc.), and it would be nice to have some extra. Anyway, whatever you can do would be greatly appreciated.

Tell Grandma G***** I loved the sweater. I will write her a note next P-day. I promise. We literally ran out of time today. The office called with some computer questions, I had to get a haircut, clean the apartment, and the landlord invited us to lunch so that was nice. But there never is enough time.

Alright, I need to go. It is 5:26 and we need to get home, clean up, and go on a split. We have this great new investigator, D*** *., who will be baptized on the end of the month. More about him next week.

I love you all so much and thank you so much for all that you do. I promise to send more written stuff and a longer email next week.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I really appreciated it. It was funny, reading about Andy launching the potato cannon at 2:00am. I am sitting here in the Danbury library laughing and a few people stared. Oh well, I’m used to stares at this point.

The work has been going great. I just got back from Scarsdale. Elder Brown and I went there yesterday to help President Boren at the office for “a few hours". One of the computers crashed and I had to put all the stuff back on. OI figured out how the church wanted things it was pretty easy. Also, on one of the boxes it has some MBR protector and I was trying to make changes and it kept reverting them so I had to go into the BIOS and disable it. Which reminds me, I should probably have reenabled it.

Also, President’s computer’s hard drive was starting to go bad, and the first thing that went was the registry. So, I yanked the HD from his computer, put it in another one, and recovered all the stuff that I could. He went out and bought a new HD and I installed it, put the new OS, and put his stuff back on. The last thing I had to do was work on some Excel spreadsheet stuff. They had a sheet that listed the performance of every companionship over 1 month, with a different sheet for each week, graphing the key indicators. Anyway, they had had formulas in the sheet before, but everytime the made changes it would break. Anyway, I re-applied the formulas, added some new ones, and used Excel’s “Protection” feature to lock all the stuff it place. It was pretty cool. I’ll probably get called back in as there are a lot of reports generated by hand off of that sheet that would be pretty straightforward to automate.

The proselyting work in Danbury is going well. We have been trying to tract in the English areas, and street contact in the Spanish/Portuguese areas, and that has been a good use of time. It is so much harder to find English speaking investigators than those from other countries. However, the work goes on.

The new year went by uneventfully. We had to be in the appt. at 6:00 (because people get drunk and do bad stuff on new years), so we had a little barbeque, and just relaxed/goofed off, and were in bed by 10:30, same as usual.

There has been a lot of snow here lately. They are pretty good about plowing the roads, but getting out of the driveway can be the hardest part. Especially because you have to dig through the wall of snow that the plow forms on the driveway.

[Personal stuff omitted]

Also, i’ll work on an outline of the daily schedule if I have time. This P-day is crazy again because we are going to have a zone activity in Stamford and that tends to eat a lot of time, because Stamford is an hour away. Stamford is a cool town. So, is Scarsdale. Greenwich is rich beyond belief. New Canaan is up there too. There is a highway that connects them, the Merrit Parkway, that turns into the Hutchinson River Parkway (the Hutch, as they say), which connects all these towns. It is the straight shot to the city from all these rich cities.

Alright, well I better go. I really love this work. It is a lot of fun, and very rewarding. The challenges have been interesting…some expected, some not. But I know I’m on the right side of things. I love it.

Thanks for everything. Please take care. Say hi to everyone for me.

I love you all very much!

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

It was indeed great to talk to you all on Christmas. 30 mins seems like 5 on the phone. Still it was great and really refreshing to talk to you all on the phone.

Today was a really busy P-day. We had a member take us to the mall with 2 YM from the ward, C**** and C*****. C***** is a young Equadorian kid that joined the church, and doesn’t have a lot of family support. His dad is in Equador, and his mom works all the time. Consequently he gets into a lot of bad things. Today, he was bent on buying some M-rated video games. C**** is a bit older (16) and was a good example to him and showed him some better stuff. Also, the store didn’t let him buy the game and there was no way I was going to do it for him.

Anyway, we went to wal-mart, got the car washed/vacuumed, and ran some errans. Speaking of that, I am sending a package out tomorrow with my sweater, the winter jacket that I took but never have touched, and my stocking. I may also be sending another package with some letters that I have been stockpiling for a while. If you could archive those somewhere, that would be great. I’m not sure if that package will go out this week or next.

Also, I was thinking of buying a tape recorder ($20 at walmart), and sending audio-letters. That would be in addition to the email. What do you think about that? I think that we could use the bubble-mailers for tapes. Plus, it would be faster to dictate than to write. My comp. has a tape player so I’ll try sending one and you can see if you like it or not. Also, I’ll work on a weekly overview and try to send it next week. This P-day was super busy. Next week should be better.

Other than that things are going great. The holidays were fun but it will be nice to have them over since people will have less reason to be busy.

Oh, today will be interesing. I may go on a split with a member from the ward, and I will be teaching a Spanish appointment. The member doesn’t know Spanish, so this will be a real test for me to see if I can hold my own in Spanish. It should be fun, but I’ll definately need the Lord’s help to pull it off. It is cool the interventions that we see from the Lord. For example, sometimes we have investigators at church and some member will say some crazy thing that I am convinced will offend the investigator. However, the investigators never seem to hear it. The Spirit acts as a filter. That much I am certain.

Anyway, next week should be great. It will be fun to have the new year. We have to be in by 6:00 New Years eve, so it will be nice to relax, cook a nice dinner, and maybe take a bath.

Alright, thank you so much for everything. Again I really enjoyed the phone call and the gifts. Don’t tell Grandma that I shipped the sweater home. Oh, and say hi to the Australian exchange student for me. Ask him to say, “Crikey", or “there’s crocidiles in my backyard", or other funny but culturally-insensitive things.

Speaking of cultural insensitivity, my comp. is from Brazil. And, a lot of people here are from various South American countries. However, a lot of the white people here thing that everything south of Texas is Mexico. So, when one says, “I’m from Sao Paulo", you get, “What part of Mexico is that?". So, that has become our joke. We passed a Taco Bell, and I said, “Elder, does seeing that make you home sick?". It was pretty funny. The Brazilians and the Hispanics hate it. Especially the Equadorians, because everyone thinks that they are Mexicans. Brazilians don’t particularly like being called Mexican’s either. So, when you pass people on the street, you need to quickly judge wether you want to say “Hola, como esta” or “Oi, como vai". Anyway, that’s life on Main St. of Danbury.

I really need to go now. It is 5:10 and I still have to do a bunch of stuff and be out the door by 6:00.

Love you all very much.
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. Please send me a hard copy, as the library is closed and we are back at the old apple store. The mall is packed, as it is only a few days before Christmas. Also, we couldn’t use our cars today because of some car stuff going on in the mission, so we had a member drive us to the mall. This P-DAY will be a long day.

Anyway, I will be calling sometime between 5:30 and 6:00 pm on Christmas day. I am so much looking forward to talking to you. I miss you all very much.

Oh, I haven’t gotten the Christmas card yet. I got one from the P******* and one from the K******, but I haven’t gotten ours yet.

Life is going great here in Danbury. My Brazilian companion, Elder Ferreira (pronounced Fa-hair-uh), and I, are working 3 languages. Portuguese, English, and Spanish. While tracting yesterday, and we taught a lesson to a Peruvian guy. It was really cool. My Spanish is getting to the point where I can teach an entire lesson, or at least be a major contributor. My comp. can speak Spanish, but it is with a heavy Portuguese accent.

The work is going great. We are working with all different kinds of people, and I love it.

I love the Gospel. It is wonderful. I love to teach people. I love the work. It is hard sometimes. There is so little personal time. Things are always rushed. But it is part of the work.

We had a great lesson with an Argentine part-member family on Tuesday, and we took the Elders quorum president, Bro. Richards, out with us. We got a baptismal date from the husband, A****, for the 22nd of January. I told him that that would be a good date to get baptized since it is my brother’s b-day .

Well, sorry to have this letter so short. I am looking forward to talking to you on Christmas day. It will be a normal proselyting day, but we will be allowed to have one dinner with a member family. So, we’ll try to visit people. We’ll tract. Carol. Maybe have a street meeting. Normal missionary stuff. It will be great.

Thank you so much for the great email. I really appreciate it. I’ll try to write some handwritten letters today, but we still need to get shopping done and finish the laundry. I’ll do my best though.

Have a great Christmas. Say hi to Grandma Debbie and Grandpa Paul.

