Brantford- Week 1

Hello Family,
It has been a good first week here in Brantford, Ontario! It is absolutely beautiful around here. Some areas, not so much, but I mean the trees and grass- it is so nice! Our little house is right across the street from a train station, so it gets really noisy. The first
night it kind of freaked me out. Everything kind of rattles when
trains go through and quite a few trains go through at night. But I've actually always liked trains, so its kind of cool.
There is so much history around here! Even family history! Mom, I met a family last week, the Taylors, and he said his sister named Dolores always talks about Grandpa Oles' conversion story. I gave them your info so she could call you or email you or something. But how cool is that! And last night, I had dinner with the Henhawk family who is alsoMohawk. They didn't recognize the Oles name, but its still pretty cool. In your next email can you let me know if we have a clan? That would be cool. I keep telling people I'm native, so I should probably have a clan name so they don't think I'm just a weird white guy saying I'm a native. :)

We do a lot of re-activation work and work with less-actives, along with teaching part-member families. We've been doing a lot of finding too, but working with less-actives is a huge part of the work here in the mission. Which we knew before coming, but its a lot more extensive than I thought. We've been helping out this guy named Joe, he's 20 years old. He's been coming back to church more often lately, and he's about a month sober from marijuana. He is actually doing a "mini-mission" with us, so he's staying with us, and working with us.
And he's trying to quit smoking tobacco as well. He's a funny guy. We
like to have him around, and apparently he's already made a lot of
progress from before I got here, and I've already seen some progress just in this past week. He is practically an investigator, so we teach him a lot of things too. We're going to continue working with him the next two weeks on the "mini-mission." President Scott has set a goal for us to get 65 baptisms in the month of June. Its pretty cool, we are all unified and working towards that goal.

My first sunday was good, people are so nice to the new missionary. They introduced me in Sacrament meeting, but they didn't pick on me for anything... yet. The ward is small. The work here is going to be picking up, it already is, there are a lot of things to do here. Lots of people moping around on drugs, alcohol, lots of relationship
problems. Lots of teen pregnancies. The devil has had a pretty strong
grip here. But I know if we work hard to have the spirit, that can change everything. Its not us, its the spirit. I'll be honest, its been pretty difficult with my first companion. He's a great guy, he has a testimony and he wants to help people, but he definitely has one
foot here in the mission and one foot in the world/back home. So its a
little frustrating. But we'll work though it. I just know that having one foot at home or in the world, would make this seem like a waste of time. I want to wear out my life for the next two years, because many people have made so many sacrifices for me to be here. So I want to make them count. One thing we're indoctrinated with as missionaries is the doctrine of Christ. That's all that matters. Faith, repentance, baptism, receiving the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end.
Investigators take that path, and we as members take it too. Faith, daily repentance, the sacrament weekly, being worthy of the Spirit, and enduring to the end. Living these principles can repair anything that needs repairing. I hope this email was not too long or boring. We've had kind of a dumb p-day. Lots of wasted time. We could've had a little longer to send more personal emails if we used time more wisely.

Anyways, I love all of you very much. You are all in my thoughts and
prayers daily. I can't wait to continue to share my experiences with you!

Love,
Elder Simper