photos from Elder Andrew Perazzo

Andrew has been on his mission just over 6 months now. He is currently serving in Sioux City, Iowa. He sent one batch of photos from the MTC and just sent another batch. Here they are (I figured out how to use the scanner and put the pictures in a folder so I could find them again...I'm so proud of me!):

Here's Andrew with the Elders from his MTC district: Elder Lunceford (his companion), Andrew, Elder Guest, Elder Allen, Elder Diamond, and Elder Widdison

 Same group, different pose.

The swine flu was rearing its ugly head while Andrew was in the MTC. The uncle of one of the Elders made t-shirts saying "I survived the swine of '09" which has a picture of a pig in missionary attire on front. And on back...

...it talks about the Super-6 (that's what the Elders called themselves) and it has a picture of a farmer with Iowa as his head holding a stalk of corn.

Here Andrew and Elder Diamond pose with a statue of the Church's first missionary in this dispensation: Samuel H. Smith.

While Andrew was in the MTC the new mission presidents were trained...so many of the Apostles were there as well as the Prophet. Andrew said he got about 20' away from the Prophet and later took this picture of where President Monson had been standing. Too funny.

Another funny...there was this Elder in the MTC that looked a lot like Barack Obama, so Andrew had his photo taken with him.

And to prove once again that Elders are, after all, 19 year olds, Andrew had his picture taken while he was "levitating." Any guesses as to how this photo was accomplished???

Now on to the recent photos from Iowa:

Here is Andrew with Sister and President Talbot (his mission President) when he first arrived in Iowa.

This is the entire group that went out into the mission field with Andrew--

Sisters Myers and Jardine, Elders Widdison, Diamond, Lunceford (in back), Allen (in front), Andrew, Elder Guest, Sister and President Talbot.

Andrew didn't say in his letter or on the back of the photo who these missionaries are...his last district perhaps??? (OK, after reading Calista's comment and taking a closer look, I'm guessing this was taken with Andrew's group in the mission home soon after arriving in Iowa)

And lastly:

Andrew says "kudos for anyone who can figure out how I did the 'companionship inventory' picture."

It was really great talking to him on Christmas. My parents were here for the holidays and Glen's parents came over for the phone call.

Andrew just got a new companion, Elder Webster, on Thursday (and of course he doesn't say where he's from...only that he trained one of Andrew's past companions). It's been very cold and snowy...they've been doing a lot of service shoveling snow for people. I will copy and paste below most of his most recent email about their GPS situation:

With this new year came really cold weather.  One day President Talbot had to call our zone and warn us about going outside because it was 20 below zero outside, without windchill.  We could still go out and work, but we could only be outside for 15 minutes at a time before we had to warm up either in our car or inside somewhere.  But that was a couple of days ago, and it hasn't been that cold since.  Now it's all the way up to 1 below zero.  Today's high is supposed to be 3 degrees, I think.

But the good news is that it isn't snowing as hard as it has been.  We only got about an inch on Saturday night.  But there's a funny story I'd like to tell you.

Elder Webster and I are driving our car to far flung cities in our area to visit less actives.  After a really good visit with a Less Active and his non-member wife, who lived about 20 minutes from Sioux City, we were driving to another city farther away from Sioux City.  Elder Webster's GPS told us to go on this back road, which was fine until we come up over this hill to see the road ahead wasn't cleared from snow.  Elder Webster slams on his brakes, but we skid about 16 yards and ram into it head on.  It's only about a foot high, so we travel in about a car's length and get stuck.  Oh, and it's about 8:30 at night.

So we get out of the car and start shoveling it the best we can.  We have no shovel in our car (poor planning on our part) and so we use our hands and feet.  Well, I just use my feet because I only have one glove, I had lost the other one about a week ago and have no idea where it is.  We look at the temperature and notice that it's negative 12 degrees outside.  It was about then that we realize we didn't know where the phone was.  It's not in the car, and we realize it had fallen out into the snow.  We think about going to the nearest house and have someone calling it, but, of course, our phone is on vibrate.

We walk over to the nearest house, which wasn't that far away, only about a rock's throw, and we ask that man there if we could borrow his phone.  He allows us to use his cell phone.  We call the Zone Leaders and they say they'll come to help, and they'll call us back when they're closer.  Then the man's phone dies from low battery.

But everything turned out okay in the end.  The man plugged his phone into the wall, it got juiced up, the Zone Leaders came, we found our phone, we got unstuck, we asked if the guy would be interested in hearing more about the gospel (which he wasn't) and we were on our way home.  Our phone is dead (the cold sucked the juice right out of it) but we get home and plug it in and everything's fine.  We did get home around 10:00 though.  And the front part of our car was broken and the bottom of our car got ripped up a bit.

So that's my story.  It's the most interesting thing that's happened this week.


So, that's what's happening with Andrew these days.