I love you all very much!
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

This has been a great week. I didn’t get transferred. I got a new companion, Elder Ferriera. He is really cool. He joined the church in 2000, and he is the only member in his family. He is Brazilian, and we will be working English, Spanish, and Portuguese. It will definately be a challenge but I know that with the Lord’s help I am up to it. Elder Hedelius got transferred to Middletown, which will be good for him. He is in a threesome with 2 other really good missionaries.

Oh, one thing on the hats. Very few hats are “approved". There is the chaufer style hat (kind of like a lump on the head, but looks pretty good), and the Russian style. So, maybe a hat gift cert. would be better, or just get something that you are sure is approved by Sister Boren =) Rules are rules.

Mom, I am so glad that you have been able to go out teaching with the sisters. I know exactly what kind of appointment you had. I was in a very similar situation where we brought a the first councilor in the Bishopric to an appointment. It is hard to answer all the questions. Anyway, I am sure the sisters love you to death for going out with them. Just make sure to volunteer to drive them places (to save on miles), and to go out with them a lot, and they will love it.

We are working with this great family, the Q**********’s. They are from Ecquador. The mom of the family loves us very much. She listens to everything we say, and loves to feed us. She sees us as her teachers, and from God, but she also treats us like her kids. She said, “yo soy como mama a ustedes.” It was because we told her we couldn’t come in without another man being home. It was funny! I was thinking that sometime you could write her a letter encouraging her along in the church. She is really trying to find out if the church is right for her and her family. The father is also interested, but the mom is the real decision maker in the household. (so you can relate to her j/k)

Tell andy I will send him the password via letter, and to not send any more passwords in cleartext over email. It is dangerous.

On Christmas, I will probably call in the evening, around 6:30. I will make plans with my companion and write you today.

Alright, I better get going. It is 3:30 and we need to shop for groceries and run some other errands. I hope everything is well and home and I am looking forward to calling you. I am excited about this cycle with a new companion. Transfers is always a good time to really recommit to being totally obedient and trying become not just a missionary, but a true disciple of Jesus Christ. It is such a priveledge to be out here. I love it.

I love you all so much. Please take care.

Love,
Elder Barr

Thanks for the great email. I always appreciate them. I love reading about what is happening at home.

Lets see, this week has been really good, and cold. It snowed on thanksgiving, got hot again, and then snowed a few more times, and the snow is frozen to the ground now. It is typical east coast…the roads are plowed and nice and brown and salty, and the roads are clean but pretty gross.

Here’s a funny/sad/painful story that happened to me this week. It was 7:30pm last Thursday night, and we were walking to a member’s house ( a recently returned missionary) to go visit a less-active member. On the way there, we decided to cut through the park. On the entrance to the park, there is this little stream, and there is a little bridge over it. They had just poured new concrete on the sidewalk part of the bridge, and it was roped off. We decided to walk around the side. Mind you, it was dark. So, I started to walk around the side when I come to the realization that there is no more concrete underneath my feet. The next thing I know, I’m laying in the stream on my back. I got up and I was fine, but soaking wet. Lucikly, I have been using the “give-away” scriptures during the day, so my scriptures weren’t ruined. But by suit and nice overcoat were soaked. We weren’t too far from the member’s house, so we kept walking there. When I got there, I told him what happened, and he gave me a towel to dry off, and a change of clothes. We went to the cleaners to drop off my stuff, and he paid for it all. (which was really nice of him. it was $27 for everything). Then we went to the appointment. So, it was a cold night that night.

We had a great mission conference on Monday. I got to see a lot of old missionary friends and it President and Sister Boren gave wonderful talks. Also, we all got a chance to bear testimony which was really spiritual and touching. Mission conferences are so refreshing, just because you get to relate to other missionaries who are doing the same thing you are doing. Also, I got to ask about my old area. Do you remember the M****’s in the Bronx - all the kids had long hair. The father and the youngest son got baptized together. They will hopefully get sealed this time next year, and I will be able to attend since I baptized most of the family (with Elder Wood, of course).

Oh, I was wondering, what should I do about cameras? The one T** sent me doesn’t work. I’ll try calling HP, but the mission is really discouraging digital cameras. My old apartment in the Bronx got robbed again. It is getting ridiculous, especially down there. I think disposables will be fine. Also, who is using my Nikon. If it is just being stored, did you take the batteries out?

Lets see, other than the conference and the fall, things are going great. Not too much is out of the normal. Transfers are next week, and either Elder Hedelius or I are out (not sure if that sentence was gramatically correct). It will be interesting because the wards here are structured in a funny way. Danbury is English and has a Spanish group. Newtown is English and has a Portuguese group. The stake presidency just announced that beginning January 1st, Danbury is absorbing the Portuguese program. Then, the Spanish/Portuguese programs will have a combined sacrament meeting. The youth will meet with the English youth. So, maybe Danbury will be getting an Spanish/Portuguese companionship? If so, I’m not sure where that leaves me. I guess we’ll have to see what President Boren and the Lord come up with for the area.

Alright, I should get going. I hope everhting is going well. I love you so much and I am excited to be calling soon. We only have 30 minutes, so it will be a quick call. That is okay though. It is incredible thinking about where I was last Christmas, where I am now, where I’ll be. It is great. I love the work.

Thanks for everything. I love you so much.
Love,

Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great letter this week. This week has been really good. I can’t believe that Thanksgiving was a week ago already. It seems like a distant memory, although we are still working through the leftovers.

Oh, by the way, I think the best reader of the blog is Elder Hedelius’ mom. Sometimes he gets lazy about writing, so they check here for more details. Anyway, she read about the spinach omlettes, and made some. But, she wanted the recipies from the source. So, in a round about way you could post them on the blog and answer her question. Or, send her an email. That would probably be better. Elder Hedelius’ mom’s email is: ******@hotmail.com. Send her some other good recipies too, including the one for the greek Easter bread, and a little mahleb. They would like that. We don’t have an oven, so I can’t make it. The landlord has one, so maybe I’ll make it. It eats a whole pday to make. Anyway, if you could send her an email, that would be great.

Oh, one other interesting detail. Elder Hedelius’ mom found the blog independently. I didn’t tell him about it. Can you send me some stats on readership, just for my personal curiosity. Their IP address is **.***.**.***, from Elder H’s memory. I wonder if anyone in the ward has gotten hold of it?

Thanksgiving was really good. We first went to drop by on C*****, a young recent convert from Ecquador. It was nice. We got him a basketball for his birthday. His aunt told us to try “a little bit of turkey". We told her we already had dinner plans. She just said, “have the 1st plate here, the 2nd there.” And then she started putting a bunch of rice on one plate. Then she literally opened the oven door, ripped off a leg, and put it on top of the rice. Then she put some veggie/mayo salad on the side, and handed it to me. Elder Hedelius was smart, and asked for a very little amount of rice. I was stuck with this enormous plate. I got to work on eating it, and C*****’ aunt looked at me and said, in Spanish, “if you like it, finish it.” My heart sunk. It was good.

Anyway, after C***** we walked over to X***** G’s house, where she hosted a party for the Hispanic part of the ward. It was nice. They played charades, trying to act out the names of different Univision soaps. It was amazing how many different soap operas they were familiar with. The teams were guys vs. girls, but one of the guys, Bro. C******, was running the event, and he helped the guys team in a wink-wink sort of manner, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, we walked back to the car, and then drove to Ridgefield to visit and have dinner with a non-member family that is related to the M******* family in the ward. The M******* family is 50% Guatemala, 50% Philipino. Their relatives were of the Philipino side, and they had a HUGE house. 8,000 sq. feet. It was pretty incredible. The food was great. Filet mignon was a nice side to the turkey. Each dish was in its own buffet-style serving apparatus, with a warming candle under each one. The deserts were brought from an Italian bakery in the Bronx. It was great.

Let’s see….other good appointments/events:
Sunday at church, I had to teach a lesson on the spot, without preparation. The lesson was on the millenium, for the Gospel Essentials class. B** and L*** were there, along with N*** S*******, and a few other members. The lesson went pretty good. It was a lot to cover in 40 minutes. Pretty much everything from now till the end of the world, and what we should do about it. We had some good discussions. Especially with L***, B**’s wife. She asked some really good questions that got everyone thinking outside the standard box.

