Cattaraugus is awesome!

26 May 2014

Cattaragus is awesome!  To describe my new area it's very rural. We have no Walmarts or Wegmans  - just dollar generals and save.   But we do have an Indian reservation for the Seneca Indians that's in our area.   I didn't even really know that they had reservations on the east coast.  Who would have guessed.  It's slightly sketchy but there are quite a few members of the church that live on the reservation.  The church building itself is actually on the reservation.  It's quite an interesting building in that it has an orchard that the members maintain as a community. It also has several beehives that produce loads of honey.   But what's most interesting is that it has a cemetery that was part of the deal the church made when it built the building here.  The reservation required it to be part of the church property that the church can bury its members in.  The branch president actually is Indian as well.    He is called President Jones and actually about a fifth of the branch constitutes members of the Jones family so it's pretty funny to hear people say Brother Jones all the time.  My area consists of the towns of Eden, North Collins, Angola, Farnham, Irving, Derby, Brant, Silver Creek and the northern half of the reservation.  As for work the other set of elders have had a lot of baptisms lately although our area hasn't had as many.  We met with a few people this week but it seems like service took up a good deal of our time so this week will be more productive as we weekly plan and set some things up for this upcoming week.