Monday October 24, 2011

Dear family and Friends,

Good News! I can now send my weekly emails to my aunts, uncles and grandparents every week, and they can email me!, so if you want to give them my email adress, they can email me, and I will just send them the big email.

Ok, so this last week has been really hard, but really fun at the same time. It is a different area because it takes 20 minutes just to walk from our house to our area, and we don't have the bus, so it is very fun to get people to church, especially when we don't have busses or anyone in the ward able to give rides to them.

So, we marked a guy named Wayalo for baptism for this next weekend. He told us he wanted to be a part of this church, so I said, ok, how about next sunday, and we prayed, and he said, alright, next sunday. Little did we know he has no time to meet with us until saturday, so we gave him all of the pamphlets and gave him a reading schedule, and then everyday we call and find out if he has any questions about the topic and review it on the phone. This will be a fun experience. He doesn't smoke, and only drinks wine, so everything is great.

We met with the bishop of our ward to try and get some support, and he has had it with the missionaries, because there are a ton of people baptized, that didnºt stay active. There is a list of 150 recent converts in the past year and a half, and only 10 or 12 are active right now, so it isn't a very good exchange rate.

The mission as a whole has been having problems. There were 40 people marked for baptism last weekend, and only 18 were baptized, so needless to say, there are a lot of questions that have been raised.

My companion and I are getting along really good, it is hard to lead a zone. We have a couple companionships that are slacking off a ton, it is hard to encourage people who simply don't care, I have seen first-hand what president Torgan talks about with the Celstial missionaries and the Terrestial missionaries and the Telestial missionaries. It is interesting to see how stressed out they can get too when they just have one thing go wrong.

Anyways, it has been good. Oh, my zone has the Cristo Rei Statue, it is like the one in Rio de Janeiro, just smaller, but it is outside of my area. I see it everyday, but I can't go there until next p day, (we can only leave our area once a month for P day) and President Torgan called a meeting for us from 11 to 5 next p day, so we will see if we can swing by right after, lukily it is only 20 minutes from our area.

We are getting into the rainy season, and it is raining a lot now, so we will keep working through the mud, rain, and cold for the next 4 to 5 months. The other missionaries say that is starts in November, but it has been starting early this year (maybe it will end earlier too), it is a humid cold, so the Utah Mormons are sort of whimps, it is funny. It should end march or april.

With Love,

Elder Hope