Elder Andrew Pena:

July 7, 2008
This week was awesome! We met our new Mission President on Wednesday. President Gonzalez and we had like a two minute interview and we got to talking and I brought up Elders Shattuck and Gannaway and he was like, oh yeah I know them, they wanted me to tell you hi. I just said we were good friends and that's about it. Anyways, he was also up in Rexburg like two weeks ago, he was there for a new born baby, but it was good we got to meet him and had our district meeting!! The 4th was the best ever!!!! We started our day off with weekly planning and got out of the apartment at 3:30 -yes, weekly planning takes that long, went and tracted a street for about 2 hours and went and ate hamburger helper at a members house, no BBQ, no fireworks, but we did get one new investigator!!!! yes!! haha Which is always the best anyways!!! ok so that's how my week was, we went and tracted a street on like Thursday and started talking to this guy about our religion and he said the only thing he sees that is wrong with our religion is and he named like 15 things and then he goes to say that people should not take what they hear from the Internet and television and believe it so then he says but I went on the Internet and on utube looked up a lot of stuff on your religion so I know all about it haha, we tried to talk to the guy but he talked for 20 minutes straight and we tried to leave he just kept talking! So that's the the sweet week I had and the awesome fourth of July I had!!! Oh also on the 4th after we had dinner we went to an appointment that was not there, then went over to a member's home, his name is Felipa Huerta and he is the only member and reminds me a lot like dad except he only knows Spanish and knows very little English.. ha and the grandma reminds me of grandma Phillips just Hispanic!!! haha So the family is awesome and we kicked a soccer ball around for like 15 minutes and went home at 7:00 because we are not allowed to be out past then so my fourth as you can tell was awesome!!! haha So we came back and finished our weekly planning and then it was time for bed!!! haha.... we have about 8 people that we are teaching and we have 3 baptisms -2 for this Saturday and 1 on the 26 of July and her name is Linda and she is like 60 years old but is sooooo funny!!! My first day here was the first day we came in contact with her and she called us and told us to come visit so we did and she was all sad and crying and we talked and she met with the missionaries before and she said she has been praying and she knows that this is the true church so we committed her to baptism and she said yes but she has a problem with smoking and her last day was the 5th so we'll see if that still works out for her. We are teaching 2 other girls but I think only one is interested, she came to church yesterday so we might be getting another one here soon and other than that it's still going great!! They moved the standard of excellence up from 15 quality lessons to 20 and we got 19 this week!!! So we're working on it!!!... Oh and I wrote an email like two weeks ago about speaking Spanish well everyone thinks I'm speaking Spanish!!! haha yeah right, I'm trying but I'm not learning how to speak! I want to learn how to pray first but no I'm not speaking Spanish I just want to real bad!!! haha So I even wrote a letter to the President about it and said maybe if he could do anything about it!!!:) haha but I think that's about it I'll try to be fluent in the next 3 weeks!:)

Elder Pena