Hello y'all
It was a good week here in Portales. We were pretty busy all week long so that was good. First off last Tuesday we got asked by a member to help brand a cow which was crazy. This member had two cows that he needed help branding. Normally he can do it by himself when the cows are really young. But for whatever reason he didn't do this cow when it was young and so it had grown to over 300 pounds! He also had another calf which was much smaller. He said he would be able to do the calf by himself but it turned out this cow was super aggressive. He threw the rope around it's neck and then pulled it tight, he then ran over to it, grabbed it by it's neck and threw it on it's back. He decided he wanted some help so he yelled at me to jump on the cow's neck/head and hold it to the ground. While I was doing this trying to keep it under control and on the ground he was frantically trying to grab the cow's legs and tie them together. My companion grabbed the rope and pulled it keeping the legs from kicking. He tried to brand it a couple times but because it was so cold the brand couldn't get hot enough. The electricity was somewhat far away and in that time from grabbing the branding iron to running to the cow it had already cooled off. So he decided that we needed to drag the cow to the branding iron! We had to drag the calf to the electricity where it was branded. After we released and set it free. Then we had to the big cow. It was basically the same procedure except is was so much bigger and so much stronger so it was way harder. This cow was somewhat agressive which was scary because the cow would run strait at us and we would have to jump out of the way. Once we got it down I jumped on it's head/neck again and held it down. The cow was so strong though that keeping it down was nearly impossible. I could not believe how strong this cow was. And of course when we would brand either of the cows they would freak out making my job way harder. Still it was pretty fun, but it was a super crazy experience.
On Thursday we had mission tour/zone conference! We got to hear from President and Sister Hales and then we got to hear from Elder Dyches of the 70 and his wife! Elder Dyches was a great speaker, and I loved hearing his talk. After the conference Elder Dyches requested to interview some of the missionaries and he chose me! So I got to spend like 10 minutes just talking to him about everything in a mission. It was such a cool experience. It was so cool to be around him and talk with him during that time. He even took a picture with us after!
On Saturday we went to Muleshoe Texas and spent the day there. We don't have many people there so we decided to knock this one street. We met 5 Spanish people who said they were interested in our message and we were able to teach 2 Restoration lessons right there!
Thanks again for all of the support! I love getting your emails and letters and it means so much to me. Thanks for everything!
Elder Morris