8/30/10

Family and Friends! How´s everyone doing? So I was going to send some pictures this week because I have some pretty good ones with the ocean in the background and all, but I can´t send them because this computer doesn´t have a place to stick the memory card into... Sorry. Next week I´ll do it. So this past week has been pretty good. We were fired on 22 times. That means we had 22 citas (appointments) cancel on us. We still ended up with 20 lessons though, so that was way good. The only problem is that we still don´t have anyone that has a baptismal date yet. We set two baptismal dates this past week, but they both live in Levante´s area. We´re still going hard though, but that´s our biggest area where we need to improve right now. So we are continuing to teach the king´s friend, Jaime. We visited him once this past week, and had another cita with him, but he´s going to his other house that´s in the country (where he has like 7 or 8 people that work there taking care of all the land. He has 5 houses like that.). We´ll go visit him at his house in the country next week though. I don´t know how you´d say it, his "house in the country." We just say "finca," and house in the country is the best translation I can think of to describe it. We also continued teaching Gatha, the investigator from Korea. She came to church this past week as well. I had to translate for her, but we were in the back, the microphone was broken, and there were two kids talking, so it was really hard to translate into english for her. She said she´s leaving today to go to Barcelona though... So we´ll get her info to missionaries in Barcelona, but we won´t be able to continue teaching her it looks like. Things are still going well with Andrea. She´s probably the closest to baptism right now, but she´s super shy and won´t come to church. So we´re still working on that. We´ll see what happens. Well, also, last Monday we went out to Zara to look for suits, but they didn´t have anything. All the stuff on Rebajas was already gone. We did go bowling though. It was only 3,50 euros for two games and shoes. So that was fun. I got 127 the first game, and 146 the second game. So I hope I can still do well after the mission. We played soccer this morning. It was pretty fun. I don´t know if I said this though, but I hurt my ankle last week, and every time we play soccer it seems to hurt a little bit again. It´s not bad though, so hopefully it gets better soon. I don´t want to just completely stop playing soccer though, so yeah. We also had scones this morning. We have an elder in our piso named Elder Cannell and he loves cooking, so whenever we have to eat in Piso he just does all the cooking, and he made scones this morning, so that was nice. We also visited with José Luis and Mildred this past week. They´re doing really well and they want to get baptized, but they´re not married. And in order to get married he needs to get divorced from his ex-wife first. That´s a typical situation with Bolivians... They´re really good though. He got married when he was 18, then split from her, but it´s expensive to get a divorce I guess, then he´s been living with his current "wife" for like 7 years and they have a child and another on the way in November. They committed to start the divorce then marriage process though. It could be like a year though before it´s all done. We´ll see. It´ll work out though. Let´s see, what else is new. I think that´s about it. Oh, I´m writing right now and right after I´m going to Barcelona for a meeting. So that´ll be fun. Then I have to go down to Castellón after to do some residency stuff! So that should all be fun. I´ll be able to see everyone again and all, hopefully. I might get there late at night and have to leave the next morning. We´ll see how it goes. I´ll write about it next week. Well, that´s about it. I´m going to go now. I´ll write more next week. ¡Chao!

-Elder Ryan Sommerfeldt