1/25/11

1/17/2011

Family and friends! How´s everyone doing? So this week we´re taking our Preparation Day on Monday. It´s crazy though, because we didn´t really even start it until 1:00 due to meetings with President Hinckley, etc. It´s okay though. It´s fun still. Well, this week has been a good week. We taught less lessons than I´ve taught in a long time, but with transfers and everything we didn´t have as much time, and Elder Keller and I are both fairly new here. Elder Keller was here for 6 weeks, but he only worked in our area like 1-2 weeks of that due to conferences and his companion was sick with pnemeunia for 3 weeks. So yeah, we´re starting kind of new. It´s going well though. We have one investigator who´s working towards baptism right now who´s named Jean Pierre. He´s 11 years old and he´s the son of Isabel, the recent convert here. She was baptized like the 11th of December I think. So let´s see what´s new this week. Well, on Thursday and on Friday we had Concilio with all of the zone leaders, Elder Keller and I, and with President and Hermana Hinckley. So that was good. Elder Keller and I had to take about half an hour each day to talk about contacting in the first block, and to talk about how to be a more effective zone leader the second day. On Thursday we all took a field trip, and contacted people on the way, to the Christopher Columbus statue. When we got there President Hinckley shared with us a lot of neat stuff. We read the verse in the Book of Mormon that talks about the prophecy of Christopher Columbus going to the America´s, and how it was fulfilled. We also went to Palau Real, which is where Columbus gave the report to the king and queen. We talked about those prophecies, then we talked about prophecies that were made when Spain was opened, that their would be wards and stakes in Spain in the not too distant future. Anyways, all of those prophecies were fulfilled. Then we talked about some prophecies that have been made by the European Area Presidency about how the real harvest in Europe hasn´t happened, but it´s just beginning, and how the active membership in Europe will double in the next 10 years. Then we talked about what we need to do as a mission to bring about these prophecies. It was a really good meeting. Elder Keller and I also helped with the breakfast on Friday morning. We made the pancakes and the syrup. It was fun. We had to wake up early, but it was okay.

Anyways, we also made a video this past week of the missionaries that went home. It´s a video we made for the new missionaries coming in. We have 7 that were supposed to come, but 6 are still waiting for visas. THe other one got in Friday night. So we went and picked him up with the Hinckleys and we went and showed him around Barcelona, watched the video with him, gave him some orientation, and got him excited. He´s being trained by Elder Harris, who was in Mallorca with me, and he´s really good. So he´ll be really good. I called him today to see how he was doing too, and he´s really excited, so that´s good. It´s fun calling everyone up and seeing how they´re doing. On Mondays we call up everyone that did really good, or had a bad week, since we see their numbers and Sundays, and we try and help them with that. We don´t get to bed until like midnight or later on Sundays becuase we need to get all the numbers done. It´s alright though. I´m fine so far.

Anyways, we also visited a less active named Diego this past week, and we taught one of the other people living there named Marina. She´s from China. IT was a really good cita. She doesn´t have really any knowledge about God, but she feels like she needs to get closer to him. So We´re really excited about that. I´ve also always wanted to baptize someone from Asia, so this could be my chance. Last night we had a visit with a guy named Seydou, and he had invited 3 friends to hear us too. It went well there too. They´re all from Africa. THe only problem is that we have to teach in Spanish and in English, because all of them speak English best, except for Seydou, who speaks French and Spanish. It was a fun cita though.

Well, things are going fairly well here. We also moved pisos this past week. We moved from a really bad piso to a really nice piso. SO that´s really good. I´m excited about that. Also, we live with the office elders and one of them is named Elder Mark Johnson. He knows Ben Brockbank, and he´s heard the name Jamie Homewood. So you should tell the Brockbanks that we´re serving together. That´s fun.

Anyways, I can´t think of much else to say. Things are crazy still and I´m still learning, but it´s going well, and I´m having fun. This next week we have a bunch of zone conferences and intercambios that we´re doing. We have a zone conference in Hospitalet, then we´re going with the Hinckleys out to Lleida for a zone conference and doing intercambios right after. The week after we fly to Bilbao, and we have Barcelona, and we´ll have Valencia. We aren´t going to be able to go to the Palma zone conference which is where I really want to go. Hermana Hinckley said she wants us to go too, but we´re doing intercambios this week and there´ll be missionaries coming to our area and it´s not good enough now, so we need to have at least one day to work in it, so we won´t be able to go to Palma. We probably won´t even be able to go this transfer out there, but next transfer for sure, so that´s good. Well, I need to be going now and write the individual e-mails. Everything is going great though, and I´m sorry I haven´t been able to send pictures for a couple weeks. If I can I´ll send them sometime. Maybe I´ll make a DVD sometime too. Well, just know that everything´s going well for me and I´m loving my mission. I also figured out I´ll probably be here until the very end of my mission, so that´s interesting. Anyways, have a great week and I´ll talk to you all next week, probably on Monday again because of zone conferences. Anyways, ¡Chao!

-Elder Ryan Sommerfeldt

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