February 21, 2011 with Elder B in Rio Branco

Hey all,

This week has been action packed. We're getting this area back in shape. We're sorting out the wheat from the chaff, so we can get stuff done. It's a really cool area. My district is doing well, which is cool. It's really weird being District leader. I had to do district meeting last week and it was...kinda weird. Almost all the district is gringos. The next meeting we have will be all gringos because the only latino in the district is a zone leader, so every other time he goes to the other district in the zone. We're doing it in english...just to see what happens. That's not gonna happen until next week though. This week we don't have district meeting because we have a multi-Zone conference with President Da Silva in Treinta y Tres, so I get to visit my first chapel. I'm really excited. We get to travel tons living in Rio Branco. We're the only 2 in this town and the rest of the zone live an hour and a half away in Melo, so we're trying to figure out a good way to do intercambios and such.

Anyways, it sounds like everything went well with the wedding. That's good to hear. We have a saying that baptism days, something always goes wrong (i.e. hot water doesn't work, the water comes out black, investigadors show up late, don't have keys to the font, one of the speakers can't come at the last minute, doorknob of teh font breaks so we have to climb in through the front part where everyone watches). Glad to hear the wedding didn't go that way. That picture was awesome. Nice work, whoever took the picture. Me and Elder Bush did a high five for you. I'm looking forward to seeing more pictures.

So anyways, our investigators are doing well. Yasì went to church yesterday. She's an old lady that loves the church, but it's hard for her to go because her family doesn't want anything to do with the church, but she brought 2 grandkids (That were....insoportable? Insupportable? Unstandable? Annoying. They were annoying.) The members were pretty good about it though. (side note: Yes, we are getting good food. No, the laundry situation isn't as perfect as it was in other areas, but it's decent. I'm washing some stuff myself.)

Progressing investigators: Christian and Marcia (Cristarcia, as they are known in our white board.) are progressing pretty well even though they haven't been able to go to church. They're taking all the steps to get married and build their new house so that's pretty exciting. We had an amazing charla with the bishop who just...laid down the law and kicked Christian into accion.

So yeah. We're just loving it here in beautiful Rio Branco and I'm muy contento that everything's going well up north (even more north than usual)