9/8/2010

Family and Friends! So first off, HAPPY BIRTHDAY PETEY!!!!!!!!! Anyways, how´s everyone doing? Sorry for writing on Wednesday. Our preparation day was switched this past week because of transfers. Elder Jacinto and I stay the same though, so that´s good. I´ll be here at least 6 more weeks, unless there´s an emergency transfer or anything. Last week we went out to Barcelona on Monday. We got there around like 7:00 or so and had a couple hours. So we went and visited Lusmila (one of my converts there). It was a ton of fun seeing her and she was super excited to see me. She told me that the night before she´d had a dream and someone that she couldn´t see who came and visited her. She said it was someone she wasn´t afraid of, that she trusted, etc. She thought it was her dad, but she was confused because her dad´s in Peru, so he wouldn´t have been able to visit her. Then I knocked on her door and she said it was me in her dream. So that was kind of a cool story. She´s doing well, but because of work she hasn´t been able to go to church for about a month, and she hasn´t been visited by missionaries, visiting teachers, home teachers, the whole time. So that´s lame. She´s still reading and praying though, and she wants to go to church. So that´s good. She´s a really good person. Then on Tuesday we had concilio. We got to eat pancakes, so that was nice. It was a good meeting. We talked a lot about making sure our goals are realistic. So we all had to cut our goals down a bunch. We took our goal from 14 baptisms in the month of September in our zone, to 8. So we´ll see how we can do. We have 5 or 6 investigators with fechas right now. We have a small zone, so we historically baptize less than other zones, but we´ll hopefully be able to just baptize more per missionary and still be able to baptize a lot of people. So after concilio we took a bus down to Castellón. It was crazy. It took forever. Half way through they pulled into a stop and announced that everyone had to get off the bus and that there was going to be a 45 minute break. I don´t know why they don´t just get two bus drivers or something. Oh well. Anyways, we got in really late, but luckily we got to see Armando, so that was cool. I also saw one of the jóvenes named Jason, also Bruna, Bianca, and Rhita. So that was good. Armando gave me a picture of Elder Parry and I that was taken at one of the activities. It turned out really good. I´ll show it to you sometime. I´d e-mail pictures home today, but a member has my memory card making a DVD of it so I can send it home. Anyways, so then Wednesday morning we waited in line a long time and finally got the paper that we thought was what we needed. I mailed it overnight to Josué (the guy in charge of residency for all the missionaries in Spain), and we went to Valencia and caught a plane coming home. We had a Family Home Evening that night with a couple in our ward and one of his non-member friends. It went really well. However, the next day I got a call from Josué saying what they gave me in Castellón isn´t what we needed and that he´s worried because I´m not in the system anymore. There´s 4 elders in Spain that were sent back to the US early to finish their missions there because of residency problems they had there. I think it´ll be okay for me probably though, I hope. We´ll see though. So then we had a decent week here in Palma. There´s two big things that happened. The first is that yesterday we went to visit with a guy named Charles for the second time. Cyril (who shares a piso with him) was there as well. So we invited him to join. In the end we invited both of them to be baptized on the 2nd of October and Charles still wouldn´t set a date, but Cyril would!!!!! So that was awesome. We finally have an investigator with a baptismal date. We also invited another girl named Paula to be bapitized, but she doesn´t think she´s ready yet either. She will be though, she´s just super shy. Anyways, Cyril is from Nigeria and he´s been here about 3 years. We have another cita with him tomorrow, so hopefully that goes well. But that´s the big news there. Next, this morning we went and played soccer and Elder Jacinto went to stop the ball and his ankle rolled really bad over the ball. Anyways, he can hardly walk now and his ankle is really swollen, so we´re going to the hospital in about half an hour to get X-rays taken, but hopefully it´s all okay. That might slow us down a bit this week though, because he may be on crutches and everything. We´ll see what happens though. I´ll let you know next week. We also started teaching a guy named Yusef. He´s muslim, but not practicing. So we´ll see what happens with that. He´s really nice though. The first cita he talked about September 11th and how it was all politics and that´s not what muslims do, etc. It was interesting hearing him talk about it. Well, I´m running out of time, so I´m going to write the individual letters now. Have fantastic weeks though, and I´ll write more next Monday, which isn´t too far away. Have a great week. ¡Chao!

-Elder Ryan Sommerfeldt