1/24/11

Still no package, but the mail hadn´t come today before we walked out of the building, so maybe it´ll be there when we get back.

Elder Benito and Hansen have had an interesting week. We´d wondered how long it would last, and sure enough, things blew up on Friday night. That seems to have helped, though. Now they´re progressing a bit. Still, like Elder Hansen and I were talking, Elder Benito needs about six or seven(he´d be over the year mark) more transfers as junior companion, in a different area.

It´s been a rather busy week. I think all we´re teaching at the moment are Africans and Edgar. Bishop said he´s glad we´re bringing in more Africans so that we can get the ones we have to have a more stable community, but I don´t think he knows we´re planning to have an African branch as soon as possible .

That´s the mission focus for the year. President wants us to find and teach primarily families. Had a zone conference on Thursday to talk all about it. He wants us to get 450 baptisms for the mission this year. Breaks down to about 10 per companionship, or, in other words, ten per missionary. It´s not an outrageous number. We´re still sitting with only 90 missionaries, and President didn´t make it sound like he expects that to go back up any time soon. Better than the 68 we bottomed out at when I came into the field, though. Normal average is 120 per mission.

We´re hearing a lot of rumors that one of the reasons President Monson is calling so hard for new missionaries is that the Church is about to open up work in all of China. It´d take a lot of missionaries, and with the shortage right now, they´d end up having to shortchange a lot of missions for a bit. It´d explode over there fast, though. We´d be the first ones in there.

Zone Conference was pretty interesting. It´s not every missionary that gets to hear their President open up his first talk by saying ¨When my father was President of the Church...¨

Well, this week will be the eight month mark. Mission is a third over. It´s gone by fast.

We should be having quite a few baptisms coming up soon. We´ve got five dates set (one of them feels like cheating), and though one or two are kinda flimsy, at least some of them will go through. Bishop came up to us yesterday saying ¨So there´s this lady who´s here, who was baptised in South America, but she had to leave and never was confirmed, so she´s got to be rebaptised.¨ Turns out she lives in our area (I love how my line always works out perfect), so she´ll probably be baptised the 5th of February. Kinda cheating, but I guess that´s how it works.

This week should be interesting-apparantly President has chosen me and my companion to be guinea pigs on some new thing the church wants to try-they´re trying to get us on the freebie healthcare here. I hope that won´t have political repercussions for the future...

I feel like this letter is short, but there´s not a ton to write about. Weather´s been cold here lately-not quite as bad as more central areas, but still cold.

Science fair projects? Nobody likes those. They´re almost as bad as those dumb probes they used to torture innocent students with. Maybe some of us don´t like coloring on paper...

Future spouse? What is that madness?

Bradley.

Oh, yeah. Doesn´t the picture look a little bit like Gerry? (Gerry Williams)