We have been working with another Ecquadoran family, the Q**********’s. They are great, although the mom played a terrible trick on us yesterday. We were over there watching a church video in Spanish (which she loves), and I was also working on making a word-search for the 10 year old son, J****, which he loves. The mom, Sister Q., also loves to cook (Elder Hedelius adds that we refer to her as Sister Q., although she isn’t technically a member. She enjoys the title.). Anyway, she asked if we were hungry. We had just eaten lunch at the apartment, plus a snack at Costco, and we honestly weren’t hungry. She said, “okay, how about just a little hot chocolate?". “Un, chocolatito? un pancito?". We said, “sure, some hot chocolate will be great.” We then hear some rustling in the kitchen, which we assume to be the hot chocolate production. She comes out with this big grin on her face, and 2 plates loaded with rice, 2 chicken legs, some beef/bean thing, and a salad, and says “Una comidita.” Just a little food. We had to take the hit for the team. It was good food, but I felt like I was going to explode, and my companion concurred. Then, just as we polish off the dinner, she brings out the hot chocolate and some rolls. I need to exercise.

Thats about all I can think of. We visited a few other great families, and we have been tracting a lot. We looked up a less active as part of our home-teaching duties, and we found his daughter in law, who has a 1966 Ford Mustang Fastback GT 2+2 with 4 sp. toploader tranny, Magnum 500 wheels, powered by a 289. Paint was red with dual white racing stripes. That is my dream car. Maybe one day….

Things are going well. Stress level is down. Energy is up. Health is good. My throat/ears have been a little sore, but I think that is just the weather fluctuations. It was really cold, then it got really warm. We had some snow a few days ago (on dia de pavo), but it is like 65 degrees right now.

Alright, take care of yourselves.
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

This week was a really good week. We had a zone activity today that ate up most of the P-DAY, so that is why the email is late, and there won’t be any handwritten stuff this week. I have only 10 minutes to finish the email, pick up the clothes from the laundry-mat, and drive to Carmel to visit a Peruvian sister, Hermana L******.

One funny thing that happened this week was a visit to R*** and R*****, a Peruvian couple that we had “dropped” (discontinued visits) for a while but decided to “look-up” (drop by unexpected and see if they are receptive). We had a good conversation with R*****, and it gave me a good testimony of how Peruvian I am. We talked about hot chocolates. I asked him if there was any good Peruvian hot chocolate available in Danbury, and he said “maybe at an Ecquadorian store". I asked him his opinion of Mexican hot chocolate. “Que feo hermano!” was his reply. So, I asked him what he thought about Mexican cheviche…"ooh. Que feo! Tomate en el cheviche? “. It was really funny, because I have the exact same opinions. It is nice to be able to relate to fellow Peruvians.

Thats about all the stories I have time for this week. I am really sorry for the super-short email. Things have been going well. There are stresses accompanied with missionary work which I have been feeling lately, but I guess that is part of the job sometimes. I have been super-tired this week. Hopefully that will clear up soon.

For thanksgiving, we possibly may be going to a half Guatemalan half Philipino member home, or possibly to a Hispanic “dia de pavo potluck". Either meal should be pretty good, although one is at an 8000 sq. ft. house and the other is at a rented American Legion hall. But, thats not really what is important.

I hope all is going well at home. I love you very much. Please take care. Thank you for your letters, love, and support.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

This has been a great week. First, tell Tina HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I am so proud of you! Second, thank you so much for all the great email. I just got a library card today so I will be able to print the messages I recieve and then respond today, so I should be back to normal in terms of Q+A responsiveness.

This week has been pretty good. It started with a someone rough lesson Wednesday night - a guy name M*** who we have been working with, who seemed to be interested but had a lot of questions regarding Joseph Smith and the idea of modern day prophets - anyway, we set up a lesson for him and invited D*** K***** from the bishopric. He didn’t tell us, but he invited a preacher from his church who came prepared with an argument and all kinds of anti-LDS stuff. We let him do his thing for a while, and then bore testimony, had a closing prayer, and left. The preacher was actually incredibly rude. We had Elder Hedelius say the closing prayer, and at the end of the prayer, he added on his own prayer, asking God to help us recognize our sinful ways. We left pretty fast, since we were late to a meeting. D*** stayed a little longer, and told us that afterwards M*** was apologetic, saying he didn’t mean for the meeting to go that way. Hopefully over the next few weeks, he will realize who was acting like a real Christian and who wasn’t in that situation, and follow his heart. I don’t think we’ll be persuing M*** much longer.

On Friday, we looked up S*******, who is the father of a really cool Ecquadorian member family. He was struggling over the last few days with some neurological problems, and we had the opportunity to give him a blessing. When we came by on Friday, it turned out he had been admitted to the Psych ward the night before, and was still in the hospital. We comforted his oldest son, J**** (13), and then went over with him to the hospital for a while to visit S*******. He looked tired, but was glad to see us. We spent some good quality time with him, and I think we cheered him up. He was released on Monday, and has the week off from work. I think that stress really just got to him and his body found a way out.

On Saturday was B**’s baptism. That went really well. I went on a split with our WML, Bro Royall, since Elder Hedelius had to go to Manhattan to go to the temple with someone he baptized last year. The baptism went well, and a lot of B**’s friends came. L***, his wife, flew in from Iowa to see it, and she was really impressed. Everything went well, and then we had a little refreshments and I got to mingle with some of B**’s friends. They are a really good group of people. Some lawyers, some doctors, and one who was both. His friend, who was in med school, drove down from Boston to baptize him. It was a great program. Afterwards, we went out to Ruby Tuesday’s for a celebratory lunch. I stayed with Bishop Smith (former bishop), since Bro Royall had to leave. It was a good evening.

On Sunday we had a dinner with President Sealy and some friends that he invited over. They were from Queens, and were Jamaican. They were all pleased that I knew how to relate to Jamaican people from my experiences in the Bronx. It was a fun evening. Bro. Sealy was President of a mission in Mexico and he and his wife just returned a few months ago. They are great people, and are always getting us referrals. Sunday was a great week overall, and our #’s were great, but we are still having a little trouble building our investigator pool.

Yesterday, we were tracting in a nice neighborhood, and we found this lady who was born into the church, but fell away when she got married to a Catholic guy. They had since realized that Catholicism wasn’t really holding up for them, and we have a return appointment to help them with some painting around the house, and hopefully to teach them more. She said “don’t expect a convert out of me". She has no idea what is coming .

So, it was a really great week. Elder Hedelius and I are getting along great. The weather is pretty good. Not too hot or cold. Just right I think. No real complaints. Oh, the itchiness is still there but it isn’t bad. I’ll try to get some lotion today and see if it helps.

Alright family, I love you very much. Thank you so much for everything. Tell Bianca I will write her a letter today to answer all of her questions.

Take care. I love you all so much.

Love,

Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I think the system will work out perfectly. Sorry I don’t get to answer every question because I can’t print from where I am doing email. I will try to get a printed copy tonight from my WML’s house. Also, sorry about the hand written letters. I know I need to be better about those.

I had a few really cool experiences this week. A lady from the ward called us to visit her daughter who was in Danbury hostpital. We went there and found her room, and the nurse asked her if she wanted visitors. She said, “no…my mom sent you didn’t she. Well I’m less active.". So, we were about to go on our way. Then, the lady in the next bed called out to the nurse, “Are those Mormom missionaries?". We said “yes". She requested that we visit with her. It turns out she was baptized in Dallas, and was up on business when she got a sudden pain. The doctors were trying to figure out what was wrong. Anyway, we gave her a Book of Mormon, since the hospital didn’t stock them and she had been wanting to do some reading. It was a really good visit. I think Heavenly Father chose a cool way of leading us to her. We left her our # and told her to call if she needs anything, and that we are only a short walk away from the hospital.

Oh, Mom, you will find this funny. After we went shopping at Costco, I made sure to get the big 4.5lb bags of spinach, and I started making spinach omlettes again. The other missionaries at first thought they were weird…the remark “fried salad” was made by Elder Hedelius. But then I started sharing, and things changed. They are very popular. The other day we made spinach omlette wraps with some chopped up grilled salmon burger. It was good. Elder Brown the other day asked me to make him one for breakfast, and at night he asked for another one for dinner. They are very popular.

We had a good experience with this young Equadorian kid, C*****, who is a 13 y.o. recent convert to the church. His mom is a member, but works Sundays and never comes. He is pretty much raised by his aunt and uncle, who are Catholics. We try to stop by from time to time and play basketball with him and his friends. He really enjoys it. Last night, we stopped by and he said he needed some help with an English assignment. It turns out it was a huge assignment and he hadn’t read the book and it was due the next day. We helped him with what we could, and then we sat him down and had a talk with him. We were very frank with him. I told him, “C*****, do you want to do landscaping, or pour concrete, or do driveways for the rest of your life?. Do you want to raise a family on $8/hr? You could be a lawyer. They make $100-$300 per hour.” It was a good conversation, and he admitted that he needed to change. We are going to “tutor him” for the rest of the year to make sure he passes.

