Received Mon, March 23, 2009

Our temple trip was awesome. Half the mission went on Wednesday and the other half (my half) went on Friday. Its called a Temple Zone Conference. We went through and did the 9:00am session, had lunch, then had our zone conference meetings until about 5. The temple was awesome as always. We always take a big picture with all the missionaries in it at every Temple Zone Conference, but you'll have to wait til I get home to see those.

Then our zone conference afterwards was really good too. I learned a lot of things and I took a lot of notes. We also got to see a picture of our new mission president and his wife who will be coming on July 1st. They are named the Salen's, I think. If you get the MormonTimes there is a little paragraph or two written about each of the new mission presidents and they are in there. They are really young and they have 6 kids, their oldest is 14. They both served missions, Brother Salen to Argentina and I don't know where his wife went to.

After that we went and taught our stake presidents neighbor in our stake presidents home. Her name is Tien and she is from Vietnam. She is probably in her mid 50s and she was an English professor back in Vietnam. Surprisingly she still has a pretty thick accent, but I think she can understand it really well. The problem is that shes really hard of hearing so we have to yell when we talk to her. This was our 3rd time teaching her and we invited her to be baptized and she said yes! We are planning on doing the baptism April 11th. The Haitian family (the Dors) also said they want to be baptized and they are just praying for a specific date. David Majewski also said he wants to be baptized but he wants to finish reading the gospel principles book so he can be more comfortable with everything and at least have a decent grasp on the doctrines of the church. He's about 1/3 of the way through. The Dors, David Majewski, and Tien all came to church, so that was nice. We also had like 5-6 less active people come as well. So everything is going really well.

We are having a pretty difficult time finding new people to teach though. We've knocked for several hours this last week and found 0 people to teach. Only one lady let us in and that's because she felt sorry for us walking about in the blazing heat so she wanted to give us water. She was definitely not interested though. I know that if we keep working hard and doing everything were supposed to everything will all work out well.

Today for P-day we went to this place called the Alligator park. Its almost like an Arboretum but there's a lot of really big lakes with a bunch of alligators in them. There is no fence or anything keeping you away from the alligators so it was pretty neat. The only bad part is that you aren't allowed to throw rocks at the alligators, but that's your first instinct when they see an alligator sitting still. I held back most of the time. But one time I threw a rock and it landed right in front of the alligators mouth and it snapped at it, so that was pretty exciting.

Last P-day I got my haircut for $5 at some Vietnamese haircutting and they usually do a pretty good job. This lady didn't do the best job though. Apparently she thought my hair was too thick and decided to thin out my hair a lot with those weird thinning scissors. I guess that's what you get when you pay 5 dollars. Its not too bad though. It'll take all of 3 weeks to grow all the way back anyway.

Hmm...oh I have a funny story about last week at church. Last week we were asked to teach the Teachers Quorum, so we planned out our lesson and we were going to base it off a talk by Elder Wirthlin. Our lesson was on the divine role of mothers intertwined with motivating missionary stuff to make them want to go on a mission. Preparing this lesson also reminded me of something that will make Mom happy. I remember in Galveston on 2 separate occasions I got told that my mother did a good job raising me. A sister missionary told me then later a member did too. So good job Mom. Anyway... so we had our lesson all prepared but when it came time to give the lesson, we both looked at each other to get the talk out and our little paper we prepared. To this day neither of us know where that stuff went. So we had to wing our entire lesson. I just happened to have another talk with me in the car about missionary work, so we used that to kind of help us out. I guess its a good thing that all we do all day is teach. The lesson actually turned out pretty good and at the end of the lesson I asked all them all to raise their hands if they were planning on going on a mission. All 10-12 of them raised their hands, so that made me happy. Their normal teachers advisor guy told us that a lot of them were kind of hesitant and weren't sure if they were going to go, so we told a lot of good missionary stories and got them kind of excited.

Do you remember that one investigator I talked about back in Galveston? His name is William, he's a Hispanic guy from Nicaragua. He had a baptismal date for like a week after I left the area. I heard a week or so ago that everything went perfect and hes already becoming an awesome member, so that made me happy.

Another random piece of news: Grandma talked wrote me a couple months ago telling me that one of David's best friends sons is in my mission. His name is Elder Sharp. I met him a month or two ago. He's a zone leader. Hes a really awesome, humble guy. He's going home in a few months though.

Last P-day my companion and I also went and played racquetball with the zone leaders in their apartment complex. They have a racquetball court there and the zone leaders have racquetballs and rackets. It was really fun. We played about 4 games and I won 3 of them. The last game I lost because my partner wasn't that good so he got bored and pretty much just stopped trying. It was really fun the whole time for everyone else though and were planning on playing again.

By the way, did Brother Jensen ever show you the picture he took with me when he was here? I have all those pictures on this memory card, so you'll get to see all that when I send this memory card home.

Ok, well that's about all for this week. I love you all and I'll talk to you all (I almost typed yall!) later!

Love,
Chase