Family! How is everyone? Things are going well for me. It sounds like you all got the pictures from Elder Sproul. I saw him a couple times, but I don´t know when all he took pictures. This past week was way good at the park. We go every Saturday, by the way. Our job is to do contacts, and try and give out either a pamphlet, Book of Mormon, and the best thing to be able to do is get their contact info. (phone number, address, name, etc.) and have the missionaries out in the field go teach them. Oh, also, they mix us up on Saturdays, so we´re not actually with our companion. They try to mix it up so at least one of the companions can communicate fairly well in Spanish. This past week I was with Elder Close. It was way good. We were able to give out two Book of Mormons, and we got the contact info. for both of them. They both seemed golden, so we´ll see what happens with that. Actually, I may never know what happens. I just get the info and pass it on, but it´d be nice if I find out someday that something happened. Who knows. So that was fun. Their names were Juan, and Carlos. Juan was a construction worker and at first told us he was tired and didn´t really want to read or talk to us. By the end though he just kept on reading scriptures that I was giving him from the Book of Mormon and gave us his contact info to hear more. Carlos was about 50 and he had just finished running and was sitting on the curb resting. We talked to him (and Juan too) for probably about 15 minutes each. It was good. Carlos is Catholic, but thinks that there could be more revelations. He wanted to take the Book of Mormon and read and pray about it. We were able to give him a few scriptures about why bad things happen to good people, because he was wondering about that, and also we left him with the pamphlet Family: A Proclamation to the World. He said the most important thing in his life is God, then his family. So hopefully things go well there. So that was fun. The other cool thing this past week is that we´re all legal residents now. They sent me and my district, plus two other Elders who arrived here late, to the government building where some lawyers did stuff, and then we signed a paper. So yeah. It was crazy, because I was in charge of the group since I´m district leader, so they sent me with an envelope that had over 200 euros, which is over $300, to give to the lawyers. I made sure I was hanging onto it the whole time. I didn´t lose it though, so that´s good. Things continue to go well for me and my companion, Elder Bodily. I don´t know if I told you this, but Elder Bodily is the one that was in Jen´s singles ward at BYU that I talked to for a bit on Facebook before my mission. So that´s cool. Let´s see, what else. Oh, Elder Bodily and I have our lesson plans for lesson 2 done. We´ll be practicing it tonight in the Prácticas Sala Grande. That´s where we teach other missionaries acting as investigators. We have that every night, but twice a week it´s a full lesson, rather than just a principle. Tonight and Saturday night it´s a full lesson. So that should be cool. They give us situations and all. Not as cool as the park since it´s not real, but still cool. But yeah, we practiced it once, and lesson 2 is harder to teach than lesson 1. But I think we´ll be fine after a few times of practicing it. It´s hard to not share more information than we should. Because you don´t want to share everything we know, it´d just confuse them. But yeah. Anyways, that´s that. Our teacher, Hermana Viso has been out of town this past week. She´ll be gone next week too, but then she´s back. Oh, also, a bunch of people are leaving next Tuesday. So that´s weird. There´ll be a lot less people here. Two of them, the portuguese missionaries are really cool. They only speak portuguese, well, a little bit of Spanish, and a little bit of English, so we talk to them a lot. It´ll be weird having them leave. But yeah. I´m probably going to try and get some pictures developed, or put on a CD or something to send home to you guys soon, hopefully you enjoy that. I´m not sure when though. Maybe today, maybe next week. We´ll see. Oh, I got to go to the temple again today. I love the temple here. It´s really nice. One thing I love is the Celestial room. It´s so much whiter than most. Most are bright, but it´s kind of a yellowish bright, this one is like a white bright. Most of the light comes from the windows/sun. Anyways, I´m going to end this now. I can´t think of much else to say. I hope everything´s going well there. ¡Chao!
-Elder Sommerfeldt