Lets see…what else…Sister Summerhays, the bishop’s wife, gave a great lesson on food storage the other day. I’ll mail home a copy of the handout. It was really good. Today, she came to a teaching appointment with us. It was with a lady named J****, who we have been working with. She is a good Christian, but she was struggled to accept the Book of Mormon. It was a great lesson, and I think we made a little progress.

B**, the Jewish attorney, is getting baptized on Saturday. I’m really excited for him. He will make a great member of the church. We have a couple other great investigators. An Ecquadorian family called the Q********. A part member family - the O****’s, and a few other people. We are trying to figure out the most effective ways to find people. Tracting isn’t very effective but we need to do some every day. Also, there is a new mission rule - no dinner appointments unless an investigator is present. It sounds like a hard rule but it is good because now members try to get their neighbors over so they can have us there too. It will take a little while for the members to get used to it but overall it is a good thing.

Alright. I should get going. It was a great week. Physically I feel good. BTW the garments are the right size and fit/feel great. I think I have all I need for the time being (except for the hat). And, I usually make it with the money the church gives me. And since we are buying food as an apartment now, I have had a lot left over, which is nice.

Thank you so much for the great email. Please send a paper copy too, since I can’t print here at the apple store. I love you all so much. Take care and have a great week. I love you all so much.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great letter. Things are going great up here. Another transfer Monday came and went. Still in Danbury. Still with Elder Hedelius. I’m pretty happy about that. We have a lot of going things brewing and a transfer would have been difficult. Nobody in the apartment got transferred, so that was nice.

The work is going really well. We are trying to work as effectively and intelligently as possible. Elder Hedelius and I though of a companionship motto - “we’re on top of it". We want to be able to fully account for everything that could possibly concern us.

Monday was halloween. It was nice. We had a good lesson with a part-member family from Argentina. They are a really great family, and the husband, who is a NM, is coming to church on Sunday. It will be really great. Since we didn’t go out halloween night (tracting is ineffective that day), we stayed in. It was really nice. I took a bubble bath at the appartment, and then made a nice chicken soup and a plate of brownies….don’t worry the weight is still down. A member gave me a blue suit that I have been using, and it has size 34 pants, and they fit fine. The size 38 pants are loose, even with the belt at its smallest setting.

Monday, we also got to perform some quick service for our new Bishop, Bishop Summerhays. He is a great guy. He lives on a lake, and we helped him move some furniture from a storage unit. We also got to have some good conversation with him. He is very interested in the missionary work and sees a lot of good potential in the ward. It is great, because we have daily contact with the WML, and frequent contact with the Bishop, and he and the WML are in constant communication, so things get done fast.

Another cool thing we did today…as a mission they have told us that we have to buy food as an apartment, instead of each missionary buying and cooking on his own. This was hard at first, because each person likes different food. So, we tried for a while to have the companionships take turns buying things. This worked out alright, although we weren’t eathing that good of food (corn dogs and cheese quesadillas ). So, last night we made a big list, and then Elder Hedeilus and I went to COSTCO with ~$300. We got some good food. Pork ribs. Salmon burgers. Chicken breast. Lots of cereal. Spinach. Eggs. Everything! It was great. We will be eating well this month.

We had some good lessons with other members and investigators this week. B** has his baptismal interview tonight, and his baptism is on the morning of Nov 12th. I am really excited for that. It should be great.

Oh, remember the camera that T** sent me. It crashed. That is the best way to describe it. I turned it on one day, and the screen made some funny patterns and then shut off, with the lense still out and open. At that point, the camera went completely unresponsive. I tried different batteries. Manual (paper clip button) reset. Everything. It is completely unresponsive. I’m not sure what to do. Part of me wants my Nikon back, but I’m sure I’ll have some more time in the city, where it is less safe to have a good camera. I’m not sure what to do. It has a 1 yr warranty on it, so I’ll call today and see what they say.

[Personal stuff omitted]

Oh, by the way, I got a package from you all. I haven’t opened it. It came as I was on my way out the door. But, thank you anyway. I’m sure it is great, whatever it is.

Other than that, things are good. We have been working hard. The weather has been great. The fall colors are beautiful. The ward is awesome. The air is fresh and crisp. It is a good time to be alive. The only complaints I have are that I have been really itchy lately. I haven’t been able to figure out what it is. I might call the mission doctor if it lasts more that a few days. Also, my lip has been a little irritated. It is probably just the changing weather. I’ve been using medicated chapstick, but maybe it isn’t working with my lip right. I’ll try switching brands.

Alright. I better go. I love you all so much. Please take care.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

P.S. thanks again for the package. I’ll try to write some handwritten letters today.

This week has been a pretty good week. First of all, thank you so much for the shoes. I am wearing them now and they are great.

Lets start with last Wednesday, in the evening I noticed I had a bit of a dry throat. By Thursday it was getting bad, and Friday I called Sis. Boren, who referred me to the mission doctor. There was a strain of strep throat going through the mission, which took out a lot of people. As a precaution they put me on levaquin, which I still am on for 3 more days. I don’t think I ever got full-blown strep, but I did have a bad cough/cold for a few days, and I am still a little congested but it is not too bad. I didn’t go out Saturday evening, but other than that it didn’t affect the work too much.

Over the last few emails I had mentioned A****…A**** won’t be getting baptized. During his interview with the Bishop a lot of things came out and we pretty much aren’t allowed to have any more contact with him. It is pretty sad. And I think the ward is a a bit mad at us because we haven’t heard from the members too much lately.

Being sick is bad on a mission, because you have way too much time to think, and also it made me a bit homesick. It is hard being up here in CT. In a lot of ways I miss the Bronx. Here in CT, the members don’t know you by name (just “Hey Elder!"). They like you for what you are, but still the relationships are very impersonal. So, I’ve been feeling a bit lonely lately. I don’t know what it is. I need to find a way to be happier than I have been lately. I think your mind can get addicted to being sad or worried and even after you have no reason to worry or be sad, it still has a tendency to get that way. I’ve been working on it though. Also, in the Bronx, all the members know you and love you, and you get to work with a lot of other missionaries, and the people there see it as a blessing when you are there. It is much harder to feel needed up here. Most of the members are returned missionaries, with successful careers and families. There are some great members that we can count on, but it isn’t the same as the Bronx.

Oh, there are some new rules from the First Presidency that I should let you know about. We found this out in a mission conference on Monday. First, missionaries are only allowed to recieve 1 incoming message, 1 outgoing message, each week. And, the message can only have 1 recipient. So, please “digest” the messages and just send them as one, or snail mail me. That is the only rule that should affect us.

One other one, “beanies” are now outlawed…they want more formal hats. So, the hat we bought at REI won’t work. It is getting cold fast so we’ll have to figure something out. I’ll do a little looking around to see what I can find.

The mission conference on Monday was really spiritual. The subject was that we need to be a more spiritual mission. A lot of fasting and prayer needs to happen if we are going to get what we want to happen as a mission. Pres. Boren started crying and said, “this is the most difficult mission in the world". He is definately right. There are some challenges here that don’t exist anywhere else. But there is great potential here too.

So, overall the work is good. There are some challenges that I never anticipated, but we’ll make things work. This is really the Lord’s work and I am glad to serve. Thank you so much for your prayers. I love you all so much and miss you all.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

[Personal Stuff Omitted]

Things have been going great. We taught a great family the other day. They were really wonderful. They are an older couple, B*** and B**. They were a Temple Square media referral. They are great people. The were very interested in the Book of Mormon and in church. Everything in the discussion was “textbook” so to say. It was cool.

On Monday/Tuesday I went on an overnight split in Stamford, CT, with the Spanish zone leaders. It was fun. I got to teach and pray in Spanish all day. My Spanish is coming along fine. I can actually be quite flexible in espanol.

I can’t believe how fast the time is flying. We are coming up on 9. At that point the sisters I came out with are halfway over. Weird….

So, Elder Hedelius and I were discussing future career ideas (when you are tracting you have a lot of time to talk, not to mention I live with him 24/7). And, I was thinking that it would be cool if I could go into computer science, and from there go into the biomedical field, like biomedical engineering or something like that. I’m not sure what the applications of that field are…maybe medical instruments, large clusters to simulate protein folding, etc. I was thinking about how much the medical field has helped me lately, and also about Ether 12:27 about weaknesses becoming strengths. So, maybe after I get home, I can go into CS, and after a BS in CS go into the biomed engineering stuff via MIT, or something like that. Maybe you could research and see where would be the best place to go. I think BYU to start.

