I arrived in Florida last Wednesday so today is day six for me counting the day of arrival. And OH MY GOODNESS the climate here is intense! No one was kidding when they said it was humid here. I nearly suffocated as I stepped off the plane. And not only is it humid, but south Florida is scorching hot! It's been around 95 and it does not drop, even at night. It still is very warm and humid. Obviously the night time is much more tolerable than during the day but we don't work at night... It's not even the hottest time of the year and I am getting a little scared about that. It's already very hot and the humidity combination makes it at least 100% worse. You are actually able to feel it on your skin. It feels like being surrounded by a warm cloud. Almost as if you were sitting in a sauna but much worse because you don't actually want to feel like that. It is as if a very hot cloud is giving you an uncomfortable hug. I do not know how else to describe it. This is not the first time you will hear about the weather during my time here so keep that in mind.
Okay, so that's out of the way and now onto the more interesting stuff! My mission president, President Garns, was there with his wife and assistants to greet us at the airport. I arrived with about 10 other missionaries, we were the last group of the day. About 40 new missionaries in total arrived in the mission. There are around 230 missionaries here. The mission boundaries take up all of south Florida, including the keys. It is quite large especially compared to my last mission. My group and I arrived at around 8:30pm so we were taken to the chapel in Plantation. There I received everything I need such as my mission guide, bed sheets, other information, and my hurricane supplies backpack. Hurricanes are rare here but they of course happen often enough where we need something just in case. The last big one they had was back in 2017. Protocol for that is pretty simple. All missionaries just go to a chapel. At the Plantation stake center, I met my new companion, Elder Enz! He is from Indiana and is awesome! Elder Enz has been out for just under a year. He is also the district leader so that makes things a bit easier for me regarding reports and accounting. Him and I are opening up a new area in the Silver Lakes branch. They need to compensate for all the missionaries coming in so many areas are being split. Silver Lakes is a very small branch but each member is pretty active. Also the average age of the branch is around 70 years old. This is also a Spanish branch!! The Florida Fort Lauderdale mission is one of those missions where there are many language assignments. The languages here are English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Portuguese. Each call extended assigns a missionary one of those languages. I am on Spanish assignment. So I am very blessed to be able to continue to learn Spanish!!! The culture here is very diverse. There are many people from Cuba, Mexico, Central America, and other Atlantic Islands! It's a shame that we are not able to talk to many of these people though. We are still in quarantine because Florida has a lot of cases. And pretty much all of the hot spots are in our mission. It is also getting worse. On the bright side, Elder Enz and I are locked up in a hotel! We also drive a 2019 Dodge Caravan. It's a rental car and it is very slick. South Florida is pretty dang awesome! It honestly looks like paradise. There are palm trees everywhere, it's hot, the food is great, and there are very expensive buildings and other things everywhere! There are very nice cars all over the place. We've seen lamborghinis a couple of times. People that live around here are either on vacation, retired, or here working. The percentage of people who actually live here is very low. Plus, my area is one of the nicest in the mission. We live in Plantation. It is a bit further into the mainland. Most of where the missionaries work is along the east coast. And a larger portion of the mission is the Everglades. That is a pretty crazy spot. It is a protected area with lots of Alligators, Monitors, and other crazy animals. We went there today and I will try to send some pictures of it! We do see Iguanas very often. They sit along the sides of the canals. They swim pretty fast too! And there are canals everywhere! South Florida has this nickname, Venice, because of how many canals there are. It's a lot like Italy. But there is water everywhere! There are ponds and lakes too! Most of the church buildings have ponds out in front. Our stake center also has a canal running on the other side of the street.
We do all our work through technology right now. We have smartphones which is very different from what I was used to and there is this church owned app just for missionaries that is the area book and it is awesome! I will have to go more in depth with that next week. We have to find new people through Facebook. I am not very savvy with that so I have a lot to learn. But the tech sister missionaries are in our district and they are the only ones in the mission so we get that huge advantage! And we are also able to contact lots of former friends (here they call them friends instead of investigators). It took a while to get everything in order for our area, Elder Enz is also new to this area. We had been assigned to draw out boundaries for our area so we talked that over with the sisters in our branch. We share the branch with sister missionaries! After we did the boundaries they sent us all the info we needed. They have been here a while longer. But this is the first time that this branch has ever had elders! So that is very exciting! In our district there are eight of us. There are four sister missionaries and four of us elders. We have been in contact with two new friends, Cheska and Arnaldo, so we are hoping to get lessons going with them soon. Other than that things are moving quite slow but that is pretty expected with our situation at the moment. We have faith that the Lord will guide us accordingly!
The food has been great so far!!! I ate Alligator today but sadly the picture of it was deleted due to my lack of attention as I was going through extra photos I took on my camera, sorry! But I will send the rest of the pictures from the little exhibit we were able to visit! A member also fed us mission BBQ which was so great! It was only a bit cold since we had to bring the sisters their portion. But it was still incredible!
I think that is it for now. A lot is happening despite not being able to go out much so I hope that I didn't miss anything.
Take care, I miss you all!
-Elder Markham
Here are some pictures I took today. You can see in one of them just how flat Florida is!
Some more pics of the exhibit we visited! There is a Monitor, a massive Alligator, and some tortoises!
Baby Alligators with turtles!! Also a bird we found with one foot. The birds always follow people around with their mouths open asking for food haha
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