Happy New Year!

Dear Family,
Thanks for the recipes mom.  Last week's pday I made milanesas, it's like a deep fried chicken or steak patty, not uncommon in the united states but they are different. I did it completely from hand so I will be able to make them when I come home, They are yummy, I  also made a curry, it was really similar to like terriyaki sticks curry bowl.

Thats interesting about the Provo airport. I have never heard of any useful flights leaving from there.
Hopefully things went well with Cams car.

That is just crazy to me that Riley is already home. Zac, Paul, and Jared are going to be home before you know it as well. I have a ton of friends that will be getting home soon.

So it's hot today. It was hot yesterday and humid, really humid. So you said you think it might be easier to get people to come to church during the christmas season. Maybe that would be true if christmas wasn't actually on Sunday because due to the culture no one came to church. we combined for both christmas and New Year with both branches and we had a little less then we normally do just as one branch. This week neither of the branch presidents came to church. Pretty much no one we were expecting came, however we had one person come that we weren't expecting - that is fantastic.

Basically what people do Christmas and New Years here is start shooting of fireworks at 1200 at night and then get really really drunk and stay up, if you are an older person till maybe three or four in the morning, if you are a younger person then you stay up till about 9 or 10 in the morning of the next day. When we went to Church at 1030 we saw people returning to their houses from the parties.... so that's why I said we might get more people in church if the holidays hadn't both fallen on Sunday. That has been a problem for getting people to progress toward baptism, but we are still working hard to find people that can get baptized. We have a few coming up in the next couple of weeks.
Right now we are working with 4 investigators who really like to drink. One of them is an inactive member. None of them are progressing very well, I think the parties and stuff aren't helping so hopefully they will get better now....

 One Request. Could you please send me a good excersize band, I'm sure dad has one laying around that he got off some infomercial or something :)

I think thats about it for now....

Love,
Elder Carlson