Anyway, the mission life is great. I’ll check with my bank. I may have done the transfer incorrectly, and put the money from checking to savings instead of savings to checking. I’ll see if I can go online and figure it out. I’ll have to ask Pdte. Boren for permission.

Thanks for all your prayers and fasting. I think I’m at a good turning point. Things are looking up. The weather is cooling off, which is nice. And, I have 1 water proof pair of shoes, and 1 have holes right to the insole. There is a pretty good shoestore in the mall. I’ll price some things out there.

Anyway, I gotta run. I love you all very much. Please take care of yourselves.

Love,
your son or brother,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Things are going great. The work is great. It is hard, but great.

This week has been exciting. It has been really rainy, so we have been in suits + rain coats. It is nice. I like being bundled up, so to say. The people here hate rain. Plus, my roommates are from Arizona and Utah, so they aren’t fond of the rain either. I like it.

We have had a few good meetings with A****, and he accepted the challenge to be baptized. A**** is great, in that every time we go over to his house he improves. His wife and son are warming up to us, but they still haven’t listened in on the lessons. A**** will have his baptismal interview tomorrow, and everything should be fine for Saturday.

We met a great family on Sunday evening for dinner, it was the family of the 1st councilor. His wife cooked us dinner, and 2 of her sons were there. Still, we had a great meal and lesson with them, and they are a great family in the ward.

On Sunday, we also got to see our old bishop, bishop Smith, get released. Bishop Summerhays is our new bishop. He is a great guy. He was on the high council for a while.

Yesterday we had a zone conference and I got to meet with Pdte. Boren. He’s a great guy. We had a good talk about all kinds of things. Also, this cycle we studied the Atonement in depth, using the Book of Mormon. Reading the Book of Mormon really strengthens my testimony. I know that it isn’t a book that someone could have written, or a religion that any person or group of people could have invented.

[Personal stuff omitted]

We went shopping at Costco today, which was fine. They let me shop without the membership card, just the gift card. The gift cards can be used pretty much as membership cards, because you can add money too them, so as long as you don’t let it run out you can shop there more. I put $50 on there today from a pool of funds from everybody in the apartment.

Alright, I better get going. That you so much for everything. I’ll try to write some handwritten letters. Thanks for your fasting and prayers. They were very much appreciated.

I love you very much. Time is indeed flying. Do you remember when we were checking in to the Marriot in Utah the night before the MTC, and the person at the front desk mentioned that her friend was already there, and going to the same mission? That sister is Sister Lewis, and she is pretty much half done already. So, time is indeed flying. You know you are really “old” when the Sisters you came out with have gone home. That is the situation that other Elders find themselves in these days.

Alright, thanks again. Take care. I love you all.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Things are going really good here. The work has been great. We have a guy we are working with, A****, who has been a great investigator. He went to all 5 sessions of conference. On Monday he agreed to baptism. On Tuesday, we told him about the word of wisdom, anticipating that it would be hard for him to give up coffee, since he had been a truck driver and was proud of his brewing equiptment. We told him about it, and he had no problems. He just said, “okay, I’ll give it up". That was nice.

The others we are working with are doing fine as well. We are working with N**** S*******’s wife, M****. N**** is a Jewish convert, and majored in Judaic studies. He is really strong in the gospel. M**** was raised Catholic, and has had a hard time accepting things other than Catholicism. However, she is beginning to like us more and more, and N**** has faith that with time, she will join the church.

[Personal stuff omitted]

Today we had a zone activity, which was fun. The whole zone came to our apartment, and they went on a hike. Elder Hedelius and I skipped the hike to help out our landlord, Bro. D*******. He took us to Boston Market for lunch and it was pretty good. I had a 1/2 chicken, plus cornbread, spinach, and mashed potatoes.

The ward is doing great. We have really been trying hard to motivate them to do their member missionary work, and to get us referrals. Things have been working well. One family is bringing another family to church on Sunday. This is a family that we tracted into a few weeks ago, and they said they knew someone at church. It is cool to see how the Lord puts prepared people in our path to teach.

General conference was great. We got to watch all 5 sessions at church. It was really nice. It is incredible to see that we really have a Prophet on the earth, and 12 Apostles. I wish everybody in the world understood how signifigant that is.

Alright. I need to go. I can’t send mail this week. We are out of time because of the zone activity. Sorry about that. Thank you for all that you do for me. I love you all so much. I miss you but I know that this is the Lord’s work that I am a part of. And the time is passing so quickly.

Thank you so much for everything. Also, please tell Sis. N****** that I really appreciated her letter, and I will reply next week.

Thanks again. I love you all.
Love,
Elder Barr

Sorry for the late email. We did “conference cleaning” today. “Conference cleaning” means that the p-day before general conference, we do a thorough cleaning of our apartment. It was good that we got it all taken care of. The apartment looks great.

First things first. I got the letter you sent. I actually got it on Saturday. It takes 3 days, which is pretty good. Thank you so much for the CD. I love it. My companion said it was a welcome break, since we listened to the last cd quite a few times. Also, I love the caricature. It is really cool.

The work has been going well. We have been doing A LOT of tracting, to try to find people that are prepared. We found 3 great families through tracting, and now we are at the critical stage with them where we need to urgently but not overbearingly follow up on these people, and get them to church. It will be nice.

One of our new investigators, A***, is doing well. He is in a wheelchair, and has ADD and very little social skills. At church, when he talks to people, if they aren’t prepared he can make people feel awkward. We are working with him, and I think things will be fine. He is excited about the church, and needs it badly in his life, as we all do.

Mentally I think I am doing much better. I still have fear from time to time, but it isn’t bad. My companion, Elder Hedelius always reassures me that I am fine, and that there is no chance that anything could have happened. Of course sometimes my mind wanders…but that is that. I think with time I’ll get over it. Whenever my body does something weird, my mind will wander. But I know I really have nothing to worry about.

I will try to sent the foot outline this week or next week. But, I am size 12, wide. EE or EEE should be fine. I’m not sure that there is a big difference between 2 E’s or 3. And I only have 1 or 2 pairs of white socks. I know you mentioned that. Actually, I could use some “night socks"…my feet get cold at night sometimes so I’ll put on my black socks. What I could really use is some garments. Large top, large bottom. It is getting a bit cooler out, so something warm would be great.

I’m glad to hear that Cody is back and doing well. So the Shill’s are back in town. They are so funny. Send them my regards. I’m glad to hear that they are doing well.

The new car sounds great. I’m excited to see it. I hear that they are really roomy inside. That is nice. I bet it saves on gas vs. the Porsche or the ‘burban.

Alright, I better get going. I’ll try to send a handwritten letter if I have time. I probably won’t get to do individual letters this week, but I will try. It is 3:40 right now and P-day ends at 6, and we still have to get groceries. Cereal. Milk. The usual.

Thank you so much for all that you do for me. I love you all so much. Please take care.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

That sounds great to hear about all the new things in the computer world. Right now I’m on an iMac G5, with a row full of iPod Nanos, shuffles, and some regular ipods as well. They are pretty cool, even if they are Apple products.

The work is going well. We have been on the bicycles the last 2 days in a row, which is actually been great for my physical and mental health, and it saves miles on the car and gas money for the church.

Elder Richens, my Portuguese speaking roommate, got transferred today. He was surprised to get transferred. He was pretty sure his mission would end in Danbury. But, the Lord knows best, and he’ll go somewhere where he is needed the most. Anyway, he is a good contact to have in the future.

[…interesting story deleted in the interest of privacy..]

On the good side, we found a really cool family yesterday. It is a single mom and 2 kids, 9 and 6. She was really open to the lessons, and we have a return appointment for Friday. There are a few member families that live nearby, and we had an appointment with one of those familes right after we tracted into her. We described her to the member family, and they agreed to have her over for teaching, FHE, or whatever. So, it is nice that she already has a support system in the church.

Well, I think that is all for today. I’m not sure if I’ll get the Mahlab [he means Mahleb – a Mediterranean spice] shipped this week, but next week for sure. Also, my right wrist has been in a little bit of pain lately. We adjusted the bike’s brake position, and that helped. I had a physical therapist in the ward look at it on Sunday, and he told me to take Ibuprofen and ice it down every night. That seemed to help. Otherwise, I am staying healthy, well fed. Spirits are up. The orthodics I bought really helped my feet. Missionary life is going well. The hardest thing I think is just finding joy in doing the same thing every day, but then again every day is different, and this is the Lord’s work. And, it is all worth it when a family embraces the Gospel. I think of how much the Gospel has blessed our family, and that gives me all the motivation I need.

