July 14, 2011

Dear family and friends,

        So I guess there's been a couple things that have happened this week. My companion Elder Cunha got transfered to Henderson and now I have a new companion and his name is Elder Pirir. He's from Guatemala and he only has 2 transfers left. So chances are that he'll be with me until he leaves his mission. We also have 2 new English Elders in our apartment, Elder Chriswell and Elder Oakey. Elder Chriswell is just about to finish his mission and Elder Oakey is just starting, so he doesn't have a bike right now, and so my companion is letting him borrow his and my companion will use another bike until Elder Oakey buys one. What you suggested sounds good to me. I can borrow a bike from the mission home until James drops off the one that his friend has.

 I was also surprised to hear that our area just got a car! So the area that the car was in was a big area because with a car you could travel more, but now the missionary that used to drive it got transferred and the missionary that came in to that area doesn't have driving privileges. So both of the missionaries can't drive, so they just gave the car to us for our area. In fact, I'm the only one in our district who has driving privileges, but we're probably not going to use the car that much because we really don't need it that much. It's a lot easier to talk to people on the street and bus stops with bike because it's just more natural; you wouldn't have to go through the awkwardness of getting out of the car on the street right in front of the person, talking to the person and probably getting rejected, and then getting back into the car.

        Rafael is still doing good. We also encouraged him to read from the Book of Mormon and pray about it to know if it's true. Although he still needs his mom's permission and so we might have to push back the baptismal date that we had for this week. We also talked to Marco's mom this past week and it's been kind of like a drama situation where we have to be the messengers. Marco's mom said that her husband wasn't Mormon (which Marco claimed he was),  she mentioned how Marco got into a car accident just to get money, how neither him or his sister Mara want to change, and how Marco has only gotten worse after his baptism. And so we talked about it with both Marco and his sister, and they said that their mom is crazy,  and that everything she said was lies, so they don't really have the best relationship between each other.

        I love Elder Pirir because even though he's quiet and reserved, he's really optimistic about our area and how we can find more people to teach and bring unto God. So we still don't really have that many investigators to teach, but we're trying really hard to find those people and I think that this will be a good transfer.

        It sounds like the reunion that you all are going to will be fun and I hope that you have a good time at it. Tell everybody I said hi.

        That's it from me this week. I'll let you know if anything comes up.
Elder Meiners