June 10, 2013

HAPPY EARLY FATHER'S DAY!!!!  I HOPE IT'S A GREAT ONE!

Hey everyone!

How are things going back home?  Things are going well here.  Really, there hasn't been all that much new this past week.  The sister missionaries came on Tuesday.  One is from Argentina and she is training a new missionary from Guatemala.  Hopefully we will be able to work well with them so that we can start to see even more improvements here in the branch.  I am really happy because we have seen some good changes in the branch up to now.  It seems like our branch president has made a lot of personal changes in his life so that he is now ready to be able to help a lot more with the growth of the branch.  On Wednesday, we had an activity with the Priesthood and 8 Priesthood holders came in addition to us.  That was really neat because that is just about all of the at least somewhat active Priesthood holders.  Hopefully we will be able to keep having activities like that that will be able to help us have real growth in the branch, since that has really been a problem.  Just about all of the people that go have been the same people for the last 20 or 30 years.  And in a branch that is so small, it is hard for things to continue that way.  But hopefully this will be the start of some real, permanent changes.

On another note, that is crazy that Curtis comes home tomorrow!!  Make sure you send me some pictures next week.  I hope that it ends up being a really great experience.  And you have to tell me if it is difficult for him in his first week being back in the states.  I'm starting to think that speaking in English all the time could end up being a little hard for me.  I still find myself translating from Spanish to English sometimes in my head.  It probably has to do with the fact that I just speak Spanish all day every day now.  But I just started teaching my companion to speak English so we'll have to see how that goes.

Well I hope everything goes well this week back home.

Chau,
Elder Stollenwerk