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| Savannah Zone Confence |
I am training Elder WRIGHT from Orem, UT and he is awesome!! He is assigned to speak Spanish, just like Elder Johnson, and because there are now four English missionaries in the ward, we are trying our best to only find and teach Spanish speakers. It's a little bit of a challenge, but nothing we can't handle! I wish that you could somehow see the difference that I felt before transfer meeting and after. I went up to meet my new companion and could tell right off the bat that things were going to be fun with him, even though he was a little bit quiet. Every day we have been talking to each other and playing this getting to know you game in companionship study that has been helping us to talk more openly. It's also a bit of a challenge to teach with unity right now just because the language is something that he's still working to strengthen. In Beaufort there are a couple of places that are pretty much nothing but Latino, so we'll be spending a lot of time there pretending like we're outside of the United States :)
I couldn't have asked for a better situation than the one we are living in right now. I couldn't have asked for a better district leader, either. His name's Elder Lash and he was serving as an assistant to President Cottle for two transfers before coming over here. We've been helping the English Elders to have a lot to do considering they're basically starting from scratch. Living with them is a lot of fun. We always have a lot of faith-building and funny stories to tell each other when we get to the apartment at night.
Other than transfer meeting on Tuesday, we spent most of our time out talking to a lot of people. A lot more people have been thanking us lately for what we share with them and listening to what they have to say. We ran into this girl named Nayeli the other day and she told us that she was stressed out about finding a job, so we taught her about the Lord always providing for those people that strive to keep the commandments and being obedient and then we taught her to pray and said a prayer right there. Teaching Carlos and Yovana has been a bit harder lately because of the stress that Yovana's been dealing with during this week of Antonio's birthday. I'll send you some pictures from the party on Facebook. We got Antonio a little tie and everybody loved it! He was so happy to stick his face in his one year old cake. We met some of the friends that Yovana is always talking about and they invited us over for dinner sometime so that they can make us their famous lasagna. We'll also get to teach them! The birthday party at first felt a little bit uncomfortable because everybody seemed to avoid talking to us, but it worked out in the end when we just found some people to talk to.
President Cottle told us this week that the Atlanta mission is receiving 50 missionaries next transfer and that 24 of them are Visa waiters that will be going to Brazil. I didn't realize how big of a blessing it was that Hannah's Visa showed up. It sounds like she is having the time of her life down there, too :)
Love,
Elder Moore
Elder Moore. On my mission, we had the similar challenge of finding Spanish speaking people to teach. Sometimes this was easy as the concentration of Spanish speakers was very high. In others, it was more difficult. In one area, we covered a territory of over 3 million people that didn't have a lot of SpanAms. What we did, is that we visited the Census office. Every 10 years, they do a census and they had maps of the city we could print out that showed the number of Spanish speakers by block. It was really useful and we found a pocket of Spanish speakers in Philadelphia that the missionaries hadn't know about for YEARS. We baptized two families as a result.
ReplyDeleteGlen