July 21, 2011

Dear family and friends,
        This week has been pretty good. We've been talking to a lot of people on the street and we've been having some success with teaching people in their houses, but we still feel like we could use some more people to teach.

Rafael is still doing good, but we haven't even seen his mom to be able to talk to talk to her about her son's baptism in about 2 weeks. Rafael has also been reading from the Book of Mormon, so that's also good. We also saw Gabby again for the first time in about a month, but not much has happened between her and her husband, so we don't know if they still want to be married. There are a couple of new investigators that we have, but so far not many of them have showed too much of an interest to learn more. Elder Pirir was in this same ward about a year ago (but in a different area), and so he asked about some of the members that were there and some of the people he used to teach. It was interesting to see how many of the people in our ward are recent converts from the past 2 years.

        It's starting to get a little hotter here in Las Vegas. On Tuesday, I was starting to tan a little bit since we were out in the sun so long, but then I could sense that my body was going to burn in the next couple of weeks if I didn't put on sunscreen, so yesterday I put some on. It's funny too, to see how people won't even talk to us now that it's hot and they think that if they talk to us for one minute, they'd get burned or something like that. There was even one investigator we had where we couldn't go in the house because she was a lady and we didn't have anybody with us, and so we offered to have a lesson outside on her porch, but she was like "Uh...it's too hot outside, can't you guys just come in?" So since she didn't want to have it outside, we planned for another day. I guess some people won't even go outside because it's too hot. I was even starting to feel a little feverish on Tuesday, but I took some ibuprofen and that took care of it pretty quickly.

        Sometimes I think that our ward is really unorganized at planning things. For example, on Sunday there were a couple members missing that were supposed to give classes. The member wasn't there to give the 14-15 year old class, so 2 of the missionaries got the manual like right after sacrament meeting and they were supposed to just "pull something out of a hat" and hopefully it would be a 45 minute lesson. They also wanted me to do that with the Gospel Principles class, but I refused because that's poor planning! You have to give somebody like that a little bit of notice before you just say "okay, teach the class", because that's pretty much what he did. The class was already starting when he gave me the manual. I hadn't even read the lesson, let alone knew it was and I was just supposed to improvise something. Sorry, but no.

        So since we have a car now in our area, I think that they're going to increase the size of our area, which I'm not too excited about. We don't really use the car that much except for picking up missionaries and going to church, district meetings, etc. So pretty much we're still using bikes and it's as if a bike area just got twice as big because now we cover 4 more blocks across (about 2 miles). So I guess we have to do a lot more biking.

        But yeah, not that much has happened this week, either. Like I said, we're still trying to find some more people that are ready to hear more and want us to actually come back and teach them. A lot of them will say that we can come back and we do, and they're not there and it really annoys me because people do that all the time. Or they want us to come back, but they give us an address that doesn't exist or a phone number that doesn't work. I'll let you know though, if there's anybody that does want to learn more.

I'll let you know if I need anything.


Elder Meiners