9/20/2010

Family and friends! How´s everyone doing over there? It sounds like it was a busy week? It was a pretty busy week over here too. First off, congratulations to Laurel and Kevin, that´s way cool with the new baby girl and all. Okay, so this past week was busy here too. I´ll start with last Monday. We started playing a game of the board game RISK for preparation day, but we weren´t able to finish because preparation day ended, so we took a picture of the board and we´re going to finish it today. So that should be fun. Then on Tuesday we had an amazing cita with a girl named Alex. Her dad is American and her mom French, and she lives in Palma married to a Spaniard. She speaks like 7 languages, but she prefers English. She´s doing really well. We were only able to visit her that one time though, because she was really busy last week. We´ll visit her again this week though. She´s really nice though, has a family, and they´re not poor either, so we don´t have to worry about them just wanting money from the church or anything. Anyways, then we had district meeting that Elder Jacinto and I taught and it went well. Then we ate Kebabs. Then we started Intercambios. I went out to Inca, it´s a city in the middle of the island, to be with Elder Harris. Elder Harris is only in his second transfer I believe, but he´s a really good missionary already. So that was a lot of fun. I´d send you a picture of me out there, but the locutorio (internet cafe) where we´re at doesn´t have the camera card reader... Maybe another week. Also, I´m still waiting on the DVD of all my pictures that the member´s making for me, but I´ll send it once I get it. Anyways, here in Palma elder Jacinto and Elder Bowers met with an 11 year old girl named Dana. She´s golden. We´ve visited with her twice since then and she came to district conference with her mom this past week. She´s the daughter of a less-active. Apparently she was going to be baptized in the past, and the morning of her baptism, her mom asked her, why do you want to be baptized, and she didn´t really know, so her mom didn´t think she was ready. But that was when she was 9, and now she´s 11, and she´s really smart. So she´ll for sure be ready. She has a baptismal date for the 9th of October. Also, in Inca, they haven´t had even one investigator with a baptismal date for like 2-3 months, but this past week in one day they set 4 baptismal dates. So that´s super good. We were really happy for them. Our investigator Cyril is still doing well, but he didn´t come to church this past week, so we don´t think he´ll be ready by the 2nd of October, we´ll have to change his baptismal date back one or two weeks. We´re going to visit him today, so we´ll talk to him about all that. Anyways, I don´t know if you remember Charles, but he´s one of our investigators from Nigeria. We went and visited him and his friends John and Wally were there. So they´re both new investigators now too. They´re both praying to know if they should be baptized. So we´ll see what happens there. We have a visit with them tomorrow. Then yesterday was a good day too. We had District Conference in the morning, so President and Hermana Hinckley came out for that and all. Hermana Hinckley took a bunch of pictures that she might put up on the mission blog, so you can look and see if those go up. We also sang in the choir too, so that was fun. Anyways, then in the afternoon we visited with a guy named José, from English classes. He was there, and so was his wife Sofía, and her sister Daisy. So all three of them are now new investigators. We watched Finding Faith in christ with them, and we´re going to go back next week and talk about how Christ´s church was restored (A.K.A. The Restoration with Joseph Smith, etc.). We also visited Leticia, which is this 20 year old girl we visited about 6 weeks ago, but then she´s been avoiding us since then. She said she wants to do better though, so we had a really good cita with her. I feel bad for her. Her mom´s in prison, her dad doesn´t live there, so she´s basically in charge of all her family now. We talked a lot about how having the gift of the Holy Ghost after baptism will help her with those problems. So I´ll let you know what happens with her. Then we visited a less active family, Luzmila, and the daughter´s friend Mihaela was there. She´s 9 years old and she´s super good. I´d love to have a daughter like her, she was just super good. We were teaching and she would raise her hand and say ¿Qué es la fe? (What is faith). She was really interested and very attentive and behaved really well. Then we set up a cita with the less active family, and she said, should my parents come too, and we said yes, so she said, my parent work until 7:00, so we set up a family home evening with the two families for this Thursday at 8:00. It should be good. Mihaela´s from Romania. So yeah, that was really fun. So that´s a little update of me this past week. I can´t think of much else to say. I´m sure there´s other things I could say, but that´s about all I have time for. I´m going to switch to the individuals now. Congratulations again to Scuba and Laurel, and also to Francis, Rachel, and Petey with the triathlon. Have a great week and I´ll write more next week. ¡Chao!

-Elder Ryan Sommerfeldt