Alright, I love you all very much. Please take care.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

P.S. - could you send me some music if it is not too much trouble…? I’m getting a bit tired of some of my stuff. Approved music is any classical music composed before 1900, with or without lyrics. If you could, that would be great. Thanks!

Things are going great here in Danbury. Elder Hedelius and I have been trying to do some new methods of finding, rather than tracting. President Boren gave the mission a new standard - 5 new investigators, 5 invs. @ church, 5 lessons to investigators w/ member present. So, we need to do a LOT of finding in order to get 5 new investigators each week.

Last Thursday, we rode bikes up a big long hill, and stopped at “Congregation B’NAI ISRAEL", which is a conservative Jewish synagogue. We went in, and it happened to be the rabbi’s office hours. The rabbi is a woman, Rabbi Vivian S. We asked her if it was okay if we went to the Saturday morning service. Saturday came, and we went to the service @ 10:30am. We were a bit shy, as there was a whole congregation singing Hebrew, with their yarmulke’s and robes, so we just waited by the door. After a few minutes, an older man noticed us, came out, and invited us in.

We put on some yarmulkes and went in, and he sat by us. The service was a reading of the Torah, and the Talmud, and the Mishra. Plus a lot of the service was singing versus of the Torah in Hebrew. The books had the english equivalent, so it was easy to follow along. It lasted about 2 hours, and at the end they did announcements, kind of like “ward business". They thanked the “representatives from the Mormon Church” for coming, which was cool. Then, they had a kiddush, which is like a “linger longer” except it is sponsored by a different person each week. They had bagels with cream cheese and salmon, some mozzarella balls, a variety of olives, some good bread, and some other good stuff. Theey invited us to stay for the kiddush, which we did.

During the kiddush, we got to talk to the rabbi. Since the lesson was on the lost tribes, we thanked her for doing a lesson that was very valuable to us as Mormon’s in particular. She asked, “why is that important". We explained how the Book of Mormon is a record of decendants of Joseph, Lehi from Mannaseh and Ishmael and his daughters from Ephraim. We told her that this makes us unique among the Christians, in that we use the records of Joseph and Judah, and told her that we believe that this is the fulfillment of the prophecy in EZI 37:15-17. So, it was cool.

We talked to a few other people. It was cool. Lots of people came up to us and thanked us for our dedication and hard work. Everyone there had an LDS friend or relative, or had been to the temple open house. One of them even said he saw “Brigham City” and thought it was a pretty good movie. Anyway, it was really cool being able to relate to that community. We have an open invitation to that synagogue whenever we want. It was a bit awkward being in missionary attire, plus yarmulke’s. It would have been a funny picture.

Also, yesterday we tracted into the house of the rabbi for the United Jewish Center of Danbury. He wasn’t there, but his wife was, and she was very kind to us. It was really hot, so she gave us some water. We have an appointment tonight with B**, our Jewish investigator. He’s really cool, and rock solid in his new faith. So, it has been a fairly Jewish week. Mazeltov!

Other than that, things have been going great. We have been on the bikes a lot, so I am sore and tired sometimes. Missionary work is hard work. The ball of my right foot has been especially sore, so I got some inserts for my shoes. I think it may be time for some new shoes pretty soon. The soles of mine are wearing down in that area. We’ll have to figure something out.

So, things are going well. I hope it cools down soon. The humidity makes me tired. I hear by October it will be nice. I’ll write some more in my letters today. I should probably get going. Mom, I will send that mahleb next week.

Thank you so much for everything. I love you all very much. BTW, congrats on the car purchase Dad! Also, the Mustang has no papers, and it is a ‘68. It was last licensed under plate # 999-MTD I think.

Alright, take care. Again, I love you all.
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

All is doing great.

[personal stuff omitted]

We always think of the Priesthood as the ability to give blessings, but now I am grateful for the ability to recieve them as well. So, I’m doing great up here. And the rice crispies were great. They really hit the spot. One of my roommates, Elder Richens, made the comment - “wow. Look at the precision cutting of the rice crispie squares. She MUST be Peruvian…. =)” It was pretty funny.

Dad, I’m so glad to hear that you are actively doing something to help with the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. I haven’t heard too much about it, but from what I have heard it sounds terrible. I’m glad you are doing something to help. This country has some emergency preparations that need to be made.

About, gas prices have skyrocketed here as well. $3.30 average around Danbury. We were driving through New Canaan the other day on the way to Yorktown, for a zone conference, and there was a place that had gas for $3.15, and there was a long line. And this is in New Canaan, one of the wealthiest suburbs in the world. We “car fast” at least twice a week, meaning we use our bikes and try to stay in a small area. The church hasn’t came out with anything official yet in terms of limitations to driving, but we are still trying to use as little gas as possible.

That Scion XB sounds pretty cool. A guy here, named Jeff as well, has one. He just got back from his mission a few years ago. They do seem like cool cars. From what I hear, they have a lot of room on the inside. It will be cool to see you have one. I bet filling the Porsche with premium is painful, and the Suburban with its 44 gal. tank….ouch.

I’m sorry to hear about M*****. I will pray for her and we’ll pray as a district as well. I hope she gets better. I’ll pray for Grandpa E**** as well.

So, there was a big change in the mission over the last week. We used to have “the Standard of Excellence", meaning we aimed to teach 13 lessons to investigators / people we contact, 5 lessons to investigators with a member present (ward missionary team ups or part member families), 7 lessons to members (less actives or actives, or recent converts), and 3 investigators at church.

Now, we are trying for 5 investigators at church, 5 lessons w/ member present, 5 new investigators per week. Those are the only metrics that will be tracked on a daily basis by the leaders. The goal is to unify our efforts so that everything we do goes towards bringing people into the church. This also allows for more customization on a per/area basis. For example, it is very different tracting in the Bronx than it is in New Canaan or Greenwich. Danbury is a different story as well. The inner part of Danbury is Latino or Brazilian, and the outer parts are white. Some of the white neighborhoods have 1 or 2 Latino families. I was on a split with Elder Galbraith, a zone leader, and we tracted an entire white neighborhood (~25 houses) with no success. The only person who let us in was the 1 hispanic person in the neighborhood, and they happened to be Peruvian. It is just funny… I think the American investigators are going to have to come from member referrals. We are going to try to motivate the ward as best as we can.

Alright, I better go. I’m doing great here. I love you so much, and I really feel your prayers giving me strength day after day, especially lately. I love you all, and my Heavenly Father, and this marvelous work that I am involved in.

Take care and may Heavenly Father bless you all.
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

How are you doing today? It was great to hear from you. Cabos sounds great as always. I can’t quite picture the water coming up to the retaining wall. That must have been an impressive sight. It was probably nice to spend a day exclusively related to relaxation.

This week has been really good. We hit “the standard” last week for lessons - 13 investigator lessons, 5 lessons to investigators w/ a member present, and 7 lessons to members - either active or less active, + 3 investigators at church. So, that was really nice. President Boren called to congratulate us. We are going to try to hit the standard every week.

S*****, a Peruvian investigator we have, is getting baptized on Saturday. Her husband, J***, wants to get baptized, but he works too much and can’t devote time to go to church. Hopefully we can get S***** to get him to change his schedule. That would be good. S***** is from Iquitos, which sounds like a really interesting place. Didn’t David and Uncle Raul go there a few years ago.

We have another Peruvian couple, R*** and R*****, and they will get baptized as soon as they can get married. The problem is, R*** was married in Peru to a different man and she for some reason can’t arrange or afford the divorce. Also, she is 8 months pregnant so she really can’t go out and do things.

As for English investigators, we have B** and L***. B** is a Jewish man, and he is fully converted to the gospel. He is a young attorney. His wife, L***, is also an attorney, and she is trying to gain a testimony of President Hinckley, and some of the church doctrines regarding the gender roles of men and women. She said she came from a very liberal background, and the idea of a fundamental difference between men and women was hard for her to stomach. She is trying. I am going to write L**** N****** today and see if she would give L*** a call. I told L*** about her and she is excited to hear from her. L**** wants to believe, and she just needs to hear the gospel from a woman’s point of view. Mom, maybe you could write her a letter as well.

So, we have been doing a lot of finding lately - mostly tracting. It is hard to balance the English and the Spanish work, because Latinos are so much more receptive, on average, than white people. However, we are confident that we can “crack open” Danbury. There is so much potential here, as there are a lot of young married couples with 1 or 2 kids, which is exactly what we are looking for.

