Oct 31st Letter

hi mom! (And everyone else) thanks for the package it was great and the gloves will be a huge help because we are going to help someone unload a ton of wood and we are going to need gloves. we do a lot of sevice here because the people really need it. everyone is pretty much moving because there are no jobs so they are all leaving town. saturday we moved two people and were going to move another but we had a baptism to go to for first ward. Elder Cooper and I serve in the Prineville 2nd ward so our boundries are the south side of 3rd street. the town use to be a big logging town and they own their own railroad, but now the town has died. now pretty much no one has jobs so they are all leaving. it use to have a population of over 10,000 but now there are only 9,200. this week we are suppose to help more people move. Earlier this week i realized that the side of town my companion and i have is the ghetto. first ward has some pretty normal homes but our side is filled with trailer parks and ghettos. we are looking for a new apartment still but have yet to find one. the apartments here are pretty sketchy so it is kinda hard to find a place to live. i really hope that we find a place soon because i am starting to get a little sick of sleeping on a love couch that is waaay to small for me. ha ha oh well. everything is going great! i am loving the mission and i am doing well. prineville is a nice quiet town that is pretty enjoyable (minus the ghettos, apartments, and trailer parks at night) ha ha just kidding we don't go down those at night, usually. we did find to people that are pretty much solid investigators. one we found in the trailer park and seems to be finding out a lot of truth for herself. she basically said everything that we were going to tell her right before we said it. and another we talked to today. we met here as we were moving out her friend. she said that she has yet to find a church that seems right, and she agrees with everything that we said. we are going to meet with her a little bit later this week. i am way excited she is probably the most solid investigator we have right now.
in answer to some of your questions: my companion is from Layton and he loves to sing. he is pretty cool and he likes to cook. i did see matt, he picked me up at the airport and was at the mission home when we went over there. my new bike is incredible! the old bike that i had to use was the worst so getting this new bike made a world of difference. it is more of a street bike though. but that acutally makes things a lot easier. a lot of people in town dont have jobs. especially in our area of the town since it is the ghettos. a lot of the people work at the les scwabs tire factory (i have no idea how to spell that) but yeah. they use to all work at the log mills but all 7 of them were shut down. now that those are gone the town seems to be slowly dying. most the people here are still pretty nice though. everyone waves to everyone. people never listen to us but they are usually fairly nice when saying no. well some are at least. i went to church yesturday for the first time because last week was stake conference. our ward is probably about 1/6 the size of our ward. last night afer dinner we went to visit the less active members of the ward to tell them about the halloween party on monday night and one of the less actives opened the door in his briefs. well... it was pretty awkard. ha thats prineville for you. nothing screams prineville more then a fat, hairy, drunk answering the door in his underwear with animal heads on the wall in the background.

on saturday we went to the first wards halloween party. it was interesting... some people showed up in some pretty immodest costumes. but i dont think that the were members which was ok maybe they are investigators. they had a chili cookoff but not that many people participated. people here seem to think that finding a store bought chili and warming it up is what a chili cookoff is all about. that, or when you make a very gamey deer chili. everyone hunts out here so they all eat deer or elk. matter of fact hunting season just started, and here that is a legit excuse to miss school. well tonight is our ward party and i am more excited for ours because ours seems to be more organized. well i love you all and hope that you all write me! take care and tell me what is going on with you

- Show quoted text -

Nate's first letter from Oregon

I am in Oregon now! i think that i will start from the beginning and tell you what has been going on since i left the MTC.

You know that you are serving your mission close to home when they put you on the smallest jet in the Delta fleet and you think that it might blow up any second. while on the plane i got to talk to a lady that said that if i ever served in forance oregon that i could come over and we could talk to her while she fed us fresh crab. i thought that was pretty cool however i am about 6 hours away from the coast. but anyways... after i got off the plane i met the mission president and his wife. they are incredibly nice way nicer then i thought they would be. we went to the mission home where we ate and did some things and were later assigned to our trainers and our area. i am currently serving in a small town in the center of oregon called Prineville. it is a very small town and it smells very wierd. at night the sagebrush makes it smell like an elementry schools bathroom. the first night it smelt like i stuck my face in a urinal. Eugene is a very green place, it is like driving in hawaii however, prineville is like Joseph Utah. it really isnt green and at all it doesnt rain here much. one of the missionaries that has served here for about 6 months said that it has only rained here about 5 times. but it could be dryer in burns (which is the farthest east our mission goes) is even more dry it is about 8 hours away from eugene.

the mission is different then i thought it would be. Prineville is a very big hunting community and very conservative. they also have 25 different churches in this small community. it is crazy there is basically a church on every block. the members here are really nice however everyone else doesnt seem to like mormons. it turns out that a few years ago there was a lot of anti mormon propaganda here and so people dont like to talk to us. it has died down for a while but it is starting to pick back up. and when a missionary goes to someones house other people from the churches around here go over there as soon as they leave and give them a ton of anti mormon stuff. so it makes things a little difficult. sometimes when we talk to people a car will drive by and check us out. i learned that from a recent convert and i have noticed it a few times. other then that the town its pretty chill. everyone smokes, has a dog, and they all seem to really like koolaid. it is a very dunder town. just about all the old people have no teeth. it is a little weird. and i think that they are all racist because they say some pretty racist things.

a few days into the field i got to challenge a guy to baptism and he accepted! he is suppose to be baptized on the 12th but he is the only person that we have taught a lesson too so far because no one else will listen to us. i finally got my bike yesturday! we have been biking everwhere and i had to use this ghetto bike that i thought i was going to die on. seiously, it screached all the time and one of the peddles broke. it was very interesting to try and ride. i hated using it because it was super slow and drawed a lot of unwanted attention. well i am pretty much out of time so i guess this will be it till next week! love you all

Sincerely Elder Berg

ps i havent gotten any mail yet because the mail is weird here and my companion elder cooper and i will be moving so yeah sorry if you wrote me and i havent gotten back. i havent gotten mail yet.

Nate Meets his trainer, Elder Cooper

Nate with Pres and Sis Young

Arrival at Mission Home Oct 18th 2011