2/8/12

Well, it actually snowed this weekend, or at least Friday and Saturday night. So it was kind of cold. My coat, scarfs, gloves, sweaters, etc are all in Barcelona in the office basement. But I was fine. I borrowed some stuff and was warm. It´s the first time it´s snowed that much since the 1960´s. The apartment´s old and drafty(and extremely overpriced), but we just close up the bedrooms at night with heaters and blankets and we´re warm. It`s probably equivalent to serving in Ukraine or similar countries.. Thankfully they came and fixed the dryer today. The electrical installation is a joke, and so when someone had a heater plugged in it blew up the timer on the dryer. We have to be careful to not plug in too many things at once either. Two heaters means nothing else. Just a few lights. And that´s after it was ´fixed´. But the expiration date on the contract is May 30th, so while we´ll start looking for a new place in March or so, I won´t be living in it. Oh well.

So we made it back to Palma on Tuesday. Had a calm couple of days, then we got a call on Friday morning saying that there´d been an office mess-up and Elder Pericle would have to fly out to Menorca to do a baptismal interview. We took him off to the airport, then I was with members on splits until the evening. I was joking around with Rafa (he´s interesting) while we huddled under his umbrella, then I noticed that the rain had changed to snowflakes. We were somewhat concerned that the airport would be shut down (island people really aren´t prepared for snow), but my companion made it back fine in the morning.

Sorry I haven´t been able to write until today. We had conferences on Monday and Tuesday, so we´re kind of getting a preparation day today. Kind of.

It sounds like you had a rough week. I´m sorry to hear that. Just remember that we´ll be able to overcome all things through Christ. Really, it´s how all these people we see here change their lives. We´re teaching a man from Bolivia named Bob(we can´t use real names anymore) who was previously a Jehovah´s Witness, though he´s been out of that church for quite some time. The day before I got here, they were passing by former investigators, and his stepdaughter had been taught before. As they knocked, Bob was reading in the Book of Mormon which he´d just found about fifteen minutes earlier. He invited the missionaries up and they started teaching him. He just surprises us every visit by his faith. The last time he´d invited us to have tea the next visit, so we commented that hot chocolate would be better, and briefly mentioned that we don´t drink tea. So the last visit was on the Word of Wisdom. He didn´t really understand why (like I told him, it´s a question of faith), but he just finally said ¨Well, I don´t understand, but if that´s the way the Lord says it has to be, then it has to be that way¨. That´s the answer we like to hear. He´s really trying to get his wife to listen, though she seems to really not like us at the moment (he says that her reason´s aren´t justified), and we´re going to keep working with him.

We had to manage the conferences on Monday and Tuesday. Of course, the planning was bad. The office only told us what we had to do Saturday at 8PM, we were headed to a visit, and all the stores close at 9PM. ANd they´re not open Sunday, and the first session was set for Monday at 10. We ran around getting everything bought (the stores also don´t open until 9AM), and managed to have everything set up by 930 when the Hinckley´s arrived. We´ll be pestering the office a lot earlier this time.

I have a working computer, so I´m attaching some pictures since I´m short on time. Most are just of the snow on Sunday morning, the last is when I took that trip down to Alcoy.

I hope you all have a good week, and that things are smoother this week.

Love,

Bradley