Spanish work is going well here, but the major issue is that many of them are here illegally. Although we are allowed to baptized illegal immigrants if they feel they are worthy, it is just hard to see how they have to live their lives. It would be sad to be living in US, yet be afraid to call 911 if there is a medical emergency, or crime, or something. Also, a lot of them work A LOT and it is hard for them to find time for things, since they work “cash only” jobs and they really don’t have the same workers rights that legal workers enjoy.

The ward here is great. The weather is good. The work is going well. No real problems or anything to report. T** sent me a 5.1 megapixel hp digital camera that takes SD cards. He sent me a handful of cards as well. I am going to write him a thank you note today. Also, R** sent me a letter but I can’t read it. So, please let him know. I know it is hard to explain, but those are the rules.

Alright, I better go. Thank you so much for everything. I’ll write you more by hand.
See you later. I love you all so much.
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

All is well in CN. Sorry for the lack of communication over the last few weeks. I’ll make this a good letter.

First, thank you so much for the Costco card and $$. I really appreciate it. We are going to go there today to do our shopping. By the way, the computer you are building sounds really nice. I am at the apple store in the danbury mall, on a mac mini with a 20 inch apple cinema display. It is pretty nice. I’m not converted to apple yet, but they are pretty nice.

So, Danbury is nice. It is a mix of white, hispanic, and Brazilian. Elder Hedelius and I are a zebra companionship, so we work in both English and Spanish. So, I have been reading the book of Mormon in Spanish and also listening to the Book of Mormon audicassettes that my comp. has. My understanding is pretty good, and I need to work on speaking spanish more.

The Danbury ward is really good, with both English and Spanish members. Most of the meetings are translated using the church translation equiptment (microphones, headphones, radios, etc). Elder Hedelius and I got to sit in on relief society because he was translating the lesson for a spanish member. The lesson was “experiencing happiness in marriage". I took notes, since I probably won’t be a witness to that particular lesson in that particular class ever again.

There are a lot of nice trees in Danbury. We live in part of a house, owned by a member. We have a deck, a lake behind the house, and a track nearby for jogging. There is also the potential for hikes behind the lake. The stars are out at night, and it is nice. We have a silver Mazda 3 (2004) that I drive, although sometimes we take the bikes and then walk around town.

So, things have been great. We had dinner yesterday, with 2 member families as part of a family home evening. Both families were exclusively Spanish speaking. One was Ecuadorian and one was Mexican. It was great. There are also a handful of Hasidic Jews in the area. I saw 2 this morning at the post office when I picked up the package. Hopefully we’ll figure out a way to get some good discussions with them.

Our investigators are great. We have a Peruvian man and woman (from Iquitos) that are getting baptized. Mom, maybe you could write them a congrats letter. We also have B** and L***, a Jewish man and his wife, who are getting baptized in October. We have been doing a lot of tracting and street contacting to build up our investigator pool. In 2 weeks, W.S.C.U. starts their fall sessions, and we are going to prepare a display table and see if we can attract some attention over there. W.S.C.U. stands for Western Conn. State University, and the campus is nice, and located in the middle of Danbury.

Mom, to answer your question about Greenwich, it is not in my area, but it is in my zone. Greenwich is a really rich area. Greenwich and New Canaan are among the most wealthy cities of the US. One guy there, Dave N., owns JetBlue airlines. The stake pres. is the CFO of MasterCard.

So, all is going well. I’ll write some more letters today. I hope you have a great time in Mexico. Take care and have a great time. Thank you so much for the great letters and the package!!!
I love you all very much!!!!
Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

It was great to hear from you Dad. I am currently in a Mac store on an iMac G5 in a mall in Danbury, CT. It is a really cool place. It is nice, quiet, clean. Elder Hedilius is my companion. He is really cool. He is from UT, and speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese. We are a “zebra” companionship, so we will be working in both English and Spanish. Anyway, I am really looking forward to work here. By the way, we are in a co-seniorship, meaning we are both “senior companions", which is cool.

Oh, before I forget, could you have mom send me a costco card. We have a costco in our area in it would be great to take advantage of it. Also, I for some reason had a lot of expenses this month, and I would really appreciate some $$, or I will have to use my personal funds for groceries. So, if you could send some extra money, that would be wonderful.

I got some pictures developed from a disposable camera, and I’ll send you some soon.

This week was good. Full of interesting experiences. A few days ago, Elder Hansen and I were walking home at night (we were on a split), and this car with 3 20-22 y.o. Italian girls came up to us and starting flirting with us. We directed the conversation to the gospel, explained who we were and gave them pass-along-cards, and that was that. It was funny, and somewhat awkward.

I feel good about how I left the Bronx. Plus, it is in the hands of great members and missionaries. We held a potluck to honor the recent converts and that went really well.

Well, I better get going. I’ll try to write more next week, once I get settled. There are only 2 hours of p-day time left and I need to get unpacked and ready to go by 6. It will be a lot of fun. Plus, I need to go buy a new pillow. I didn’t like the old one and left it in the Bronx.

So, if you could send a COSTCO card, that would be wonderful to have by next p-day. And also some extra cash would be great. There have been a lot of expenses this month, as I said. And let me know what is up with the camera situation.

Thank you so much for everything. Please say hi to everybody for me.
Take care!

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Sorry for the extreme shortage of email on my part. I got a lot of mail from you all today and I really appreciate it. We went to the temple today, most of the zone, and it was really awesome. We got to go through a session and then act as stand ins for a several sealing sessions (stand ins for children). It was really awesome and we had a good time. On the way there, we took a bus through central park, which was pretty nice.

…

Sorry, there won’t be any snail mail this week. I’m outta time.

I love you all very much.
Love,
Elder Barr

How are you doing today? First of all, I got your advice about the camera. I think I’ll return it. You are right…it is too nice of one to have right now. I can send it back to the store. It is only in Manhattan, so I’ll send it back today. Sorry about that. So, please send me what you can in terms of cameras. I’ll return the one I bought camera today. They have a 14 day unconditional return policy.

Anyway, the birthday was great, and I really enjoyed it. I appreciate all the gifts.

Oh about the tripod, I ordered one for Elder Volkanov, using my acct and he paid me in cash, but for some reason the store told me they shipped it to the billing addr instead of the shipping address. We got it straightened out.

We had a big change of areas the other day. President Hinckley and the 1st Presidency asked mission presidents to re-evaluate the areas where we are serving. So, we decided to do that and we ended up dropping our area. Except for the people we currently have (A*** the M****’s, ******* (the aids patient)), there won’t be too much tracting in that area anymore. We got transfered to the East Tremont area, and mostly it is a wealthy Catholic area. Many Italians and Irish people. We were taking a quick drink break, and a guy came up to us in a tank top and shorts. He came up to us and asked us what we do. We explained and he said, “oh, I’ll give you some money". He then pulled out a wad of cash and flipped through it and said, “oh, sorry, all I have are hundreds". He then looked through his other pocket, found a stray bill. “oh, another hundred. Yeah, sorry guys". The Bronx is full of weird stuff.

Oh, by the way I have a 99% chance of getting transferred this cycle. President Boren told the zone, at a zone conference, “you better review your areas before Elder Barr gets transferred". Then he turned to me and said, “you’ve been here what? 4 cycles? That is what I thought.” So, on August 10th I’ll be mailing from a new place most likely.

There haven’t been too many other stories to report lately. The new area is a fairly wealthy Italian place. There are lots of nice little bakeries and Italian restaurants. We tracted into an Irish guy, B***, who kept his return appt. and looks promising. Also, we have been teaching a wonderful Jamaican lady with a daughter who looks promising as well.

I am trying my best to stay as focused as I can. Mission life gets so hard some times. The heat. The companionship. The day to day routine. Never being alone. I’m trying my best though. I think a transfer will be good for me.

I’m glad you all had a great trip to Disneyland. It sounds like a really great place. I hope to be able to visit it with you when I return. That would be a fun trip. I bet that Bianca’s decision to quit gymnastics was hard. I will write her about that. I know that she’ll be happy no matter where she goes or what she does.

Thank you so much for everything. I’ll take care of things today, and all I’ll lose is the money for shipping. So, not a big deal. You were right…I just needed something “new” to happen. But the camera was too much money. I’ll return it today.

Thank you so much for everything. I love you all so much and hope for the best for you all.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thank you so much for the package. It was great to get the sweets, shirts, and watches. It is pretty easy how to turn off the hourly update. I’ll write it in my written letter.

