Forest fire 8-5-2024

I have been pretty horrible at sending out emails as of late. I can't really remember what I put in the last update so I will run through the last few weeks. Our friend Jim got baptized and the week after our friend Henry got baptized. We were teaching Jim for a while and it was a pretty routine. Henry all the other hand came out of nowhere and the whole thing was a miracle. We saw Henry had been contacted by missionaries months ago and we were swinging by to meet him and the first time he wasn't home but the second time he was and he said he'd actually been attending church off and on for the last little bit. We made the connection and realized he had been coming to church functions for years so we invited him to be baptized that week and he was all for it. He was baptized on a Saturday and since then he has been consistent with church and scripture study and even brought a non-member friend who we are now teaching. He is 18 years old and is a funny skater type kid. He's in a tough family situation so we've been helping his mother and sister. We had interviews with our new mission leaders and they went completely off schedule and spend an additional 15 to 20 minutes with every missionary so we ended up sitting at the church for 3 hours and I didn't even have my interview at the church. In order to get to a member meal on time in the zone leader's area we had to boogie with Sister Kerr. We were on exchanges that day so I went down and then President joined us halfway through dinner and then he administered my interview in the family room of this member's house. The vibes of the new mission presidency are really chill and it's going to be exciting to see the culture shift a bit in the mission. Present Kerr and I counseled about a lot of good stuff. A few weeks ago I was supposed to have an assistant exchange, the day before they canceled it with me because they needed to go with another companionship. Early afternoon on that day we got notifications from our zone chat that we had missed two calls and then we saw a text from one of the missionaries that said "everyone go to the Moscow Stakes center right now." We were confused and called the chat and the tech leads in Spokane answered and said the zone was evacuating because of a fire. We started to head for home and then we got the word that we were in the clear where we were at. We started working again and drove out to the furthest point of our area closest to Lewiston because that is where we had planned but we also wanted to see what was going on. When we got to the top of a hill we saw tons of smoke and then a few more communications with leaders later we were told to go to Kamia to temporarily evacuate. One of the assistants was in Kamiah when the evacuation started so he had to drive back to Lewiston and he said on the way back flame was right on the edge of the road and they were rocks and trees falling everywhere. We spent two days with another companionship in Kamiah. Four elders in that apartment was chaos but we had a lot of fun and I was able to go buck hay for service one of those mornings. Towards the end of our time in Kamiah our vehicle's tire went flat. It had a slow leak all week prior. We took the thing into the tire shop and they patched one of the holes but turns out there was two so we had to go back on Monday. On our first drive to Lewiston after the majority of the fire passed through we saw some flame patches of flame and smoking logs all over the burnt hillside. It was gnarly. Devastating fire but there was a natural beauty to it nonetheless. We've had zone conference and we've had exchanges .. typical mission stuff. We're getting close to the end here .. exciting!

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