June 2, 2011 ONE YEAR!

Dear family and friends,
Yes, today is my 1 year mark! It's definitely a little different seeing all the missionaries that have gone home and the ones that have come in since I've been on my mission because now people are going to start asking me how many months I have left instead of how long I've been out. But that's still really far away. I'm now going to repeat all of the holidays that I just went through and I'm probably going to have a lot of memories come back from this past year of what happened.

Anyway, so we don't really have too many people in our teaching pool right now. We have an investigator named Gabby and she and her 3 kids have almost been taught everything, it's just that she has a boyfriend that is living with her and they either have to get married or break up. Gabby wants to get married, but one of the problems, though, is that the boyfriend isn't sure if he wants to marry her and she can't break up with him because she depends on him for money. So we're still trying to work that out with the bishopric about how they can help.

Oh yeah, I did fix my brakes. I guess I had a blonde moment and didn't figure to actually click it on. But then one of them was only half working, so I went and fixed that up a little bit because our apartment has a couple of tools to fix bikes at least. And then for my flat tire, I tried putting some patches on it, but it was kind of stressful because they weren't working and the holes were too big anyway to patch up and so I just went and bought myself a new tube altogether. So now my bike is pretty much fixed and it's probably as good as it's going to get.

The Monte Bello ward is about the size of a normal ward, probably around 200 or so people. That's the only ward that I cover. Elder Cunha is really cool and I'm getting along with him really well. He said that the Monte Bello ward sometimes doesn't teach everything correctly in the Gospel Principles class and so we have to make sure that we're paying attention to make sure that they're not teaching anything wrong. I've heard on more than one occasion that missionaries would try and tell the teacher what was right and that the whole class would try and argue against it.

We live in an actual apartment with just us 4, and it gets a little dramatic because sometimes the English Elders would argue with each other but nothing major has happened yet. My bed is kind of ghetto because there wasn't a comforter or a thick blanket to use when I got there, so I opened up a sleeping bag completely and I just use that as my blanket and it actually works pretty well. Our apartment complex is a little run down but it's kind of funny because it's still better than most of the other complexes, which aren't that great. The English Elders sometimes get annoyed because there's so many Hispanic people and we offered to teach them how to do a street contact in Spanish, but they kept refusing because they thought it would take too much time. So yeah, there's a lot of Spanish people. Oh yeah, Memorial Day was just another day for us, haha. Nothing special happened.

So our mission has also instituted a new system of obedience starting yesterday. Before, we would only judge ourselves on how well we obey the morning schedule (up at 6:30, exercise for 30 minutes, 5 min. showers, personal study by 7:30, companionship study by 9, and leave by 11). If we obeyed all of that, we would get 100% for the day, but now, all of that is only worth 40%. The other 60% is 20% of having lunch under an hour, 20% of leaving dinner before 6 and proselyting from 6-9, and 20% of planning using all of the planning guidelines. It's going to be tough because now the bar is raised and we have to try harder to get 100%, but now it's more black and white and when you follow the rules, you get more blessings.

So yeah, everything is going pretty well. Elder Cunha and I are having a lot of fun and we enjoy each other. I'll tell you if I need anything.


I love you!


Elder Meiners