April 25, 2011 -email

Hello Family!

Thanks for the recipe. Yes Mexicans color Easter eggs but in a different way, they don’t hard boil them, the crack open the shell at the end and drain them liquid, then after everything is dry they color them with crayons, then later they crack them over each other’s heads making a huge mess.

I'm not really sure why we change from Mondays to Wednesdays; yes it’s probably because the temple is closed Mondays. I have seen Elder Hemsley, he is actually in my zone, I see him at least every week, we slept at their house last Tuesday night because it is closer to the temple than ours. He is a pretty cool guy. I forgot there was another guy from Preston, haven’t seen him yet.

Yes mom, I do have a way to print the letters that are sent to me, I usually (a cockroach just crawled out of my keyboard) print all the letters I get. As for sending them email you can do whatever you want, I should start to get them either way. Probably snail mail should come pretty soon.

This week has been a good old hard working week. No baptisms... we worked super hard trying to get various people to accept. Those people were Victor and Minerva Peña, the parents of Adrian, Victor just can’t get over the fact that drinking and smoking in moderation is bad, and isn’t willing to give them up. and Minerva won’t do anything unless her husband does also, even though she knows it’s the right thing to do.

Tony is another guy that we are teaching. He drinks alot, he is about 40 and lives with his sister(a cook for the priests in the catholic church) in their parent’s house. He came to church and has gone lots of times in the past, he just needs to quit drinking. We actually teach him in English, he was born and grew up in Texas. He won’t tell us what he did to need to be living in Mexico; I don’t really want to know. We actually find alot of people like that.

We had some very interesting lessons with random people. We were invited to an Easter dinner with a member and her extended family, she is very strong in the church and only has one year as a member. It started out well, we ate (i hate eating in groups like that, the people always want us to go first, I would rather wait and watch to see what they do with the food, how they serve it and such, this time was very embarrassing because i served myself completely different than i was supposed to) after eating the member asked us to give some blessings to some sick kids, always a spiritual experience, and then the family members started to ask questions about our religion. Why we can’t drink coffee, who is Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. My comp loved it, because he loves to argue, and that’s basically what it was. But it quickly spiraled down hill and just turned into a bashing session (my first real one and hopefully the last) luck we were able to establish the fact that prayer is the only way they can really know why we do what we do.

This week has been really different than most, we worked really, really hard, taught almost 50 lessons, experienced the joy of hard work but didn't really see many results.

Thanks for everything. Hello Mariah!

Love
Elder Waite