No More Bikes

Dear Family,

Well, sounds like the box you are sending should be nice! I think I probably won't get it for a little while, maybe like 4 or 5 days after they bring it to the mission home! It is really nice of the Roney's to take everything to Uruguay - I hope they make it through customs.  Did you know they are ridiculously rich? haha but its true....

So it doesn't seem like a full week has already gone by, nothing really significant happened... just work work and more work, basically we are about to start cleaning the books in the entire district, we are going to have to visit every single member on record to see if they still live in the area or if they are still living at all, then if we can't find them we have to talk to at the very least 5 neighbors to confirm where they are.... it's going to be a pain, the idea is to be able to send their records to where they actually belong and basically cleaning the books. The reason is that in order to become a stake, you have to have at least 20:1 ratio of members to  Melchizedek priesthood holders so if there are less members on the books then we need to have less priesthood holders to qualify.... anyway its going to be a huge job to do and it's basically up to the missionaries..... But recently we have been working with a lot of inactive priesthood holders to get them reactivated and we have been having a lot of success. There were like 6 priesthood holders that came to church this week that are inactive. Also in one family the husband is the only member and we are going to start working to baptize everyone else and reactivate him! Sunday morning my comp and I went on splits with two members and we went and got some investigators to come to church, both of us were successful and we ended up having 4 investigators in church.  We won't be having a baptism this week but we should have one the week after....

One of the investigators names is Damion, he is a really awesome guy. He is 31 years old, unmarried, he has family that lives really close but he pretty much lives alone. A lot of the members already know him because a while back he was kinda known as the town drug addict, a lot of the members were suprised to hear that we are teaching him, but I've been really impressed by the positive response the members are giving us, everyone recognizes that it's something that really can change his life, the first couple times we visited Damion all we talked about was baptism, he is probably the most excited investigator i have ever had to get baptized, He really is looking to be clean and start over, turn a new page. He is kinda crazy, maybe from the drugs, haha, but really he is such a nice person, he loves to sing too. Every lesson I leave from I always feel the spirit, We taught him the Word of Wisdom pretty quick off the bat to really see if he was willing to change his life, or if he was just saying that. He is doing a great job at quiting smoking, its really impressive, I cant wait to baptize him!

So the other week we got our helmets stolen, i think i told you, so we bought new ones, then this last Wednesday we were at the church and I didn't want my helmet to get stolen so we locked them up, and when we came outside after the activity my comp's bike was gone.... so we aren't going to be using bikes any more, haha we actually aren't allowed to buy new bikes if they get stolen because Pte Da Silva is trying to get rid of them....

I think thats all of what I had to tell you!

Thanks for everything!

Love Elder Carlson!

P.S. No the apartment doesn't have heat, I think heat is even less common than AC.  

Also Eimi's inactive grandpa came to church! We are still working on the father....