Received Aug 24, 2009

Dear Family,

Happy Birthday Quinn! I think this is the first birthday that has been on a Monday since I left. So that means Quinn is going to be a teacher. I think the thing I was most excited about when I was going to be a teacher was that I would get to eat the leftover bread.

Answers to Mom’s questions:
The Spanish is coming easier and easier now. I am happy about that, especially because its only been about a week and a half. Depending on how quickly/what kind of accent someone has, I can understand about 75-95% of what people are saying. I’ve also learned that I can speak so much better when I focus on speaking slowly and clearly, rather that trying to speak quickly and sound exactly like a Hispanic. I think that when I start speaking Spanish I get really antsy and my mind doesn’t think clearly. While I’m talking to someone I’ll forget a word or keep on incorrectly conjugating a verb, then immediately after the conversation I know all the words I was trying to say and I can conjugate everything perfectly in my head. So I think nervousness kind of clouds my mind, but hopefully that will leave with time.

Me and my companion don’t really speak Spanish in our apartment. We are starting to try to speak Spanish all the time at least while were outside of the apartment. I’ve tried to do it several times, but I don’t think my companion really likes to do it. I’ve decided that this week I’m going to do it whether or not he does. We might be having half Spanish half English conversations, but I think it’ll really help my Spanish.

I probably know more Spanish than my companion does. We were probably almost even when I first got here, but I’ve been picking it up again pretty fast.

My companion and I live in a 1 bedroom apartment. Yes there is AC…I probably wouldn’t be alive if we didn’t.

Lets see…in other news, I went on exchanges with our zone leaders this week, whose area is in inner city Houston. It was fun. I hope I get to serve inside Houston sometime. Its exactly how I pictured it. Basically it is really really ghetto. You always hear sirens whizzing by and in at least 1 of the complexes we went into I overheard a little group of people talking about some crime that had just occurred in their complex, then the cops showed up a few minutes later. We ate dinner in this one complex and literally every person that I saw in there was black except for the Hispanic people’s houses we were eating at. We ate on a little table just outside of their apartment because her husband wasn’t home so we couldn’t go in. A bunch of kids came sat around and talked to us the whole time. Their parents who were in the stairwell above us would yell at them to get away every once in a while. I learned how prevalent racism still is when one of those kids started talking to us and telling us about how her mom doesn’t like white people or Hispanic people. The little girl didn’t really understand why. It surprised me how that stuff already starts to get engrained into the heads of the kids while they are so young. On our way out we past by these 2 girls who were coming into the complex who nicely let us know that we shouldn’t be in that complex. Of course we have to be careful, but it kind of made me laugh. We wouldn’t have gone in there if it was past dark. In the back of the area books they have certain complexes names written down and there are rules that you cant go to certain ones past sundown. That’s really how things are in the inner city though. I thought it was all interesting. There were people outside everywhere too, so we always had a lot of people to talk to. That makes missionary work a whole lot easier.

Now that I’ve been in my area for a little while, I’m starting to kind of get a grasp of how things are and what needs to get done. Basically, a lot of work needs to get done here. We don’t have a single progressing investigator. So we have basically no teaching pool…that’s a big problem. And the next big thing is that our relationship with the branch is not very good either. That’s another huge problem. There's all sorts of other little things that need to get worked out too, so we have a lot of work to do. We found 15 new investigators this week and taught 29 other lessons (other lessons are just lessons without members, whether we sit down and teach them in the home or just teach them in the streets), which is the most I’ve ever had. Hopefully soon we can get some solid investigators that we know will show up for lessons, and have members accompany us to them.

Next note I wrote down: Rain. It rained probably 3 times this week. We got soaked all 3 times. One of the times it was raining it was probably 95 degrees…it was weird. Yesterday I went into a gas station to buy a drink so I could get change for laundry (yes I have to pay for laundry now, which is not fun because its not very cheap either), which took about 2 minutes, but when I walked out it was POURING. We were only like a block away from home but we both got completely soaked.

Here's my one funny story for the week. We run into a lot of crazy people and have some interesting discussions almost every single day. Last week we had a really good one. I don’t know if this guy was slightly drunk or just plain crazy. In the middle of our lesson he’d go off and start talking about random stuff. One of the times he was like, So do you know who taught the Indians? I was guessing we were supposed to say God, so I did. He was like, “No…it was the ANTS! The Indians watched the ants and copied what they did. They saw how they traveled up and down the hills, and that is why Indians lived in the hills!” He then went on to tell us how they wrote down all the secrets of the world and put them underneath a pyramid. I think that part he was talking about how they discovered some metal plates (like the plates the BoM prophets wrote on) underneath one of the Great Pyramids. People also always love to bring up how the Mayan calendar ends on December 1, 2012 and that is when the end of the world is going to be. One person expanded on that theory and told us how in 2012 that will be the first time ever that all the planets will line up, and at the end of the planets, there is a dark hole and that is going to suck us all in. Haha…I bet you never knew that.

Ok, well that’s all for this week. Enjoy your last week of summer! School starts today here in Houston…which I am happy for because that means all the libraries wont be full of a bunch of kids looking at myspace and playing internet games. I love you all!

Love,
Chase