My birthday was pretty good. We had lunch as Sister C******’s and dinner at the M****’s. The M**** family is really a great family and an example of the gospel changing lives. They have cleaned up their apartment, are starting to save to buy a reposesed house, and are starting to let go of their old traditions. For example, all the M**** boys had long hair, and when we met them the mom wouldn’t let any of the boys cut their hair. The boys hated it, because they don’t have manly faces and were often mistaken for girls and forced to defend their boyhood. Anyway, Elder Georgeson brought his clippers over yesterday and we cut their hair. They look much better now. So, it is nice to see their lives improve.

So, this week has been full of interesting experiences, good and bad. On last Thursday, Elder Hansen and I were on a split, street contacting. We ran into 1 black Jamaican, 1 black Guyanese, and also a 3rd black Jamaican guy who became interested in our conversation. We brought up the book of Mormon to these 2 guys, and they had a lot of interesting questions. Sadly, most of them had to do with racial stuff. People get so caught up in that kind of stuff that they loose the big picture. Anyway, the most memorable statement that I remember from that conversation is saying “we have a prophet on the Earth today!". The response, “A prophet, like Bob Marley or Martin Luther King?". Maybe like Dr. King….not like Bob Marley. There is a lot of Bob Marley worship from the Jamaican community. It turns out the guy, and a handful of people on that street, are of the “Rastafarian belief", which is a mostly-Jamaican tradition. The belief: when Moses saw a burning bush, it was actually a marijuana plant. Therefore, smoking marijuana brings you closer to God. Therefore, they “pray” as often as they can afford to. Needless to say, that discussion didn’t go well. That 3rd guy was a Hebrew Israelite (believes that real Jews are black, so was Christ, and that white people are evil). He took the Book of Mormon, looked through the first pictures in the front of the book, and yelled “there are no black people. Come black when you get a black book…". I told them that if I was looking at a book about the history of Africa, I wouldn’t be offended when I didn’t see white people. Anyway, that was interesting to say the least….

Another story. We tracted into this lady with a few children. She has AIDS, and so do some of her children. I suppose she was diagnosed after the youngest was born. Her husband has just died, persumably of AIDS. Anyway, she had come to church with her kids once, and enjoyed it. After that, we had another appointment set up, but she never made it. She also has chronic asthma, and any cough she gets develops into a huge asthma attack, since her body can’t fight the cough. So, we saw her on Saturday night and she was ready for our appointment on Sunday. We show up on Sunday and it turns out she is in the ICU, interbated. We went to Jacobi hospital to the ICU on Monday after district mtg, and that was a rough experience. About 20 different machines, IV’s and stuff were connected to her. She was convulsing and unresponsive to all external stimuli. I was really taught by the Spirit over the last few days about the purpose of our visiting with her. I feel that we gave her an opportunity to feel the Spirit, so she would recognize it on the other side. It was quite an experience.

Another story, we went to A***’s house yesterday, and she told us she decided that she isn’t coming back to church anymore. She is now 5 months pregnant, and she just had a sonogram and it turns out that her expected son is missing part of his skull, and if he survives, will probably be mentally handicapped. This was the initial diagnosis by the doctor anyway. So, she told us that she just doesn’t care any more. That ever since she joined the church, she has been tried too much and she can’t bear it anymore. We are going to visit her tonight and give her a blessing. She tends to overreact, and Elder Georgeson and I are confident that she can be reclaimed. It is so hard to see people go inactive, especially because of trials like that. When we hear more about her condition, I’ll let you know. Maybe the bishop can write her a letter.

So, things have been up and down this week. By the way, I would love it if T** sent me the camera. I also want to know what you think about me getting a good film camera in addition to the digital. I can order a Nikon N75 plus a good lense for ~$500. Elder Volkanov has been explaining some stuff about film photography to me, and the pictures seem so much better and the colors are better, plus it seems fun. I want to order it soon, so please let me know what you think. If you mail a response tomorrow, I’ll get it by Saturday. So, please respond. That would great. I really want to try film photography, as there are some cool things that you can do that would be impossible with digitals, plus I can mail back picture CD’s which are only an extra $1 with development. The lense I was looking at was a Sigma 24-135/ 2.8-4.5 77(0) Aspherical internal focus lense. That would last me indefinately, as well as the camera body. The camera body is an Nikon N75. So, if you could let me know what prices you can find that for, maybe we could arrange something. For now I am using a disposable that you gave me at the beginning of my mission.

Alright, I should get going. I’ll write you my written letters as usual. Thanks for everything. I love you all very much. Please take care.

Love, your son or brother,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

This week has been a good week. A lot of ups and downs, but overall pretty good. My companion and I are working okay together. Truthfully I enjoyed Elder Wood or Elder Wilcox better, but I’m sure I’ll learn from Elder Georgeson.

We have been tracting a lot, trying to get people to church, and all of that. Truthfully, I am getting a bit sick of my area. Things here are very “ghetto", to use that word. For instance, we got a mom and her kids to church on Sunday, but I think we are probably going to stop teaching them, as they have some really big, bad issues. What we really are doing is looking for the ‘elect’, meaning people who will be an asset to God’s church. Don’t worry about safety here. I have never had one person be a threat to me personally. Sometimes I wonder how or why people want to live here.

So, on Sunday, we were at corellation meeting, and then we went to pickup a family for church (they couldn’t afford the subway, so we paid for them), and then we went to church. Elder Georgeson and I ran back to the appt. after the 2nd hour to pick up something to use for class. Now, it has been really hot lately so we have been leaving the windows open. Anyway, we came to our apartment door and it was unlocked, and we came in and all looked normal. We were a bit frustrated at what we thought had happened, that the other Elders left the door opened. Then, my instinct told me to check for my camera. Gone. Elder Georgeson’s camera. Gone. Elder Hansen’s camera, and cash, gone. In short, someone got in the fire escape, took our stuff, and walked out the front door. We called the police and everything, and the first set of officers showed up. Later in the evening, a second set showed up and dusted for prints. The didn’t find anything. It must have been someone in the building, because access to the roof via the stairways has alarms. Someone must have gotten to the roof via their own fire escape, and then crawled down to ours and grabed our stuff. It is sad that people would do this. We spend a day with the senior missionaries who are in charge of apartments, and we added another lock to the door, and bars to the windows, and we are keeping the fire escape window locked. So, this should prevent any further problems. So, I will be using my disposable camera for a while. We’ll figure out something I’m sure. President Boren is advising all missionaries not to carry good cameras, as we aren’t the first apartment to have been raided in this way.

So, that was the most exciting part of the week. As I said, we are finding and teaching a lot, but many people here have so large problems that they are not ready for us. We are looking for the people that are.

Well, thank you so much for the birthday wishes. I’m glad to hear them. I’m not sure what I’ll do to celebrate. I know President and Sister Boren will call and sing to me, and thats about it.

Alright, take care family. Have a great time on the road with Grandma. I love you all very much and wish you the best. As for the rules, I know they are hard. Visits from friends aren’t allowed either. The rules are from the 1st Presidency. I guess they have a lot of missionaries that do bad things, like go to the library to look at porn, so they try to limit computer time. I wish sometimes to feel more trusted, but rules are rules.

[personal stuff removed]

I love you all very much.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

It was great to hear from you all this week. It sounds like you are having a great summer so far.

The work here has been good. Elder Georgeson is the district leader, so I am still jr. comp. He is from Boise, ID. Work is going well. We are purging our investigator and potential investigator pool, and dropping people who aren’t prepared to recieve the message of the gospel. So, we are quite low on investigators. That means that we get to do a lot of finding this cycle. That will be good, because in a few weeks we should have a lot of progressing investigators if all goes well.

Not too many interesting experiences this week. The work is going well, and the ward is growing slowly but surely. I do enjoy my associations with all the people there. There are a lot of good people, and most of them have had what we would consider “hard lives", but they move on through the gospel.

We had a great experience last night doing some contacting in a park. We had just read the Book of Mormon with one of our recent converts, A*******, and then we walked over to Sister C******’s for family night. We had some extra time, so we decided to do some contacting in the park, and A******* stayed with us. We were able to teach a person a full 1st lesson and give him a BoM and get a return appt. Additionally, it got A******* excited about the work.

Elder Volkanov really appreciated the laptop. He sent you a card which you should recieve soon.

Yeah, so my b-day is coming up. I’m doing fine with money and everything. Oh, please tell people in the ward, especially the Bishop, that he can’t email me, only snail mail. It is a new rule. I put an autoresponder to my mail to let people know of that. I could use some more mahleb to make some more bread. Everyone who tries it loves it.

Anyway, I need to go. Have a great week. I love you all so much and wish and pray for God’s blessings to continue upon you all.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr